As you venture into the sports media industry, you no doubt have a vision for the subject you want to cover and the content you want to produce. The content and the substance are both incredibly important, but how you market yourself and your product is just as, if not more so.
In an industry oversaturated by its sheer volume of content, you need to find ways to creatively promote yourself. Your visibility and messaging is what matters, and that’s why having a marketing mindset is the ultimate key.
For content creators hoping to increase their reach, here are four pieces of advice.m
4 Key Marketing Tips for Sports Content Creators
1) Define and Showcase Your Brand
The first fundamental insight you should understand is this: Your brand is you. It’s not just the content you produce, or the words you put on a page. It’s everything you say, do, create, and associate with under the brand umbrella.
You might say on a social media platform that retweets don’t equal endorsements, but anything produced under your brand umbrella is something your audience will inherently associate with you. Ensure that your brand is presented well by ensuring that you present yourself well, and that you always strive for personal growth first.
2) Build Awareness Through Consistency
Struggling to find a rhythm and sustain growth? First, be open to re-evaluating your brand and discerning whether a change in focus can help you better align with your target audience. Beyond that, understand that awareness precedes interest. And it takes time to build awareness when you’re launching a brand.
The best way to build awareness, ultimately, is to be consistent. Produce a steady stream of content, and be consistently present and responsive on social media. If you can be consistently available for your audience, your awareness will grow, and more interest will blossom from that. Understanding the long game makes the grind easier.
3) Leverage Every Interaction as Marketing
Another way to foster a marketing mindset is to understand that marketing itself is a constant effect. You’ve read about active and passive marketing before here, and those same concepts apply. When you hear the word “marketing”, you most often think about active marketing strategies like promotion and advertising, but in truth, every quality of your brand markets you in some way or another.
Your writing, for instance, might market how analytical, or how straight-to-the-point, or how polished you are. Your social media habits may market your personality to audience members eager to interact. Your video presence might market your agreeability and charisma. Every detail markets you somehow. You have the control to maximize that effect.
4) Prioritize Delivering Value to Your Audience
If you ever find yourself lost or unsure where to take your brand, always come back to this final insight: It’s all about value. Value is at the very foundation of the content creator’s exchange. The creator makes content for audience members who glean value from their work.
To re-center yourself and find your brand’s direction, always ask yourself: What value do your readers glean from your work? How does your work provide them value? What are other ways you can fully align with the reader’s value proposition? And how can you make the experience more valuable? Asking those questions with a learning impulse will only help you expand.
Playbook
- Define and showcase your brand
- Build awareness through consistency
- Leverage every interaction as marketing
- Prioritize delivering value to your audience
