How Mobile Marketing has Impacted the Sporting Industry

Mobile marketing impacts the sporting industry. Major sporting events are a key driver of emergent communication technologies, and text marketing is no different. The 2012 London Olympics saw mobile advertising grow by 50%, as businesses recognized the enormous power of the spectacle as an attention-grabber that could attendees into phone numbers on lists. 

Other sports organizations are realizing the potential of text marketing as a way of engaging fans whose prior involvement in the game was limited to hollering support (or abuse!) from the touchline. The smartphones now carried by most fans allow them to interact directly with their club or team. Collegiate athletic departments are looking towards the 35% of young sports fans who routinely comment on games via social media.

College sports fans and tech-savvy youngsters aren’t just easy bedfellows – they’re often one and the same person. Educated and equipped with their smartphone round-the-clock, this demographic is instinctively primed for your text marketing campaign.

It’s not just college sports or major one-offs like the Olympics that are benefitting from text marketing. Sport is big business, and everyone from the Bundesliga in Germany to the NBA in the US, right down to minor league grassroots enterprises are using mobile platforms to transmit, among other things:

• The latest transfer news
• Results
• Player Statistics
• Tactical information
• Fixtures
• League table standing

Text marketing is helping the global reach of sports organizations grow. Even a decade ago, the English Premier League was still largely the preserve of UK soccer fans. At the end of 2012, 37% of global mobile media users followed it.

The beauty of sports as a vertical is how easily it can be broken up into sub-verticals. Take the aforementioned soccer as an example. You have a pyramid of fandom, all pointing to ‘soccer’ at the top. Beneath that you have a variety of international clubs, which capture huge audiences (nearly half the global population watched the 2010 World Cup, according to FIFA). Below that are the top-flight club teams from around the world, which attract cross-country interest thanks to the European Cup and other continental competitions. Then there is a raft of amateur and semi-pro lower leagues, each with their own loyal following. Finally you get right down to Sunday soccer teams and casual spectators who watch the occasional televised match. This grassroots fanbase is just that – a ‘base’ on which the entire soccer industry is built. 

To varying degrees, these fans have strong, identifiable allegiances that translate directly into personal preferences. This segmentation neatly forms the basis of an effective, highly targeted mobile marketing strategy, which no sports organization should go without.