By Al Falaschi
It’s fair to say that visual assets like photos, graphics, and video drive ROI for professional sports teams more effectively than for most other industries.
And why? The experience!
The average sports fan consumes 8.3 hours of sporting events per week and spends $725 a year on sports events and apparel. Sports teams arguably dominate more mindshare than any other industry in America. In fact, scientific studies have found that sports trigger impulses in our brains that cause us to obsess over them. Watching sports sets off surges in testosterone and dopamine, which activates our pleasure centers, as well as “mirror neurons,” which cause us to feel emotions as if we are actually playing the game.
Watching sports is immersive, and fans are biologically primed to get wrapped up in the drama and excitement of the game. Sports teams know how to channel this excitement into immersive, addictive experiences that make consumers rabid for content.
While an everyday business may not incite its customers to paint themselves from head-to-toe in company colors, professional sports teams present a powerful model that any organization can follow when it comes to setting the bar for visual content experiences.
The Experience Era
Whether you’re a small business, a big brand, an educational center, a health-care provider, a non-profit agency, or religious institution, your organization could benefit from creating the kind of engaging and absorbing experiences that professional sports teams are known for.
You may not be able to match the fever pitch of the Red Sox coming back to beat the Yankees during the 2004 American League Championship Series, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the example to deliver memorable content experiences. These experiences are necessary to stand out from the crowd, cut through the clutter, and claim the split-second attention spans and selective dollars of consumers.
Marketing gurus Robert Rose and Carla Johnson have defined this as the “Experience Era of Marketing.” It is characterized by the capacity to delight audiences with content-driven experiences that make customers understand and feel connected to the value of the presenting brand.
One of the biggest lessons to pull from professional sports teams is the use of visual assets. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a second of video is worth 30,000. Professional sports teams have recognized the power of visuals and used them to forge a lasting emotional connection with their audience.
Seventy percent of all fans say they spend most of their time online with sports sites watching online videos versus reading content. This time is spent not only watching games, but consuming commentary before and after the game, and during the off-season. Photos and videos maintain that connection fans feel to the sports, the team, and the players.
In addition, every event, engagement and interaction visually drives home the brand’s connection to its audience. Team colors, logos, and paraphernalia, dramatic snapshots of players, images of decked out fans–all these images constantly reinforce fans’ love of their team.
Visuals appeal to the senses. They drive ticket sales, cable subscriptions, apparel, merchandise and collectibles, multimedia, and countless other ways to monetize the lasting impression of the experience of a sports team brand.
All this content creates an experience second only to “being there.” Most people will never make it to the Super Bowl, World Series, or any other championship game, but the modern media experience and visual content marketing of professional sports teams can offer an equal or greater lasting experience to any one single event. Plus, television allows fans to get even closer in some ways than they could if they were actually at a game.
This is a powerful model for a customer experience strategy that not only attracts customers, but keeps them, maintains loyalty, and turns them into brand advocates. As Vince Lombardi said, “Think of only three things: your God, your family and the Green Bay Packers-in that order.”
Pro sports teams know how to use visual assets to cultivate passion and devotion.
Get “Fans” Involved
One of the most effective and efficient ways that sports organizations keep their audience engaged is by encouraging fans to share user-generated content (UGC). UGC is the most authentic way to demonstrate the human connection between a brand and customer.
For your brand, this doesn’t have to be quite as exciting as an entire stadium dancing to “Jump Around,” but still look for opportunities to get your customers involved. UGC, like “Jump Around” videos, can trigger the FOMO (fear of missing out) phenomenon.
As fans upload and share their visual content, their friends will either want to experience it for themselves and buy tickets to a game, or continue to talk about the experience. In either case, fueling FOMO with visuals keeps people thinking and talking about your brand.
Involvement (and images of it) can extend beyond the stadium as well. From player stories to community goodwill, pro sports teams constantly create moments and stories worth sharing that forge lasting emotional connections; they always look for new opportunities to get their brand out there.
The intensity, authenticity and feeling that a fan feels with his/her team is what any brand dreams of. By using images to create an immersive experience, any business can tap into a little bit of that pro sports team magic.
The post Learn From the Pros: How Professional Sports Sets the Bar for Visual Marketing appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Learn From the Pros: How Professional Sports Sets the Bar for Visual Marketing appeared first on AllBusiness.com.
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