Incorporating Influencers into Your Sports Marketing Strategy
While many athletes are active and well-followed on social media, leveraging influencers is a great way for sports teams, leagues, and organizations alike to reach and engage with new communities and audiences off their “field” and outside their fanbase.
Regardless of your sport, playing field, or marketing goals, why not consider using influencers as digital cheerleaders? Consider the following objectives when building out your influencer strategy:
Increase Team Awareness and Fandom
Turn your fans into superfans! Inviting influencers with a genuine passion for your sport, team, or league to craft and share content about their authentic love for, or engagement with, your organization on a regular basis is a strong evergreen approach to staying relevant in the minds and hearts of fans and soon-to-be fans alike.
Promote Tune In
Whether you’re promoting a big game, match, tournament, or team/player spotlight on television, a podcast, or another streaming service, consider using influencers to spread the news! Ensure their content includes clear calls-to-action when it comes to show time, channel, etc.
Encourage Content Consumption
Use influencers to create consumer stickiness — not to be confused with the kind of consumer stickiness that occurs when a fan spills something on their way back from the concession stand! Get your fans to spend time consuming your content on your Instagram, an app, a website, or more through influencer encouragement.
Participate in Community or Fan Activations
Most athletic organizations are giving back to their community, or communities in need, in one way or another. Influencers often jump at the opportunity to work with brands that have experiential opportunities for them to participate in. Consider amplifying your community work through the eyes of a participating influencer. (See: The Guide to Mastering Events, Trips, and Experiences with Influencers)
Sell Merchandise and Tickets
Need we say more? Learn more about the important KPI’s to measure that determine a successful influencer campaign. ACTIVATE has the ability to track conversions and sales through our proprietary platform so you can see the impact influencers had on ticket and merchandise sales.
A large challenge of incorporating influencers into your sports marketing strategy is the ability to find content creators who are genuinely fans of a specific sport or team, let alone your sport or team. The ACTIVATE platform has multiple features that leagues and teams to identify which influencers may already be their biggest cheerleaders.
How Can ACTIVATE Help?
- ACTIVATE Discover: Use our influencer Discovery tool to Identify creators by parameters pertinent to your brand, whether it be age, location (See: Leveraging Radius Search for Smarter Collaborations ), or upcoming life moments (See: Targeting Major Life Moments through Influencers).
- Content Exploration Tool: See if the influencers you’re considering working with have ever mentioned relevant keywords to your brand by surfacing content through custom keywords, hashtags, geo-tags, and more.
- Influencer Relationship Management: Manage large sets of insights (team preference, jersey size, etc.) on creators that you are considering working with or have partnered with before. IRM represents a new suite of tools to allow marketers to cultivate and manage influencer relationships at scale.
- Better Briefing: Our briefing tools ensure that when you launch a collaboration, you’re not missing any of the nitty gritty details on a true influencer expert would know. Plus, all campaigns activated on our platform by our Self Serve client are reviewed by our strategists!
ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. The platform consists of an opt-in network of 150,000+ vetted and authenticated influencers. Pinpoint niche groups by leveraging our geo-targeting and micro-survey capabilities or dive in deep with our curated networks of creators. Notably, the networks span a diverse variety of influencers including ‘vegan foodies’, ‘outdoor enthusiasts’ , ‘bohemian stylistas’ (and more!). Need a hand? Leverage ACTIVATE Studio, our in-house team of influencer strategists to build out and execute custom influencer initiatives.
Want to learn more about ACTIVATE or Bloglovin’ ? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.
