Infographic: The State of Digital Marketing in Sport

The modern media consumer
It all starts with todays' modern media consumer. They've changed, in a big way. They are more mobile and more social than ever. The new technology at their disposal has changed their habits and their purchase decisions. Decision making is quicker, and they trust recommendations from friends or trusted blogs ahead of traditional print advertising. Their mood has changed too, with new social pressures largely based on "FOMO" - a fear of missing out.

To put the mobile world into context, there are 1.5bn smartphone users in the world today. This represents only 21% of all mobile users, meaning there is significant global growth (3-4x) ahead in smartphone adoption. This is weighted down by countries such as India, which has been slower to adopt than say Australia, which has around 50% smartphone penetration.

What do they care about most?
Pepsi is a great marketer to the 'new generation'. What's their latest brand slogan? "Live for now". Entirely reflective of today's modern consumer, who prefers to experience life now, to the full, and with little hesitation. They want their communications the same way, instantly, and delivered to their 'person'.

Pepsi believes consumer interest and activity is fuelled by their passions. Their research has found that today's modern consumers can be identified largely by one of two things, their favourite sports team, and their favourite music genre. So, in a lot of advertising and activation campaigns, we are seeing a merge between the 'professional athlete' and 'popular music'. The Pepsi NFL Anthems campaign is a great case in point.

How do they use mobile?
For anything and everything! In China, browsing via mobile has just overtaken browsing via computer. That's significant, and a trend being followed by the rest of the world. There's only one way forward from here, more mobility. Mobiles are not just used for browsing. 45% of all Groupon sales (Nth America) are currently via mobile. At ECAL, up to 45% of all users manage their personal schedule via their smartphone calendar, and the most popular calendar on the ECAL platform? iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch), ahead of Outlook, Google, iCal, and Android.

Users reach for their phone 150x a day, the most popular reasons being for messaging (23), voice calls (22), check time (18), music (13), gaming (12) and social media (9). What is clear is that there is much efficiency gains to be made in the use of the smartphone, particularly in delivering smarter and more intuitive messaging, based on user history, time, location, calendar entries, tasks, preferences, friends and so on.

Major issues
So there are a number of consistent issues experienced by today's marketers. Due to the change in media landscape, marketers are faced with an ever-increasingly fragmented communications world. It is harder to reach modern consumers than ever before. The channels of communication continue to expand, and we now market via email, calendar, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram at a minimum. So there is generally an increasing time, cost and resource burden on marketers.

A lot of organisations don't have the systems in place to effectively manage their communications, or gain a global view of their customers. Organisations have a legacy of different business systems, gathered over time, with little to no integration between systems. So, a sports club may have a management system for their membership, a different system for ticketing, merchandise, email, social media and so on.

This leads to the biggest issue amongst marketers (and sponsors) today, "how do we capture the time and attention of customers?"

Trends, opportunities and future solutions
Funding / business solutions
Lets's have a look at some of the great opportunities and solutions today. Major League Soccer is a great case study in digital marketing. Amongst the major US sports, MLS have (by far) the lowest average age of 'avid' fans at 33.7 years. Next is NBA (37.4), NHL (39.7), NFL (41.4), NCAA (42), MLB (44.2) and NASCAR (46).

MLS have a highly mobile fan base, and 'go digital' in their marketing. A great case in point is that MLS have now stopped printing 1 million season schedule cards in favour of using ECAL, to distribute their schedule and events information digitally. Based on a printing cost of $0.35 p/unit, this results in a saving of around $350,000 annually to the MLS marketing budget (less ECAL licensing), which is then redirected into more effective digital marketing initiatives.

Global spend in marketing and communications is worth $1.5 trillion annually. From this, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will spend around 8.7% of the total marketing budget on marketing IT ($130.5bn). By 2017, it is estimated that the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO (Chief Information Officer). As such, organisational roles are changing, and we see the rise of the 'Digital CMO' (or Digital Marketing Manager) and the huge role for CRM and analytics, with dedicated and skilled persons in 'CRM & Analytics Manager' positions. In fact at MLS, there is now a 'Director of CRM & Analytics' such is the importance in CRM.

As marketers look for better management system solutions, spend on automated marketing and CRM systems  is growing 20% year on year, to estimated $4.2 billion by 2016.

Technical solutions
So what are the major technical solutions? There is a big rise in 'event-driven marketing', that is, any time, task and calendar based marketing, such as ECAL. Anything that is able to capture a person's time and attention, literally, in such a cluttered and noisy communications and media environment is a great thing. You will notice much development in this area. Apple's Siri for instance, Facebook calendar is evolving rapidly, and there is now Google+ Events (calendar), LinkedIn Calendar, Twitter Invites etc.

The number and breadth of end-to-end marketing solutions is rising. These platforms will generally help you manage your lead management and marketing, social marketing, sales management and analytics. Products such as  Hubspot, Responsys, Eloqua, Marketo and ExactTarget are worth looking into. Together their revenue exceeded $660m last financial year.

There is greater integration between products and applications. You will see 'plug-ins' developed for popular environments such as Wordpress, Salesforce, Evernote etc.

'Social curation' is a big trend currently. In its basic form, this will create a 'social hub' of all your social media accounts in one place on your website, presented in a meaningful and interactive way for users. This provides good customer profiling too, as these will often require login via Facebook, Twitter or Google etc. In its more expanded environment, social curation tools can also provide you with a live event screen. Check out Stackla, which is also integrated with ECAL.

'Dynamic CRM' is probably the most important concept currently for digital sports marketers. Effective CRM starts with a strategy and a vision for how you wish to manage and market to your customers. Then choose your technology. Not the other way around. Dynamic CRM is the ability to gain a valid, continually updated, centralised view of each customer. For example, for our major clients, we deliver tagged customer data files daily to a single destination, such as a SFTP (secure FTP), so they can import this data into their master CRM system. Check out SAS CRM system as a world-leading example.

Marketers are certainly thirsty to better use 'big data' and analytics to better target customers, but are mindful not to dampen the creativity that often provides consumer cut-through.

Creative solutions
Some of the popular creative solutions centre around three things: community - which often allows a bigger and more meaningful 'movement', driven for and by the people (eg: 'RISEUP' campaign by the Atlanta Falcons); sport and entertainment - the use of athletes and music to drive consumer passion; and rewards - on-site loyalty programs to drive social competition, viral spread, engagement via offers and incentives. The NFL.com Rewards program use virtual coins that are earned for various engaging behaviour, such as 'read an article' (1 coin), 'watch a video' (5 coins) etc.

New opportunities rising
It is quite conceivable in the future that media rights deals will have to be negotiated with the most popular athletes of our time. Their media reach is enormous and hugely influential to today's modern consumers.

Content for many is 'king'. Many leading sports teams are taking control of as much broadcast time as they can to produce their own TV content (outside of the assigned in-game broadcasting times). This allows them to create a deep relationship with their customers, and better control of the communication message. Chicago Bears (NFL) for instance have eight (8) regular TV programs of their own, 'Coaches Show', 'All Access', 'Preseason', 'Gameday Live', 'Gamenight Live', 'Recap', 'Bears Blitz' and 'Bears Huddle'. Each show is sponsored.

The expansion of content is also being driven by different device types, particularly different sizes. Basically, the smaller the device, the shorter the video content you will watch. So, ESPN for instance, produce different versions of the same content. Short 'play' highlights are distributed to small devices (phones), 'magazine' highlights for mid-size devices, and full 'game' replays for larger devices.

On-site and in apps, it's all about personalisation - myESPN, My Sky etc. The future is about personalised services where you can track your favourite teams and be served with content (and advertising) that suits your interests. See where the dynamic CRM comes into play? The big question will be whether such personalisation will be charged under subscription, or via higher advertising premiums. The SportingNews app is a great example of personalisation, and their philosophy in development is true of many of today's leading publishers - who now develop for mobile first.

Another significant development is 'super connected' stadiums, that deliver Wi-Fi to much larger game-day audiences than is presently available. Wi-Fi is a big issue for major stadiums globally. The new 49ers stadium (scheduled to open in 2014) aims to be the smartest ever built. With a focus on the growing trend of 'BYOD' (bring your own device), the smart stadium will be able to deliver amazing services to the fans' via their mobile using apps - for 'second screen' live game viewing (where you can switch between multiple camera angles), to radio feeds, pre-ordering of food and drink, maps to amenities such as toilets, traffic updates etc. Miami Dolphins (in partnership with Cisco) are also significantly enhancing their Wi-Fi capabilities and producing an in-stadium mobile app.

How do we evaluate modern digital marketing?
So, in line with the rapid changes in consumers, technology and marketing, evaluation measurements are changing too. It's not just about 'ROI' (return on investment) anymore. If success is all about capturing the time and attention of customers, the more reasonable success equation is 'ROI' plus 'ROO' (return on objectives) and 'ROT' (return on time).