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 ‘digital’ has become the ‘buzzword’ over the past year, in no small part influenced by COVID. At Sportskred, we wanted to delve deeper into what are the four key components of delivering a high-quality social media sponsorship campaign, and explain how we have methodically built our technology in order to facilitate these core components. 

Without further ado, here are the four key components  for successful social media campaigns in this digital era:

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…

Sportskred’s technology provides highly detailed social media audience data of athletes and rights holders, enabling campaigns to be targeted at the right audiences.  

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 fold. 

The Sportskred algorithm provides ongoing valuation on all media assets, from YouTube videos to Instagram grid posts. This algorithm is calculated with numerous data points, including audience reach, engagement, credibility, industry market rates etc.

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. The automation to be able to achieve this in minutes instead of what would take days will put you in front of all your competitors. 

Within a matter of clicks, rights holders and brands can instantly share content for marketing campaigns across athletes and their network – making it one of the most straightforward tools for delivery of social media content. And, if it’s a sponsorship campaign for social media activations, once you’ve selected the athletes you create an offer and send it.  Athletes (or their agents) can instantly accept, discuss or decline the offer, and then you have the final say to book the campaign. It couldn’t be simpler.

Number 4: Prove the return to your organisation and your sponsors

Having post 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. Was it a content issue, time of day or perhaps the person’s audience wasn’t appropriate? It all adds up to being able to measure the ROI and (just like on the sports field) this feedback is necessary to improve. 

Post-campaign analytics is fully integrated within the Sportskred platform so there is no need to use a variety of tools for campaign tracking. No more nightmares of keeping on top of everything. The level of detail enables precise understanding, for both the commercial teams and the athletes to improve. Sportskred makes social media more effective and more profitable for any marketing and commercial teams. 

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. 

If you haven’t yet thought about social media sponsorship, don’t wait until the New Year, it’s happening now!