Digital Marketing for Sport – 3 Reasons Why Sports Marketers Need Social Media

Sponsoring an athlete, sports team or an event is not just about signing a cheque. It’s more than just getting your name on the side of a car or a sign in the stadium. For those of you that know me you know that Sport is my passion and I’m also involved in business consultancy and digital marketing so here is my take on Sports Marketing. 

Basically, if you want your sponsorship pounds to be an effective marketing tool, you need to double your total sponsorship just to promote the fact that you have a sponsorship deal. If you’re sponsoring a rugby team, you need to tell your customers about it, and get them to cheer for “your” team. If you’re sponsoring a football team, you need to get your best customers into the luxury suite to see and hear the game. Even if you’re sponsoring a small local village football team, you need to find a way to bring the parents into your store or restaurant after the game.

The Same Old Problem – You Can’t Effectively Measure Traditional Marketing

Sports marketing is no longer just about soliciting cheques from big companies – you have to be able to demonstrate the ROI of a sponsorship.  Measurement and analytics for  off-line marketing is nearly impossible.  It is almost impossible to know which TV commercials increased sales, and which ones lost money. You don’t know which billboards brought visitors to your website. And you certainly don’t know which logo placement or interview plug was responsible for the increase in sales.
But social media can do all of that, and more. Here are three things social media can do for sports marketers:

1. Social Media Can Prove ROI in Sports Marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s easy to demonstrate the ROI. Thanks to simple tools like Google Analytics and bit.ly, it’s possible to come up with a basic system to see how many people found your website, requested additional information, or bought something.
You can measure a campaign’s success and figure out which variables, messages, and even time of day brought the best results. See if you get spikes in traffic before, during, or after an event. And whether the spikes are taking place in the city, or if they’re spread out. You can even set up different URLs and landing pages, and do A/B testing to see which variables brought the best results.
With social media, you can pay attention to who’s talking about your brand, and interact with the ones who are the most vocal, whether positive or negative. You just can’t do that with a billboard or a TV spot.

2. Social Media Can Grow a Sports Marketing Audience

There are more social media tools than you can shake a stick at. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of ways to connect with your customers online.  Use tools like Twitterment, NearbyTweets, and even Twitter’s own search function to find people who are interested in your team. Use Twitterfall or TweetDeck’s search feature to watch for discussions about your team or the event.
Connect with those people, and discuss the team, the players/drivers/crew, and the event itself. Don’t sell them anything or talk about your company. if you have to, hold a special contest or make a special offer. “If our team finishes in a certain place or higher, the first 500 people to tweet us gets a coupon for a free widget.” But other than that, talk about the thing that interests the fans (hint: it’s not you).

3. Social Media Can Deepen Relationships With Fans and Customers

Enhance your customers’ experience on race day by live blogging, tweeting, and video streaming from the stands, the sponsor’s tent, or even Victory Lane.

• Get some behind-the-scenes looks (assuming you get permission from the team) at what it looks like in a garage or locker room.
• Hold a special Twitter chat with a driver or crew member.
• Have a player give a special video greeting or tour for fans.
• Ask different team members to blog about their experiences over the season, complete with photos and videos.

Social media lets fans see the things they might be missing, but help them feel like they’re part of the experience. By doing this, you help them feel more like a part of the team. They’re insiders, with special knowledge about the team, the athletes, and the event. By feeling like they’re connected, they’ll become more of a fan, not only of the team, but of the organization or brand that helped them get there.

If you want any advice on digital marketing or social media plans the contact us on our business webpages

A Financial Management firm can create a strong web presence by designing and developing a business website on the internet.  However, this step alone is not a digital marketing plan. Just putting up a Financial Management firm website on the internet is similar to establishing a physical business like a shop or an office, and then just sitting back and waiting for the customers to flow in. More than likely, it will not happen and your website will resemble a billboard in the desert.

Financial Management firms must understand that they need to spread the word about their firm, talk to people, inform, engage with potential clients and communicate their services using the internet.

The focus of web searchers looking for accountants has changed, and instead of turning to the yellow pages, people prefer to search the net in order to find an Financial Management firm.  To search for a Financial Management firm in Tunbridge Wells

·         Visitor 1 may type “Tunbridge Wells Financial Managers”

·         Visitor 2 might search for “Financial Management firms Tunbridge Wells”.

·         Visitor 3 might search for “IFA Tunbridge Wells”

Different people search in different ways and it is important to make sure that your Financial Management firm website captures this valuable traffic.

What should Financial Management firms, large and small, do to be found on the web?

Financial Management firms need to invest in a digital marketing strategy that will specialise in Financial Management firm search engine optimisation, Financial Management firm marketing and website design. A professional digital media marketing consultant will have the relevant business expertise and will know how to handle this. Other important factors are:

·         Digital media marketing starts with your Financial Management firm website design. The website must be structured with elements of search engine optimisation, where the meta tags are properly written and executed. The website is designed with SEO in mind. The starting point is keyword research and when this is done properly the right keywords are embedded in the content.  Images and graphics are optimised to make the Financial Management firm’s website search engine friendly.

·         While the above will greatly help in organic search engine rankings, the digital marketing strategy may need some quick traffic through a Pay Per Click campaign. Organic search engine optimisation will take a few months to get going until the web site attains authority in the search engine rankings. During this time, the sponsored listing or paid advertisements will help to project the Financial Management firm and traffic will start to flow to the website.

·         In parallel, the digital marketing strategy will also lead you through other digital media marketing mediums such as announcing your Financial Management firm website presence through press releases and news. Syndication will help that news to reach as many readers as possible

·         While this will draw enough website traffic to start getting web visitors and leads, the digital media marketing strategy will also start building a social network campaign through Video, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to draw the Financial Management firm close to social communities on the internet.

·         The strategy will deploy legal blogging, article writing and submissions.  Through blogs and articles, it is possible to create an air of trust by writing about the Financial Management firm, and educate readers about Financial Management. This will project the Financial Management firm as an authority on the subject and people will tend to trust the firm with their business.

·         We have heard the phrase “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and this is still very applicable today and even more so in a period of recession.  In this context, the digital marketing plan will use web analytics to collect data from the website to determine which aspects of the site are working towards the defined business objectives for the website. 

Web analytics is a continuous improvement process and a key part of an effective digital marketing plan. It is not enough just to produce reports each month, you need to analyse these reports so you can ensure that the website is always responding to the needs of its visitors. Once you have gathered your data, analysed the results, proposed changes and implemented these changes you repeat the process all over again.

Financial Management firms and who think that digital marketing for their firm is a thing they can do without are severely cutting themselves short. Consider these facts from January 2010:

·         Over 60,500 searches being conducted in the UK for the term “Financial Advisor”

·         Over 33,100 searches for the term “Financial Advisors”

·         40,500 searches conducted for the words “Financial Advisers”

·         18, 500 searches for the term ”Independent Financial Advisors”

·         100s of thousands of more searches for related terms

The question is: Can Financial Management firms and keep themselves away from a focussed digital marketing strategy? 

Learn more about a specialised digital media marketing strategy for your Financial Management firm at http://www.wsionlinebiz.co.uk or give us a call at 01580 819529.

Paid search marketing uses an advertising model often referred to as direct response because it allows advertisers to purchase premium placed ads of their choice on search engine result pages, advertising networks and content sites such as blogs and news sites.  This advertising model is often referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) and for the right business it can be a key element of their Digital Internet Marketing toolkit.

How Does PPC Advertising Work?

Paid search programs allow site owners to “bid” on the terms they wish to appear for. You agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. Websites that utilise PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a Web developer chooses on a content site.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Lets Your Company

• Reach prospects when they are actively looking for information or products and services related to their business
• Run cost effective advertising campaigns, as this type of advertising is less expensive than any other type of traditional advertising and lets business owners have control over their budget.
• Have flexibility and control. You can edit your campaigns and ads at any time (24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

Ads start running for the first time almost immediately after you activate your account with your credit card or direct debit information. (Advertisers in certain countries can pay by bank transfer. In this case, ads run when the first payment is received.)

Industries That PPC Works Well In:

PPC works well in those services that people need immediately and used to go to the Yellow Pages to look for.  If you are keen to drive traffic to your business website then PPC should be one of the tools you should seriously look into.

Paid Search Marketing Platforms

There are many PPC providers but the three largest network operators are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter and all three operate under a bid-based model.  The Cost per click (CPC) varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword.

Contact Anthony Burke here to discuss any aspect of digital internet marketing.  He has many years of executive experience in business development, marketing and the Internet with large companies – more recently Hewitt Associates, Xchanging, Axa Insurance and several key London Market Insurers. Anthony now runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society, the Chartered Institute for IT, and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.

Digital Internet Marketing Systems – Step One is a business website

Business owners and leaders should be carefully examining all items of discretionary spend and evaluate them, line by line, to ensure they have potential to grow the business and can demonstrate unambiguous Return on Investment (ROI).  In some organisations, in times of a downturn marketing and advertising spend gets classed as “discretionary” rather than as an investment necessary to grow the business. The advantage of Digital Internet Marketing over more traditional off-line marketing is that the impact can be more easily measured. An effective internet marketing strategy will enable businesses to increase marketing ROI whilst being able to directly track marketing investments with measurable and incremental results. An innovative business website is at the heart of an effective internet marketing system, regardless of the products and services that a business sells.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the more important benefits of a business website. The first important benefit is visibility. It is the shop window into products and services and is the online business card. Your company and its products and services need to be visible to your target market. Prospects are actively searching on the Internet for your products and services – especially where the market is local. Recent studies have shown that 80% of buyers rely on Internet search as their primary source of information before making a buying decision. Businesses that rely solely on traditional printed ads in yellow pages, local classified ads and word of mouth are missing a large part of their target market.

As more and more businesses and individuals use the Internet to research products and services before buying, companies must provide online prospects with easy access to company products and service information. Online buyers have now come to expect  24 by 7 access to information. Let’s look at the example of local restaurants where customer behaviour is markedly changing.  It is now critical that local restaurants have a internet marketing system that includes a website to engage and inform customers about opening hours, address, location, driving or walking directions, updated menus, email contact and a phone number so that customers can email or call to make a reservation. More and more customers are planning their restaurant meals online and restaurants without business websites miss out on potential customers.  Trend searches on Google in the UK clearly show a peak in local searches in December and January as customers begin to research restaurant bookings for Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day.

All business websites must have clear goals and that support the business’ objectives. As a minimum, companies going online need a domain name that is relevant to their business and an email address with the same domain name. Free email accounts from Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail should be avoided as they dilute business credibility. Also, email from these domains is often blocked by spam filters due to the large amount of suspect emails that get classed as spam.  It is also important to budget for basic website traffic promotion via search engine optimisation (SE0), and pay per click (PPC) and social media (SM) advertising to ensure that the website is visible to online searches and receives targeted traffic to the website.

For the vast majority of businesses, the objective will be to increase sales and grow margin through an improved marketing ROI effort.  A business focussed website then becomes a necessity and not a “nice to have” accessory.  The good news for businesses today is that in the digital age there are a number of affordable internet marketing systems available where the business website is at the heart. The cost varies depending on the level of initial and ongoing support a specific business requires. Having a Digital Internet Marketing System does not always differentiate a company  from its competition, but it does improve visibility and hence the chance to compete for those online customers  that might otherwise be lost to the competition.

Anthony Burke is an digital internet marketing consultant with experience of business development, marketing and the Internet with many large companies – more recently Hewitt Associates, Xchanging and Axa Insurance and several key London Market Insurers. Anthony now runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.