In sports media, your content and brand form the core of your value proposition. However, effectively conveying that value to your audience requires an effective marketing strategy.
Marketing, at its core, is about communicating what you offer — not just to your audience, but also to potential collaborators and brands that can open new opportunities.
So, how can marketing help you grow your personal sports media brand? While growth takes time, applying the right strategies can set you apart and drive meaningful progress.
6 Ways to Use Marketing to Expand Your Brand
1. Fully Develop Your Value Proposition
All marketing stems from your brand, so before you carry on with the marketing process, you first have to fully develop the value proposition underneath your brand umbrella. How do you provide value? How does your content provide value? These are the first fundamental questions you need to ask.
When you’re searching for answers to these questions, leave no stone unturned. For the substance of your content itself, your value proposition may be somewhat simple. But there are other features of your brand – accessibility, interactivity, etc. – that also serve to infuse value.
You need a full, complete, and composite understanding of your value proposition before you can market your value offerings to the best of your ability. It’s a pre-emptive step, but it’s no less important.
2. Fully Realize Value Proposition in Your Work
Once you have a full, composite value proposition to work off of, you can begin the process of fully realizing that value proposition in your work. This is where passive marketing first comes into play.
The pure value proposition of your brand offering – in and of itself – serves to passively market your product. And this is where the details matter. If you’re in the written content game, how is your grammar? Your structure? Your flow? If you’re in the video mix, how is your production value? Your audio? Your graphics and support?
When you fully realize your value proposition in your work, you bring your brand image to life in its best possible version. Anything less, and your organic marketing will fall short.
3. Understand How Your Brand Offering Fits Demand
Once you’ve gotten the aspects of brand marketing under wraps, structural marketing takes the focus next. You should already have a good idea of who your target market is after composing your brand identity, but in this step, you actively pinpoint how your brand offering fits the current demand landscape.
What is in demand? Who demands it? Where are they seeking out this content? On which mediums? Traditional supply and demand doesn’t always apply to the sports media industry, where content is always in a state of over-saturation. But by microscopically targeting your demand quadrants – who, what, and where – you can ensure that your passive marketing reaches the intended group.
4. Advertise, Promote, and Strengthen Brand Footprint
Now we’re roaming into the territory of active marketing – the first component of which is promotion and advertising. You can use promotion and advertising to strengthen your brand footprint, increase your reach, and build on your target audience through social media and other platforms.
Promotion can take many different forms. You can make content-specific posts and graphics, or you can use audio and video mediums to promote current or upcoming works. The marketing concept here is actively communicating your value offering to your target audience.
5. Interact and Engage With Your Audience
The second component of active marketing is interacting and engaging with your audience. Particularly in the modern sports media industry, where the aspect of community, connection, and human-to-human interaction is becoming more important, this subset of brand marketing holds great weight.
By interacting and engaging with your audience, you not only involve them in the conversation and expand your value offering, but you also open a two-way feedback loop – through which readers and viewers can provide constructive feedback, so you can continue to refine your value proposition based on their needs.
6. Earn Opportunities Through Actualization
Once you open all the pathways to actively and passively market in the sports media industry, you’ll be able to construct a strong resume – not just as a content creator, but as a presence in the space itself. And working at your full potential can draw attention from prospective employers, if you seek to climb the ladder.
While a strong personal brand is powerful, it’s also true that you can catalyze your own growth by working with established company brands. By producing and marketing at a high level, you can get the attention of those brands, and earn opportunities through self-actualization that wouldn’t be possible without proper marketing.
Playbook
- Fully develop your value proposition
- Realize that value proposition in your work
- Fit your brand offering into market demand
- Strengthen brand footprint through promotion
- Interact and engage with your audience
- Earn opportunities through actualization
