Last week we looked at athletic prowess in public relations and marketing, using our own recent success and a few famous examples to explain how seizing the moment is key to promoting a company involved in the event-specific industry that is sport. But, as it’s such a vast marketplace, we thought it best to follow that up, only this time with a focus on audience.
Our recent work for the Red Bull Harbour Reach competition, which concluded in a wakeboarding contest at Liverpool’s Albert Dock, is probably a good starting point. Of course the recent weather certainly helped make that event a success attended by 8,000, but the 58 pieces of press coverage we achieved, creating 13,000,000 opportunities to see the brand in the media, along with those 34,299 YouTube views for the ‘best crashes’ video, were also a result of understanding the target audience, and the titles that would be interested in the campaign, not to mention appreciating the kind of high-octane web content fans would engage with.
Earlier this year our staff were employed by another high profile household name to help with a different but similarly sporting project. Manchester United Soccer Schools wanted to launch their very first worldwide Facebook competition, which despite the prominent team is still no mean feat. For one thing, there are countless campaigns taking place on the world’s biggest social network at any one time. As such, our first task was to work alongside the client and our friends at Creative Spark to come up with a prominent proposition for the public to get involved with.
As regular readers of our blog will know, we advocate video at any opportunity providing it’s put to good use and produced to a high standard. Aware of the potency visually engaging content has for all online users when an idea works, the collaborative brainstorm led to one strong concept- ask young people with an interest in football to submit a 1-minute video explanation of what they think it would take to captain one of the most prestigious clubs on the planet for a chance of winning some money can’t buy experiences with the brand.
An inspiring question for aspirational young athletes, it worked to motivate both those wanting to enter the competition and online viewers overall. In total we generated over 6million opportunities to see the brand, had almost 20,000 voters involved in judging which response should win, and secured column space at a time when there were plenty of other things to write about involving Old Trafford’s finest (mid-Premier League season). Again, those results came from listening to the audience, and learning about what excites them in order to deliver content that was almost guaranteed to engage them. Combine this with the appreciation for seasonality and timeliness featured on these pages last Thursday, and the potential for success within sporting PR and marketing campaigns is likely to increase exponentially.