If you’ve ever considered a sports marketing career, you’re looking at a job that pays in the six-figure realm.
For marketing specialists who love sports or expert salespeople who love sports, this is a great direction to take your career. However, if you don’t know the first thing about how sports and marketing overlap, you have a little bit of learning to do.
Here is everything you need to know about how sports marketing works and why you should start a career in it.
Why Sports Marketing
If you are into sports or an athlete yourself, you know the industry around sports better than most people.
When you understand why people love sports, you know what people want to buy and who they trust to sell them things. Sports marketing could be about professional sports, college sports, or even triathlons.
Because sports are watched on a wide range of platforms by a broad audience of people, marketing takes a lot of forms. It is in everything from billboards inside and outside stadiums to print ads and social media ads.
You could be selling airtime, athletic wear, or even something tangentially related to sports.
If you find a rock star triathlete, you could even sell these wetsuits for use in triathlons.
Sports marketing relies on how we perceive celebrities and sports stars. The qualities are then transferred to the company they endorse by the mere association.
Athletes are rich and successful while showing a high degree of physical and mental strength.
Their dedication to their sport can show off the kind of commitment that either they should have to the product or that the product has to them. They could even just be associated with the product because they’re talented and sexy, which is often good enough to sell anything.
It Makes Brands Visible
Throughout the history of advertising, there are companies like Nike and Wheaties who have spent years of their brand life being associated with sports stars or events.
So many companies have done everything in their power to link their products with Olympic athletes and competition that their brands are permanently boosted.
When people see a company’s ads during sports competitions or while inside a stadium, companies have a more attentive audience than usual. While live sportscasts have commercial breaks, there are sometimes quick cuts back to the action.
Because of this, there is a lot of attention paid to games.
If a customer’s favorite athlete endorses a product or service during this time, then they’re paying close attention. The consumer is going to link the athlete and the brand closely.
The trust and faith they put in the athlete are quickly tied to the brand and both will benefit from this connection.
Benefits For New Products
If a new product comes out, tying it to an old product can be problematic.
Any problems people had with the old product then get tied to the new product. If the new product is trying to be independent of the general perception of the brand, then it’s a challenge that needs to be overcome in a different way.
When a team or an athlete promotes or endorses a new product, the marketing runs much better.
The trust and faith that people have in the athlete and the team are then transferred to a brand new product. People who root for a different team than the one the athlete plays for still recognize that player’s talent so it’s a win-win no matter what.
It feels like the athlete has first-hand knowledge about the product when they promote, so it helps the product succeed. It’s even better when the product is related to the sport or is a healthy food product.
The people buying it will, consciously or not, link their own health to the health of the athlete, even in an aspirational sense.
More Than Just Selling Things
When you are working in sports marketing, you get to do a lot more than to just sell products to people.
Even if you are in the world of retail or creating consumable products, you and the athletes you might work with care about more than making money. Athletes may make millions of dollars a year but so many of them go back to the communities where they started to support people there.
You could raise aid for people who you feel need it the most with the help of your brand and an athlete. You could try to do this on your own, but you’ll find that working with a professional athlete amplifies your voice by a massive factor.
Healthy and active lifestyles are the perfect places to get people excited about the future of health and wellness. If you have a health or wellness interest that you’ve thought about, an athlete is a perfect person to help support that idea.
Promoting sports as a vehicle for good health with an athlete by your side is a smart way to market initiatives like that.
If you have got a philanthropic streak, even giving your products away to people is a great way to spread the word. A contest where you give out lots of your sports-related products to a community who raises money is another good way to spread goodwill.
Sports Marketing is A Lucrative Career
If you have never thought about before but love the two concepts, sports marketing might be your future. It is an exciting career where you get to meet great people who accomplish lots of exciting and impressive feats.
If you are looking to market your company on a budget, check out our latest guide.
