Sports Marketing: 7 Tips for Marketing With Sports Brands

Sports marketing is any form of marketing that intersects with amateur or professional sports in any fashion. Besides ticket sales, sports teams, leagues, and organizations make most of their money through marketing initiatives. Similarly, other brands will use the clout and notoriety of sports teams to market their own products to fans.

While there are no strict requirements to start a career in sports marketing, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in a related discipline will give you a leg up in acquiring an entry-level position.

When someone refers to work in the sports marketing industry, they might mean one of these three distinct roles:

• Marketing products through sports: Brand managers can reach out to major sports teams and organizations to advertise their own products through athlete endorsements and sponsorships. This way, people see otherwise unrelated brands in connection with their favorite teams. Sometimes the use of sporting imagery alone can help brands mount successful campaigns.
• Marketing sports teams: Event management teams work with marketers to advertise sports brands and bring in ticket sales. For instance, they might lean on focusing on the most popular professional athletes on their teams in their marketing. This might draw more fans due to their devotion to this specific sports star versus the team as a whole.
• Marketing sports themselves: The promotion of sports themselves is yet another major field of sports marketing. There are many different types of sports throughout the world, some of which are less popular than others. For these niche activities in the global sports industry, marketing professionals work to advertise and increase fan interest and participation through unique campaigns.

Sports unite and excite people, making sports extremely conducive to effective marketing campaigns. Keep these seven tips in mind as you pursue a sports marketing strategy:

1. 1. Define your target audience. To market effectively, you must target a specific audience. Reaching a Los Angeles team’s fan base will require different strategies than a New York City team’s devotees. Analyze consumer behavior in your target market and draft a marketing plan accordingly.
2. 2. Lean on the loyalty of sports fans. Successful sports organizations foster a deep sense of loyalty in their fans. By forging partnerships with people’s favorite athletes and teams, marketers can tap into that sense of devotion as well. Just remember the sports business thrives on an authentic sense of connection between fans and teams—marketing materials that feel too salesy will probably be a turnoff.
3. 3. Offer promotional opportunities. Marketing teams both in and outside of sports organizations can offer sports-related promotions to their fans. Those working for individual teams could offer discounts on jerseys or other merchandise. Those partnering with teams could work out an agreement for stadiums to lower ticket pricing if fans prove they bought a product from the company.
4. 4. Reach out to individual athletes. Marketing managers can gain interest by cultivating the right athlete endorsements of their products. If this option is available to you, contact an athlete’s sports agent to get the ball rolling on an advertising deal that can benefit both you and your company. Alternatively, marketing managers with sports organizations can ask teammates to share promotional material via their social media accounts.
5. 5. Seek out sponsorships. Get in touch with sports franchises to see how you can increase brand awareness by sponsoring their team. Both sponsoring companies and teams benefit from these sorts of deals, as both entities can launch sports marketing campaigns featuring the other’s brand.
6. 6. Strategize around major sporting events. Sports marketers and event managers can both take advantage of how many major events there are in the sporting world. Marketers focus on increasing as much public interest as possible in events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, and World Cup in part because they can then use that interest to promote other products while fans are watching.
7. 7. Utilize social media. Use a combination of traditional media (like billboards) and digital marketing, whether you’re advertising your brand via a sports team or you’re a sports team advertising yourself. In either case, work with sports management officials to cultivate a social media strategy that foregrounds the brand identity of a specific team or an athlete to help your marketing connect to the fan base.

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