Winning Sports Digital Marketing Campaigns To Inspire You

With the Tour de France and Wimbledon under way this week, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to remind ourselves of some of the great digital marketing campaigns within sport.

#ThisGirlCan

The #ThisGirlCan campaign by Sport England was well publicised for its genius creative and impactful messaging. Sport England launched the campaign to inspire more women to participate in sport due to a research revealing 2 million more men took part in sport than women in the UK. The reason for this was that women feared judgement in many aspects including appearance and ability when taking part in sport.

This campaign was different in the fact that they used women that did not fit your stereotypical athletic profile to promote the campaign. The use of real women was set to encourage other women to take up the cause of getting fit. Sport England warmed up the audience with a similar sentiment in preparation for the launch of #ThisGirlCan and influencers and media outlets engaged before the campaign. Throughout the campaign women began responding to images and messages shared by Sport England on Social Media. The launch of a YouTube video featuring Missy Elliott with the message ‘get your freak on’ had over 8 million views and the hashtag #ThisGirlCan was shared millions of times. Results in January 2016 revealed that 2.8m women aged 14 – 40 who recognised the campaign said that thus they had done some, or more activity whilst 1.6m say they had started exercising. We think that is mission completed.

Virtual Reality with Sky Sports

Sky Sports’ first campaign with 360 degree video was used for their 25th anniversary, David Beckham filmed an interview in Virtual Reality with Kirsty Gallacher talking about his top three Premier League goals. Sky chose to use the feature for marketing purposes only which resulted in 3.1m views. A great use of modern technology to create a marketing buzz.

BetFair Back Yourself

This campaign was ingenious. Betfair offered a free £20 bet to allow runners at the London marathon 2016 to gamble on themselves to make their target time at the event. All winnings, for those who completed the run within their target time went to their chosen charity and lost stakes went to Cancer Research UK. This was a clever way to improve Betfair’s brand image, collect some data, do something good, and subtly get people to have a go at gambling.

Real Madrid on Snapchat

Real Madrid has a strong digital presence as one of the biggest soccer brands in the world. In 2015 they became the first soccer team in Europe to launch SnapChat and partner up with an Official Live Story. Well what a smart move that was as they gained 480,000 subscribers in just three months and the Clasico Live Story generated 185m impressions.

We hope looking back at these past marketing campaigns within the sports arena has inspired you to be more creative with your upcoming digital marketing projects.