5 Amazing Sports Event Marketing Strategies That Marketers Forget

Marketing your sports event properly and effectively involves a lot of hard work. That’s why we’ve created this guide for marketers who want to create and execute a sports event marketing strategy. In this guide, we will explain to you the different types of sports event promotion ideas that exist, how you can market your sports event, and finally how you can sell tickets for your sports event.

So, if you’re promoting a sports event and want to sell out all the ticket spaces, pay attention because we are about to tell you how.

What is Sports Event Marketing?

First things first! Sports Event Marketing is used by companies to extend their reach, brand name, and product awareness through sports clubs, and sporting organizations, find event sponsorships and advertise deals. Using sports marketing techniques has been proven to be an effective tool to promote consumer goods across different market sectors.

Why should you care about Sports Marketing?

Sports are meant for entertainment and many enterprises are making use of sport events as a mean of advertising their goods. This includes food and beverage companies, clothing, fitness equipment and accessories, and sports products among others.

The unique advantage of games as marketing tools is,

• Sports events have massive audience outreach
• Large numbers of clients in various locations who have already made it known that they are interested in the games
• Easy to get sports event sponsorship from merchandise

Set A Goal For Sports Event

Everyone says that sports event planners need to have a clear goal. But how to set your goal?

Firstly, you need to know what your primary objective is. Is it to get people to come to your event, or is it to get them to sign up for a newsletter so they’ll hear about new events? Once you know what your main objective is, you can start working on your target audience.

The second step is to identify who your target audience is and what their needs are. Once you have this information, then all that remains is crafting the perfect event theme for them! You can do this by thinking about what makes sports fans unique and finding ways to tailor your campaign with product launch ideas so that it speaks directly to those individuals’ interests and desires.

Develop A Theme For Sports Event

If you’re looking for a way to market sports events that could draw out a big crowd, themes and event registration forms are the way to go. Themes will get people excited about your event and keep them engaged. They also provide structure as a guideline to make decisions about the event.

Once you have an idea of what your sports event is going to look like, you can begin brainstorming event theme ideas. Look at what your audience would be interested in. Is there a popular topic or trend that is relevant to your event?

The next step is deciding on the tone of your theme. Are you looking for something light-hearted or formal? Once you have decided on this, begin working on how you want it to look visually. Do you want bright colors or non-neon tones? Consider how the theme will affect the way people experience the event and how they will remember it afterward.

Create a timeline for your marketing campaign

Every sports marketing person needs to set up the basic structure of their timeline. To do that, you’ll need to know the overall launch date of the campaign and what event planning tools or techniques will be used. From there, you can work backward to determine when each task needs to be completed.

As you move forward with creating your timeline, remember that things don’t always go according to plan—so plan accordingly with event management software! You should add a few days on either side of any deadlines just in case something goes wrong in production and we need extra time to fix it.

Sports Marketing: Budget & Strategy

Marketing your sports event can be expensive. It’s a fact. But it doesn’t have to break the bank. All you need is the right strategy and a well-thought-out budget.

You must create a realistic budget for each aspect of your event so that you know how much money is available for advertising and marketing efforts. If necessary, you can consider cutting costs elsewhere in order to boost your marketing budget—it could make all the difference in whether or not people show up.

Once you’ve established your budget, it’s time to think about how you’ll formulate the marketing strategy for your event.

Top 9 Sports Event Marketing Ideas

When it comes to creating marketing strategies for a sports event, you have to work harder than ever to stand out. Because you’re competing with millions of other events all trying to capture the attention of their participants.

Following are 9 best event marketing ideas that can oversell your tickets:

1. Create a Buzz

No, it’s not about Buzz Lightyear. We’re talking about creating a buzz around sports events. One highly effective way to do that is: to get people talking about it! Let’s check the process of creating a buzz and excitement for your sports event.

Step 1: Make a list

Write down all of the media outlets that are relevant to your event: local newspapers, event listing websites, sports clubs, radio stations, sports blogs—any place where people who would be interested in your event would turn for information on sporting events.

Step 2: Reach out

Call or email these outlets. Tell them about your upcoming sporting event, and ask if they’d like more information or a podcast with someone involved. This step is crucial! If you don’t reach out, most outlets won’t know you exist—and so they won’t write about you!

Step 3: Create a hashtag

It’s self-explanatory. You create a trend and share it like a maniac.

2. Social Media

The most important thing to know about social media is that it’s a two-way street.

Yes, you’re going to be sharing things—but you also want to be listening to what people are saying and responding. Social media is all about the conversation, and it won’t do much for your event if you try to leverage it as a one-sided billboard.

The key is to promote events on social media and find ways to engage with your audience and make them feel like they’re part of the conversation—otherwise, they’ll just tune out. Here are a few ideas that can help you get started!

Start with a great bio

Social media platforms are filled with bios that sound like they were written by robots—”I’m John Smith, I love my dog and eating tacos.” The challenge is: how can you make yourself pop? Don’t be afraid to inject some personality into your bio! Show off your sense of humour, or use an inside joke from the community. Make people laugh! Make them smile! Just don’t make them yawn.

Sell tickets online

Social media is a great way to get people talking about what’s coming up. Create an event on Facebook and promote it on Instagram, and if you have more than a few hundred followers, consider posting sponsored stories to reach a wider audience. You can even sell tickets on Facebook. On Twitter, try running promoted tweets in the lead-up to your event, and consider running a contest or giveaway at the same time to boost your conversions.

3. Use E-mail Marketing

Reach out to everyone who has ever purchased tickets to one of your events before, and let them know what’s coming up! If they already know they like your events, they might be eager to tell their friends about it too.

You can also send event invites via mail with compelling event invite templates. That way, you can attract lots of attendees if they like your invites. Try looking out for Event Invite Templates to improve conversions.

4. List Events On Different Websites & Platforms

In the age of technology, your organization’s success is largely predicated on how well you can use digital marketing platforms to reach your target audience.

AllEvents, a platform to sell event tickets online, has been created to help marketers, whether they are just starting out or are seasoned pros. Event organizers can create event pages, market their events, create custom event invite templates, sell tickets online, and much more.

5. Paid ad campaigns

Paid ad campaigns allow you to target an audience that’s likely to be interested in what you’re offering—and even if they’re not interested in the first campaign they see, retargeting them with more ads can help keep your event top-of-mind until registration opens.

You can do event advertising on almost any platform, including social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or on websites that offer products similar to yours. Do some research into which platforms are most popular with your target audience—if they’re heavy Facebook users, there’s no point in advertising a video on Twitter!

Want to consult an event marketing expert before starting paid campaigns? Connect with experts →

6. Bloggers and Influencers

They are no joke when it comes to increasing your sales. If you can utilize the power of influencers and find ways to get them involved in your event. Then you can easily harness their sphere of influence to boost yours and help increase sales.

7. Go Organic!

If you want attendees to fall naturally into buying tickets. Then organic marketing is a good option. What you can do is—create an attractive landing page with SEO-friendly content. If you do things in the right manner, then your page might rank higher. And your page will automatically attract event enthusiasts.

You can even create event pages easily on event ticketing websites. Also, you can leverage their traffic into buying your tickets. So it’s a win-win for the event marketers.

Pro tip: You can learn more about SEO for Event Planners to market your sports event effectively.

8. Pre-Sports Event Marketing

When you are into event promotion. Pre-event push is really necessary to boost your ticket sales and get your participants hyped about your event.

To do this. You simply need to be creative and try some event engagement ideas to catch your participants. How? Here are some ideas.

You can try out some event activation ideas. For instance, mini-games or foreshadowing your main event. It will get people more reluctant into buying tickets and wait for D-Day to come eagerly.

9. Design and Distribute Promotional Materials

A wise sports marketer once said, “You can’t just put up a poster and call it a day. No one’s going to come to your event just because you told them about it.”

You gotta let them know they’re in for an experience—and that they’re going to want to be part of it. How do you do that? With great event promotion ideas, compelling design, and a well-targeted distribution strategy.

There are two main factors to consider when you design promotional materials.

Get creative with the visuals

Take a look at what other companies have done for their event marketing, and take inspiration from their successes—but also learn from their mistakes. For example, if a competitor has used bright colours for their fliers advertising an outdoor event, use softer colours instead. Then when people see your fliers on the street or in mailboxes, they’ll immediately be able to tell how different your event will be from the others out there.

Keep it simple

You don’t want people getting overwhelmed by all the details in your promotional materials for an upcoming event—just give them enough information so that when they show up later on day one, they’ll see that it’s much more than what they expected.

Takeaways

Marketing should be fun. If it’s no fun, then your attendees won’t have fun. So when you’re jumping into this field, be sure to stay on the positive and cheerful side. Trust me! Your campaigns will reflect the same.

With some planning and the right materials, you can have an effective campaign promoting your sports event or any other event.

Happy eventing!!