The potential that data holds for forging fruitful relationships with customers is rapidly being recognised and exploited by the sports marketing industry.
GlobalSportsJobs is at the vanguard of this revolution. We’re a data and content-driven business that is constantly investing in better understanding its audience’s data, to deliver greater value, greater engagement and greater credibility with its consumers.
As CEO Will Lloyd comments: “Much of sports marketing is based on how to bridge the emotional connection between the individual and the product. Data and personalisation has started to bridge that gap. Consumers are receiving value back from their emotional and financial commitment, driving ever deeper levels of engagement.”
Here, GlobalSportsJobs speaks to two leading figures in sports marketing to get the lowdown on precisely how they extract maximum value from customer data – and how this might develop further in the future.
Jez Clark is Head of Fuse , a marketing agency within the Omnicom Media Group. Fuse unites brands with rights holders to create partnerships and experiences, making a difference to the people who share in them and the brands that benefit from them.
Clark explains, "Our access to data and the insights we can garner from it are changing the shape of the conversations we're having with rights holders on our client brands' behalf. Traditionally a big sponsorship deal would have been done on the number of eyeballs it would attract, or pitch perimeter boards you might have access to."
"Conversations we're having now around the grounding of deals are increasingly focused on access to data on the rights holder's audiences. We have access to a broad range of tools to help us collect and understand the data and gain behavioural insights into how people are consuming and connecting with sport", he adds.
Clark goes on to explain the difference Fuse has been able to make, "The insights and segmentation work we're able to access as part of Omnicom Media Group – enable us to be very specific in the entitlements we ask from rights holders in order to hit the client brief and meet their objectives."
"We've long been able to target certain age demographics, but we can now layer on top of that segmentation based on behavioural insights. So, within that age range, do we need to request more content from a rights holder, or more player appearances? What is it that appeals to those people beyond simply association with that particular team or sport? It's giving us much richer insights so we're able to create partnerships that are really answering clients' business needs," he expounds.
Claude Ruibal is Executive Director - Digital, Production & Sport Solutions at Swiss-based Infront Sports & Media , a sports marketing company with a comprehensive portfolio of sports rights.
The unlimited capacity to show sports content on a variety of platforms grants fans new access to an event that they have previously never experienced. There is a lot more accessibility, personalisation and portability, and that in turn has changed the rights holder’s potential array of sellable rights.
Sports organisations are finding it increasingly important to build a personal relationship with fans to provide them with customised offerings. There are so many alerts and notifications attacking fans on a daily basis. The more sports can tailor their messaging to an individual and reinforce that consistently, the more likely they will convert a potential customer into a consumer of their sport.
The secret is to gain consumer trust, leading to a registration and, as a result, discovery. You can target the things they care about the most and consistently deliver those experiences to them.
With thousands of sports channels, offerings have become much more specialised. The revenue business model is no longer about reach; rather the economics are becoming more focused on delivering a specific audience for brands.
Offerings that provide a solution to a fan’s specific sports interests, combined with the ability to access that content anywhere in the world, allows a rights holder to aggregate a global audience and provide them with exactly what they want. You create for them a daily destination for the things they love.
This targeting helps brands be more specific about to whom they are marketing, and as a result delivering a higher conversion for the products they are selling.
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