How do you engage your target audience with a sports event media strategy?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start creating your media strategy, you need to define your objectives for your sports event. What do you want to achieve with your event? How do you want to position your event in the market? How do you want to measure your success? Your objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, your objective could be to increase ticket sales by 20% in the next three months, or to raise awareness of your event among a new demographic group.

2 Identify your audience segments

Once you have your objectives, you need to identify your audience segments. These are the groups of people who are most likely to be interested in your sports event, and who have different needs, preferences, and behaviors. You can use various criteria to segment your audience, such as age, gender, location, income, education, lifestyle, interests, and media habits. You should also create personas for each segment, which are fictional profiles that describe their characteristics, motivations, pain points, and goals. For example, one persona could be John, a 25-year-old college student who loves soccer and follows his favorite team on social media.

3 Choose your media mix

Next, you need to choose your media mix, which is the combination of media channels and platforms that you will use to reach your audience segments. You should consider the advantages and disadvantages of each media type, such as paid, earned, owned, and shared media. Paid media are the ones that you pay for, such as advertising, sponsorships, or endorsements. Earned media are the ones that you earn through word-of-mouth, publicity, or reviews. Owned media are the ones that you own and control, such as your website, blog, or newsletter. Shared media are the ones that you share with others, such as social media, podcasts, or webinars. You should also consider the media formats that best suit your message, such as text, images, videos, audio, or interactive.

4 Create your content plan

After you have your media mix, you need to create your content plan, which is the blueprint of what content you will create, distribute, and promote for your sports event. Your content plan should include the following elements: content themes, content types, content formats, content channels, content frequency, content tone, content goals, and content metrics. For example, one content theme could be the history of your sports event, one content type could be a blog post, one content format could be a video interview, one content channel could be your website, one content frequency could be weekly, one content tone could be informative, one content goal could be to educate your audience, and one content metric could be the number of views.

5 Monitor and evaluate your media strategy

Finally, you need to monitor and evaluate your media strategy, which is the process of tracking, measuring, and analyzing the performance and impact of your media activities. You should use the objectives and metrics that you defined earlier to assess how well you are achieving your goals and reaching your audience. You should also use various tools and methods to collect and interpret data, such as analytics, surveys, feedback, or interviews. You should also review and adjust your media strategy regularly, based on the insights and learnings that you gain from your evaluation.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?