Sport Buoy

So, you want to put videos on YouTube to market your sports club, do you?

Why?

Knowing your reasons to promote your sports club on YouTube is the most important thing to understand before starting your marketing efforts. The goals you set out for yourself should guide every part of the process if your want to deliver the best possible results. This post will help you to answer those questions, formulating your sports marketing strategy more clearly.

Why Videos?

There are an endless list of goals that could be used to justify the use of video in your sports marketing mix, but make sure that video reflects the best return on investment (in time and/or money) that your goals can be achieved with. Always bear in mind that the underlying drive behind all your efforts should be to make your sports club more money – you are not doing this just to give the fans something to watch! Examples of goals include:

• Increasing fanbase – create videos which appeal to demographics outside of your core support. Examples would include highlights and showreels.
• Increasing attendance – drive gate income by making attendance more attractive.
• Increasing merchandise sales – boost sales in the club shop
• Increase sponsorship sales – make existing and new packages more attractive through increased media exposure.
• Increase youth support – the young of today are tomorrow’s star players, supporters and sponsors. Hook them early with specifically crafted content.
• Increasing search visibility – if you’re looking for your club site to become more visible to non-fans, then attracting more links to videos will help drive you up the rankings.

Why YouTube?

Chances are that you’re reading this post because you had already decided to use YouTube for your sports marketing campaigns. Why choose YouTube over other video sharing sites (Vimeo, Facebook, etc) and how does that decision align with your sports marketing goals?

1. 

   YouTube videos in Google rankings for 'Man Utd'

   YouTube belongs to Google. Why does this matter? Because Google likes YouTube, and the world loves Google. By choosing YouTube you automatically make your videos more likely to appear in search results in the world’s number one search engine, which means more views. If your goals require the ability to reach beyond your core support to a wider local or sports audience then this aspect is a no-brainer.

2. YouTube is the most popular video sharing site. This means that you’re more likely to get greater numbers of people finding your video through both the YouTube site and the ‘Related Videos’ links in embedded players than on other alternative video sharing sites. Viewing figures are one of the most obvious metrics by which you (or your sponsors) will judge the success of your videos, especially for reaching out to new supporters.
3. YouTube only allows a maximum video length of 10 minutes. Wait… that’s a negative, right? Not at all. Unless your aim is to create something saleable in its own right like a Spinal Tap-esque sport-u-mentary or provide full match footage, then keeping your audience engaged for more than 10 minutes will be nigh on impossible. Keep it short, sharp and snappy and you can’t go far wrong. As a rule of thumb, take what you think your intended demographic’s attention span is, then divide that by 5. Don’t get carried away and think that your interviewing technique makes you the next Michael Parkinson or Jay Leno.
4. 

   The YouTube Hotspots data helps you to see just what your audience likes (in this case, a period of scoring) and what they don't (opponents scoring!)

   YouTube Insights. Everyone in the digital age of marketing likes data, and YouTube now provides it in the form of YouTube Insights. You can see the demographic information about your audience, how people have found your video, what keywords were used and what country your audience lives in. More popular videos also show your video’s Hot Spots – how popular different parts of your video are across time, telling you when people get bored or which bits they watch again and again!

5. YouTube is free. You don’t have to worry about bandwidth, servers, streaming or subscriptions: YouTube represents a zero-cost, high-impact solution. True, you can’t charge people to view your content, but unless you’re creating saleable content then why would this matter?
6. YouTube is a social media network. YouTube is not just about hosting videos, but about user interaction, commenting and forming networks of peers and fans. Show people your content and encourage them to react to it!
7. YouTube is embeddable. If you want the maximum number of people viewing your contehis could be counter-productive if your intermediate goal is to drive people to interact with the YouTube channel you set up, but that interactivity is not a core goal in itself – remember the aim is always to maximise income.

Planning Your YouTube Sports Strategy

So now you know where you’re going to host your club videos (YouTube!) and what you’re trying to achieve by doing so, it’s finally time to consider what kind of videos you’re going to create… and what resources you’re going to need to execute your ideas.

In the next week’s post in this series we’ll be considering the best types of sports videos which you should consider pursuing.