For a myriad of reasons, live video remains incredibly important in the sports landscape. Notably, fans and media members want to stay up to date on their teams and important happenings in real time. It’s often easier to absorb the latest information in a video than scrolling through a series of tweets, posts, or articles.
In fact, 82 percent of people prefer live video from a brand to social posts. Because of this, it makes a lot of sense that there are money-making opportunities for brands in this arena.
Take press conferences, for example. Brands pay big money to have their logo featured behind a popular coach as he or she addresses the media. Streaming these conferences to a team/brand’s social audience gets those logos to far more people than just the media members in the room at the time, however. What’s more, outlets can also find additional sponsors for their own videos of live events. Both of these instances present some clear benefits for the companies that purchase these sponsorships, as well as the teams themselves.
“Anytime a sponsor can tie themselves to a team it creates a relationship with the fanbase. These brands can benefit from fan loyalty turning into brand loyalty,” said Joe Centeno, art director of Team Infographics. “For the teams, they benefit from creating new inventory whether it’s new live social broadcasts, in-game features, or player features. New inventory means a new opportunity for both teams and sponsors to collaborate.”
SEE MORE: Exploring Fan Experience Trends and Opportunities
Speaking of those fans, use of live video can sometimes be about identifying who those fans exactly are on social platforms. This helps teams build a proper monetization strategy for all social content moving forward. Some things that help with this are the analytics tools that Delmondo provides its clients.
“All these insights help teams build a story around the monetary value of their videos and their fans to an advertiser, which they can use to match brand partners with appropriate content themes based on audience insights, or create more engaging content to increase the value of their social channels,” Nick Cicero, CEO of Delmondo, said.
Live right now with @superdeluxe – so cool how they use @delmondo live data in real-time for their broadcasts! pic.twitter.com/rx6RTzG25y
— Nick Cicero (@nickcicero) June 1, 2018
A strategy is an important aspect of actually monetizing live video. Without content or information that people want access to, it’s tough to build an audience. Therefore, digital strategists must remember that content is king and think through the best ways to build that audience before jumping right into using live video. While a small percentage of teams are making proper use of live social video, especially for revenue-growing purposes, Denver-based creative director Jesse Alkire offered some pointers for organizations hoping to make the jump.
SEE MORE: Inside The Athletic’s Live Event Strategy
“To me, the obvious first place to start is transitioning traditional pre- and post-game shows online, preferably on to social platforms,” Alkire said. “From there, you can deliver links and/or ads in-feed that are relevant to the streaming content they’re watching live, which can then take users to purchase tickets, merchandise, and even sponsor products. Everything all in one place, right where fans would naturally access it, just organized in one nice content stream.”
Alkire added that this could be a major jumping-off point for the next phase of social marketing’s evolution.
“Right now, I don’t see many sports teams offering live video — which is too bad, because they’re missing a huge opportunity. I’ll bet in the next five years you’ll see live streaming video become the biggest marketing tool for digital creative teams.”
