The world of sports presents businesses with numerous opportunities to market themselves. In fact, sponsorship and marketing are vital revenue streams for most professional sports teams and leagues.
The XFL league might be smaller than the better-known NFL. However, it is comprised of some of the most popular teams in America. This creates plenty of opportunities for savvy marketers, some of which we have highlighted below.
Audience Segmentation
Dividing your audience into specific subsets of users enables you to target each group with marketing content tailored for their needs. Audience segmentation is a very powerful tool when used to its full potential.
Sports leagues like the XFL create some degree of audience segmentation organically. For example, supporters of the New York Guardians are more likely to hail from New York. The same is true for the other seven teams in the XFL league. If you want to market to the citizens of a city represented in the XFL league, their team is an obvious target.
According to a survey conducted by Mailchimp, users open segmented marketing emails 14.31% more often than usual. Segmented email marketing also generates 101% more clicks than a non-segmented campaign. By all meaningful metrics – bounce rates, unsubscribes, and reports of spam – segmented marketing is much more effective than non-segmented marketing.
Take advantage of the inherent audience segmentation in the XFL league when you are formulating your marketing strategy.
Betting on Sponsors
Sponsorship is a huge part of professional sports. The money provided by sponsors to teams is a core component of their financing. Meanwhile, businesses can benefit enormously from the added exposure that comes with having their name and logo printed on a team’s kit and plastered around their home stadium.
Just about any business can take advantage of sports sponsorship deals to get their brand out there. Businesses don’t necessarily need to provide products or services relevant to the sport they wish to sponsor.
Let’s take an online betting company as an example. Click here for an example of such a business. Not only can an online casino benefit from increased exposure, but advertising themselves through sports sponsorships makes a lot of sense. After all, most online casinos and online betting companies offer sports betting. The UK is home to, arguably, the most important top-flight soccer league in the world. Betting firms sponsor 17 of the 24 championship sides in the UK.
Another benefit of sports sponsorship from a marketing perspective is that it is incredibly simple. Sponsors aren’t generally expected to do anything beyond providing money. In exchange, their name and logo will appear wherever appropriate.
AR And VR Opportunities
Tight augmented and virtual reality have been gaining prominence in recent years. Most of us now have a smartphone capable of running AR and VR apps; we no longer need expensive hardware to utilize these technologies. The overall market for augmented reality technologies is projected to hit $18 billion by 2023. This figure is a significant increase on the $1.8 billion that augmented reality generated in 2018.
Both augmented reality and virtual reality have already been harnessed by marketers working in a variety of industries. By augmenting reality or generating virtual worlds, marketers can create immersive and interactive experiences that are unlike any previous form of marketing.
Utilizing augmented reality in the realm of sports is nothing new. Anyone who has watched a professional sports game on TV in recent years will have noticed that the commentators make extensive use of augmented reality to illustrate what is happening on the pitch.
Augmented reality marketing enables businesses to get their name and logo in places they would otherwise be unable to. For example, no major league sports team is likely to give over a significant portion of their pitch to a sponsor’s logo. However, by using augmented reality technologies, it can appear to viewers at home that this is exactly what has happened. Superimposing a logo or name over the real world is very cheap but a very effective marketing tactic.
The XFL league presents businesses with some potentially very lucrative marketing opportunities. In addition to direct sponsorship, marketers can also take advantage of pre-segmented audience and sports teams’ familiarity with AR technologies. The marketing and sponsorship opportunities highlighted above are just some of what the XFL has to offer.
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