Blog #4

KSS Blog #4 will focus on the mirroring of a Sutton Impact SBJ article.

Interested in Sports Marketing? Know The Basics

With Sport becoming bigger and bigger, so do Sport Management careers. In that field, marketing plays a significant role, but students must know the basics in order to successfully enter the market and thrive within it. As a marketing professional, I have seen the pros and cons, as well as the ups and downs of the industry. In order to impact those seeking a career in Sport Marketing, I hope that my expertise and experience can shed light on the direction to success in their quest.

• Everything starts with your audience

As is the case with all business decisions, you must know your audience. If you don't, how will you know who to target? How will you know who to promote to? How will you know what they want? How will you know how they will receive it? Your target audience determines everything. You must understand them in order to understand Sport Marketing. For example, you are trying to sell suite tickets for the Denver Broncos. Who do you target? How do you find them? For starters, you know that suite tickets are the most expensive tickets in a football stadium. That allows you narrow your target audience down to higher income individuals and families. Second, how do you find them? Geographically, you can make a pretty good assumption that your suite ticket buyers will come within a 300 mile radius of Denver. It is unlikely you will find a suite ticket holder in San Francisco, CA. As aforementioned, that's an assumption, but you would be wasting your time looking through the San Francisco phonebook. This research of such elements of demographic, geographic, and psychographic information can help narrow down your target audience. In the end, through those two simple questions, you have significantly narrowed down who you are going to pursue.

As Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American management consultant, educator, and author, once said, "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

• Know the way the industry is heading

You must be aware of the trends of your industry, as well as what the trends indicate for the future. The most significant trend of today's marketing is the conversion from traditional forms of marketing to a digital, online realm. While traditional forms are still useful in certain regards, they do not support themselves anymore. You can't expect to send out mail letters to the top 1,000 family income households within 300 miles of Denver, CO and expect to fill your suites for the season. First, that would be plain stupid. Second, mail letters aren't best marketing practices anymore. You need a creative, attractive webpage. You need an informative Facebook page. You need an interactive Twitter page. You need an updated, visual YouTube page. You need SEO and PPC marketing and metrics. New Media is the new way of marketing. Those who don't abide will fall in to the distance while adaptability will thrust those who react in to success.

• Have a plan for your decisions and their implementation

What is your plan for marketing? You may have found upper income, local Bronco-fan residents, but how will you go about marketing to them? A simple four-step process is perfect for all marketing campaigns.

1. Review

Research, analyze, and review your internal and external markets. Internally, you must perform a SWOT analysis, which features Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. What drives your business and what threatens your business? Once you know how you operate, you must know how you operate within your market. Who are you competitors? Who are you customers (aforementioned)? What are the trends (aforementioned)? Externally, analyze the underlying forces of business environment change: Cultural, Natural, Legal, Governmental, Technological, and Economic. Each and every one of these environments affects your business. You must know how.

2. Strategize

Now that you've analyzed your internal and external environments, put together a strategy of what you want to do. What are your goals? When do you want to achieve them? How are you going to measure them (We'll get to this)? Map out your entire broad-level strategy.

3. Implement

You know your market and you know your strategy. Now implement it. Put the process in motion and guide it to success.

4. Revise

Finally, review and revise your process. Did budgeted items match actual items? Chances are they didn't, so go back and research why. Then revise. You can always improve your processes, and it starts here.

• The 4 P's must be considered in every decision

You can't get through a marketing class without hearing about the "4 P's." They are the foundation of marketing.

1. Price

Price is a key to all marketing. Are you a low-cost provider or a differentiation provider? Are you providing cheap products at a low-cost or high-quality products at a higher-end cost? Price will have a significant effect on demand. It will be the key driver of your marketing.

2. Product

Products and services go interchangeably here. They are the basis of what you're marketing. You must know how to properly market and advertise your product or service to your customers.

3. Promotion

Building on "Product," you need to promote (market/advertise) your product or service. Will you invest in advertising or rely on word of mouth? Are you going to do online, traditional, in-store, etc. marketing? There are a wide variety of ways to go about promoting your product or service. Find what works best for your company and respective campaign.

4. Place

This section refers to the place in which your consumers will have access to your product or service. You have such options of intensive distribution, selective distribution, exclusive distribution, etc. You can offer a significant amount of your product in a significant amount of places (intensive distribution). You can offer a limited amount of your product in a limited amount of places (selective distribution). Or you can offer a limited amount of your product to only high-end consumers (exclusive distribution). For example, it will be must easier to find a Honda versus a Porsche. This illustrates intensive vs. exclusive distribution. Know how you are going to provide your product to consumers. It will be a key factor in the revenues, costs, and subsequent success of your marketing.

• You must be able to quantify your success

You can put all the effort in the world in to marketing your product or service, but you must know if you are doing so effectively, efficiently, and successfully. In order to do this, you will set up metrics in order to track, research, and analyze your marketing and advertising. As aforementioned, as an example, you can track clicks, click-through-rate (CTR), and cost-per-actions in PPC. If a customer clicks on your ad for Sears.com, did they leave after 5 seconds or did they stay for 20 minutes and end up purchasing a blender? These metrics are crucial in knowing the success of your marketing efforts. Anyone can market, but not everyone can market successfully. Analyzing the success of your marketing and advertising is crucial.

Knowing the basics of marketing is crucial to being successful in Sport Marketing. Remember that you must know your audience, develop and implement a plan around the 4 P's, and lastly, track your metrics. The more experience you gain, the more you will learn in this regard. As is life, you learn as you go.