While it might not seem obvious right off the bat, brand awareness and sports marketing naturally go hand in hand. In fact, roughly 59% of the American population classifies themselves as avid sports fans. This audience segment spans age, racial background, and gender with the growing popularity of female sports.
By tying your marketing efforts to a local sports team your business can reap all kinds of rewards in terms of brand awareness and name recognition if done correctly. Tying your business to a sports team in Mid-Missouri — like the St. Louis Cardinals, for example — has long been considered an effective marketing practice within the region.
But exactly why, and how, are businesses being positively impacted by associating their local business with sports teams? Below we’ll take a look!
1. Great for Building Brand Awareness
Associating your business with a sports team is a powerful way to create brand awareness for your business. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach either, as you can tie your business to a sports team via advertising on sports radio, creating promotions for when the team wins, or co-branded giveaways of promotional items. Radio ads can be particularly effective, as sports games and associated coverage reach a wide audience. You can even have promotions and contests built around Fantasy Football, designed to create excitement and engagement with your brand.
2. Sports Teams Have Active Followings
Fans love their teams, and demand information and coverage on a continual basis. This goes for TV, radio, and social media. By piggybacking on the local team’s following, advertisers can leverage some of this momentum in their favor to garner even that much more attention. Using social media combined, with sports marketing, is just another effective way to reinforce the consistency of your branding across marketing channels, while at the same time growing your following, and databases. Nearly half of sports fans prefer to engage with team-related content digitally, making followers that much more crucial to your marketing efforts.
3. Sports Audiences Span Generations
One of the great things about sports fans is that the audience spans multiple generations. Sons watch and listen to games with their parents and grandparents, allowing marketers a better chance of reaching a highly diverse audience. This also enables marketers to further segment and personalize their messages to reach various groups within their target audience. Famous announcers like Jack Buck of the St. Louis Cardinals are iconic in the minds of every generation, making associating your business with a sports team an even more powerful concept. Recent figures have shown that Major League Baseball broadcasting rights fees have increased in recent years, showing how valuable access to these multiple demographics has become.
If you didn’t have enough reasons for tying your marketing efforts to a local sports team, now you do. Advertising with a local mid-Missouri team like the St. Louis Cardinals will enable you to optimize the strategy, messaging, consistency, and frequency of your marketing campaigns. Get plugged in with a local sports team, and you’ll become the talk of the town sooner than you think.
What’s your favorite sports-related marketing campaign of all time? Go ahead and share with us in the comments!
