Sports marketing: using marketing games to win

To work in sports and sports team promotions has to be one of the most rewarding marketing niches. In what other industry do you have such a passionate audience to engage with through your campaigns? Football fans will head out to their local side’s home ground week-in, week-out,, or head to their local to watch the game live, and whether it’s a win, loss, or draw, tantrums and tears or a street party after winning the local derby, they’re invested, they’re paying attention, and they care.

The same applies to rugby, American football, ice hockey, basketball, and pretty much any other team sport you care to name. They wear the jerseys, the hats, the merch, they win and lose together, with their athletes, with each other. Sports fans are dedicated communities. Sometimes they’re local, and sometimes, in the cases of the big NFL teams with global reach, or Premiership sides stacked with superstars, these dedicated communities span overseas, all over the world.

So how do you engage such a vociferous and no doubt varied crowd with your marketing content? How do you cross cultures with your campaigns, and penetrate and unite different social groups with your branded messaging? The answer could lie in a gamification and marketing game campaign, and theming your approach with the very sport your audience already loves.

Invite your fans to play

It’s a perfect match. Gamification applies game mechanics from popular video games and applies them to non-gaming contexts, such as marketing, in order to motivate audiences to desired behaviours or outcomes. By creating your own marketing games to promote your team, club, or even athlete, you can invite your audience, your fans, to play.

Do you have a ticket giveaway? A prized experience to reward someone with? Are you looking for collaboration opportunities to promote your sponsors? Invite sports fans to step on to the virtual pitch, or court, or rink, and take their best shot. If they already love the game and love the team, it’s not hard to motivate them to engage with your customised marketing game mimicking the format digitally, and interacting with your brand.

When you also consider that nearly every sports fan will have their own smartphone, it means anyone within your target audience will be able to play. All games created on the Drimify platform are playable on any modern device – for mobile gaming, on tablets, and on home computers, or even touch screen terminals you could set up at your home ground.

Print and online ads and video content still have their place, but introducing interactive marketing games gives you a new marketing tool that is far more effective when it comes to engagement. If you’re looking to grow your mailing list, bring more followers to your social media channels, or collect usable data for market research, asking for information and consent on a collection screen as part of a gamified experience incentivises fans to opt-in and subscribe if they don’t already.

Put your sport’s mechanics at the heart of your marketing to help reach your goals

Through our games creation agency, we offer the Drimify platform as an accessible and easy-to-use tool for any sports marketing team to create interactive, playable experiences to promote their brands, whether those are giant franchises with international appeal, or local sides with diehard followings. We have a range of easily customisable game engines that can be kitted out in your colours, with your logos, and with your graphics, copy, and prizes, for professional and effective experiences for your audience.

We offer game engines that adopt the mechanics of football, American football, rugby, ice hockey, basketball, and handball.

Like experiential marketing and influencer marketing, gamification is a modern promotional solution that can cut through the noise, demand an audience’s attention, and invite them to play. Promote your sports team by promoting your fans from spectators to superstars. Collect data, grow your mailing list and social media channels, and deliver new and exciting experiences your communities will remember.

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