What do sports and influencer marketing have in common?
Why do fitness and sports brands often invest in this type of social strategy?
Let’s try to think of Adidas, Asics, Kappa, Nike and the faces that often appear in the commercials of new products: even during the lockdown these brands have never stopped organizing campaigns involving prominent personalities and playing on the strong emotional impact.
In this post we want to explain this particular relationship and try to give you some advice to structure your Influencer Marketing strategy, explaining why it could be the ideal solution for your business in the sports field.
Sports and Influencer Marketing, a winning combination
Apparently fitness and sport could seem a sectors like any other in which to decline different Social Media Marketing strategies.
However, not all strategies would perform as well as the one involving a charismatic and influential figure on social networks.
We are talking about influencers, individuals who have wide popularity on social networks, who are able to attract and engage a wide audience of users and to direct their purchasing trends more or less directly.
The variables that affect this mechanism of influence in addition to trust (which we will discuss later) tend to be: aspiration, desire, motivation.
If we think about it, these same elements are often the basis of what drives people to train, to resume physical activity, to take care of their body.
This basic emotional alignment is one of the reasons why Influencer Marketing is so suited to delivering messages in sports.
If you too want to leverage motivation to raise purchases you might think about turning to an Influencer in line with your corporate image.
But how to choose him / her?
How to choose the right ambassador for your brand
The key moment of this digital marketing strategy consists in choosing the most suitable person to represent your product or company.
Reflect on each of these points to guide your final decision.
1. Analyze the values conveyed by the influencer
There are many factors that can determine the success of a Social Media Strategy and one of these is certainly the relationship of coherence between product or service and the values transmitted by the brand that produces or promotes it.
By now the Influencer is no longer just an opinion leader able to guide the purchasing trends of his loyal public. We can consider him as a real brand from all those values that characterize his communication distinguishing him from other public figures.
The value and influential potential of your online business is based on this degree of recognition.
It is a power strictly linked to the personality of the influencer who at this point is able to build a sense of community around him and a trust that will work as a guarantee certificate for his audience.
In this sense it is very important that there is an adherence of values between those of your brand and the potential influencer to be hired.
The more coherence and linearity there is in terms of value asset, target, communication style, the more your strategy will have success!
2. Numbers aren’t everything
Is there a minimum threshold of followers that distinguishes a common user on social media from an influencer?
Well, no.
Or at least it cannot consist of the only evaluation index.
The number of followers is important to evaluate the authority of a profile but it can also turn out to be what is defined as a “vanity metric”. A data that, rather than offering an indication of performance, serves to satisfy the ego of those who holds that number.
Often vanity metrics such as likes, followers, even comments do not always return a reliable index of engagement or growth of a profile.
For this reason, when evaluating the potential influencer we should go beyond the simple numerical data and consider it together with other factors. It may be useful, for example, to evaluate the geographical origin of the followers as well as the degree of interactions through the insights of sharing, saving, comments to the contents.
Finally, it is good to remember that there is not only a single type of influencer (the one with hundreds of thousands of followers) but different types depending on the size of the audience.
We will therefore have:
- Mega influencer: + 1 million followers
- Macro influencer: between 100,000 and 1 million followers
- Micro influencer: between 10 and 100,000 followers
- Nano influencer: – 10,000 followers
3. The “3 R” rule
In influencer marketing there is “the 3 R rule” to evaluate the suitability of a potential ambassador for your brand or product:
- Relevance: refers to the degree of representativeness of the influencer with respect to your brand, company values, the product to be launched and the target audience
- Reach: refers to the catchment area possibly reachable through the implementation of an Influencer Marketing strategy. NB: remember that numbers are not everything!
- Resonance: refers to the influencer’s potential for conversion and audience engagement regardless of the size of their fanbase
Conclusion
If you want to approach the world of Influencer Marketing you must be prepared to face a series of steps to be able to identify the person who ensures you the best result at a great price.
Before even starting to search and compare the various identified influencers, you will need to be clear about who, what and how you want to communicate; your investment budget; data to evaluate the success or failure of the operation.
Finally, when you have decided, just contact your ambassador directly to explain the details of the project and maybe participate in the conception and creation of content and make sure you launch the product in the best way!
Are you curious to know more? Read our Arena success story here!
If you are interested in contacting us to present your project, write to us, we will be happy to find out more!
