With vaccines starting to appear, and soon available for wide scale adoption, there is a growing sense of optimism that 2021 is not going to be a repeat of the last 12 months, both for us individually but also for sport. With the Tokyo Olympics now only eight months away, and many major competitions scheduled beforehand, both athletes and rights holders (and their respective brand partners) are now able to fully prepare for the excitement that is to come.
We’ve seen how the sponsorship industry’s shift to digital has accelerated this year, in no small part influenced by COVID-19.
But what are elements need to be in place for a great digital campaign? At Sportskred, we think there being four key components of delivering a high-quality social media sponsorship campaign:
Number One: Analysis of social media data
Who are you speaking to on social media? Follower numbers is a basic measure of quantum, but where are they located, and crucially what are their interests?
Any brand in a partnership with a rights holder will need to have the data to make decisions on where sponsorships activations are going to give the best return, so armed with detailed social media audience data gets you in the game.
Through identifying the right athletes (with the right audience, interests etc.), rights holders and brands can effectively determine where best to spend the budget. Say if you’re a UK football club that has 75% of your fan audience in Asia, is it going to be as worthwhile for a UK focused brand to work with you? Probably not…
Number 2: Valuation of athletes and rights holders social media
Understanding the true value of your social media, whether you’re a rights holder or an athlete is essential. There are constant statistics and valuations flying around about how much ‘so and so’ is worth, but does anyone actually really know how much they’re worth?
Without a valid assessment and analysis of your social media, you are flying blind.
Number 3: Delivery in a way that is both cost and time effective
Delivering social media content quickly and at scale is a huge challenge without either paying social media channels or with a man hours to manage campaigns. Technology is paramount to be able to achieve this in quickly and profitably.
Number 4: Prove the return to your organisation and your sponsors
Again, automation and technology takes the front seat here. Having campaign analytics and detailed data reporting is essential to improve your social media marketing strategy over time. The data provides you with the necessary detail as to what’s working and what’s not.
It all adds up to being able to measure the ROI and (just like on the sports field) this feedback is necessary to improve.
If you haven’t yet thought about social media sponsorship, don’t wait until the New Year, it’s happening now!
Alice McWilliam is Athlete Manager at ESA member Sportskred
At Sportskred we talk social media marketing and sponsorship. We’ve built a sponsorship ecosystem with advanced martech tools to provide a comprehensive end to end solution. And if you want to integrate Sportskred into your own IT operating system, we have branded versions with API’s that do just that. As the technology leader in social media sponsorship we are constantly adding cooler 😎 and slicker functions to the platform.
