Audience engagement is crucial for establishing and nurturing fan loyalty. With the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games approaching, there are very few major sporting events that provide the size of platform and global reach for International Federations (IF) and national governing bodies to capture the imagination of fans worldwide and to build an engaged community.
In the three years since the Covid-impacted Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, governing bodies have been investing in the digital transformation of their direct-to-consumer (D2C) experiences and internal workflows. As a result, the event heralded a “new era” for the Olympiad in the digital age.
For example, 65 percent of Tokyo 2020 was consumed via digital platforms, while Olympic social media channels accounted for 6.1 billion engagements throughout the summer spectacle.
Having shined a light on the importance of digital ownership, and the value of social media on audience growth and retention, there is an appetite among our Olympic clients ahead of Paris 2024 to maximize fan engagement during the spectacle, as well as an understanding of the importance for aligning their digital and social media strategies to nurture fan loyalty post-event.
As part of this journey, N3XT Sports is hosting working sessions with its industry partners and sports organizations to maximize fan engagement across their multitude of digital platforms and social media channels, so as to optimize their fan-marketing funnels and increase the value of their fans on the back of the world’s most coveted multi-national sporting events.
This includes how to set key performance indicators (KPI) to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, including processes to increase brand awareness, the time spent by fans on their digital platforms, user-conversion rates and email engagement, as well as audience retention and fan monetization.
Here we outline some detailed best practices sports properties can adopt during Paris 2024 to heighten their audience engagement:
- Put a special emphasis on followers, engagement, reach, mentions, and link sharing.
- Put a special focus on the week before, during the Olympic Games, and the week after.
- Create educational content to bring new audiences into your digital channels.
- Due to video content limitation, creative and engaging static content will lead the way.
- Quizzes, raffles, fantasy games, and other interactive content will increase engagement.
- Create a hashtag for all the community to use during the Olympic Games.
- Use that same hashtag across all the social media channels, including the disciplines as keywords on every post.
- Align all of your marketing efforts – from CRM, to organic, SEO, and performance marketing.
- Leverage the power of performance marketing to run followers and engagement campaigns.
- Leverage X and Facebook to share website articles to Paris 2024 website and app.
“The Olympic Games are a global sporting event that captures the imagination of audiences worldwide,” says Beatriz Indurain, N3XT Sports VP of Growth. “For organizations involved in the Games, it presents a huge opportunity to connect with a vast and engaged audience. However, with such a large audience spread across multiple platforms, creating a social media plan that maximizes reach and engagement can be a challenge.
“While the Olympic Games are fast approaching, this is an important period for IFs and sports organizations to optimize their social media content strategy. This window allows you to tailor your content plan to maximize results and ensure you’re ready to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the Games.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
N3XT Sports thrives on its ability to serve the industry and to align our clients’ needs with the best-in-class services and technological capabilities. Digital transformation is laying foundations for sports organizations to meet their business goals – whether that be to create more tailored fan experiences and grow online audiences, or to automate operational processes that maximize audience value while also helping to reduce running costs.
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement data and digital transformation strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To find out more about how N3XT Sports can serve your organization, or to access our workshops and webinars, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.