5 ways in which the sports marketing industry will be transformed for better, forever!

“They are crazy, all are crazy, crazy, crazy. South by Southwest has gone Crazy”, these words still keep on lurking in my mind which were spoken at one of the conference room by a quite famous and uptight women sports agent. She was a close-mouthed, blunt lady wearing glasses.

She exhibited this reaction at the carnival of attractions which was arranged by all the smart sports advertising agencies who presented their brilliant ideas and similar smart means of presenting those ideas. Nothing was left unattended in their presentation of ideas, everything related to sports marketing was superbly covered and touched with complete understanding and insight.

For that lady, as she seemed to attend the event for the first time, South by South West (SXSW) is actually a physical representation of what we do not like on the web. This includes pop-banner ads, unwanted spammed content and quite often locating wrong information from the wrong public and from the wrong place. All this combines to provide us with the misleading online ads and marketing strategies by the companies which more often irritates rather than making them interesting.

Though I personally do not agree with her about her perceptions about SXSW but I do agree with the notion that the sports marketers needs to review and change their online marketing strategies. These new strategies have worked to bring in more audience towards the sports events and occasions.

Here are the 5 ways in which the online sports marketing will change for the better.

1.      Online market places will now be increasingly involved in supporting, handling and sponsoring the sports events: According to the CEO of Knoda ,Kyle Rogers, “We were able to put together a high impact, athlete endorsement campaign for the SuperBowl in 9 days and since athletes have a powerful emotional connection with their audiences, our whole campaign surpassed our presumptions and delivered thousands of new leads and followers.”

Knoda, is an online social forecasting service on which the fans and followers make predictions about the scores of a particular game. This service found that by working with the prominent athletes and sportsmen they can generate much higher ROI’s as compared to the conventional advertising methods. For attaining this end, they made use of the online platform named Opendorse which has established and made its name as one of the expert and authority, among the marketers that want to generate powerful and quick results from athletes. This means that in changing sports marketing trends online sports marketing places will be playing a significant role.

2.     Prominent sports personalities will now be able to make use of social marketing to sell their merchandises directly to their followers and fans: in the past, the launch of any sports brand needs to have heavy budget and wide network of distribution for launching and introducing a new sports related product in the market. Now this can be easily through online sports marketing strategy, by just contacting and networking with the few prominent sports personalities. For instance, you do not need to look further, just take an example of Christiano Ronaldo, a world famous Portuguese soccer player or Vin Diesel, an actor or an eminent golf player, Tiger Woods; whatever sports related product they promote or advertise in the market become popular.

It is a fact that the key factor for endorsing anything is its authenticity. Fans and followers are now enlightened and they will not base their choices on false recommendations. Therefore renowned and smart brands make sure that the eminent athletes not only like their product or services but also use it.

The small e-commerce entrepreneurs can also adopt the same strategy to promote their products among the target audience. They are now becoming increasingly involved with sponsoring any upcoming sports event, coaches as well as trainers for endorsing their brand among their fans. This is a change that is taking place now in the online sports marketing industry.

3.      Athlete engagement and impact can be measured now: the highlighting news of the online sports marketing track was a company called Stout Social. This company launched the MVP Index. This product exhibits who engage most with their online fans and who is most exceptional, who is successful in moving the social needle and who has failed.

As this product provides the sports marketers with the true picture of athlete’s social metrics, brands will be in a better position to justify their recommendations and sponsorships. In this way they will be much more confident about their spending and getting fair market value out of it. This form of data which provides the social sports engagement level is the beginning of the new era in online sports marketing because the spending can be linked to the outcomes and the outcomes can be linked to the ROI.

4.      Prominent sports personalities will be working together for creating a comprehensive network effect: Oyo SportsToys is known for creating a small lego like sports characters. They are NFL license holders and they attempted to do something magnificent around SuperBowl. But SuperBowl turned them down and they were not able to get ample time to negotiate, locate, hire and run a marketing campaign by using NFL athletes. Therefore, they took the services of Opendorse and all was done in mere 10 days.

Luckily, Oyo already has created some content during their days with SuperBowl. They hired the services of OpenDorse athletes for the promotion and sharing of that content. Afterwards, it has been explained by the OpenDorse CEO, Blake Lawrence that the results of this strategy turned out to be remarkable. This gave a tremendous boost to the Oyo Brand. It becomes obvious that this kind of online sports marketing strategy in which customer’s engagement is involved is much more fruitful and valuable than conventional banner ads or any other type of conventional advertising techniques.

5.      There will be more choices for the sports agents and sports managers for monetizing their teams and clients: all these online sports advertising strategies, offer a good range of options for the sports agents and managers to earn more money. Renowned atheletes, coaches, trainers and teams have already started finding the ways in which they can turn themselves into the powerful media influencers and content creators, for monetizing their image.

The prominent sports personalities no longer need to wait for the phone calls or contact by the brands. With so many other options open to them, they can now easily participate in online sports advertising campaigns and can make big bucks. They can now engage themselves in the social media marketing places which are now blending the brands with the eminent personalities, content with the merchandises and data with the outcomes. So the intelligent organizers, agents and managers have already started recognizing that their world is changing for good!