The Market Share Compass
Media Opportunities
Jim Richards
CEO & Founder of The Market Share Group
The right content strategy and media plan gives you the opportunity to show your brand’s personality and demonstrate your value to consumers. Good sponsorship properties have plenty of ancillary media opportunities due to the passionate audience they serve. Tapping into existing media and a property that is used to creating content for their audience is valuable. Consider a strategy for the following media options.
Owned Media: Every sponsorship includes production days and makes personalities or other assets available for your brand to use in content. If you are sponsoring an event without a personality tied to it, leverage an actor or influencer or just collect footage from previous events to get fans engaged. This content is then available for you to distribute through your social media channels. When working with your sponsor property, make sure the content is brand-directed. You should control your messaging as much as possible. You want the content to drive attention to your product — not just to the team, athlete, etc.
Earned Media: Creating authentic, sharable moments for fans is a great area for focus. Your sponsorship property should be creative and help you produce scripted and unscripted pieces of sharable content. They can also make sure that the media members who cover their industry are aware of your product and why you are invested in them. Get comfortable with being somewhat out of control as fans, media, etc. begin to share and drive visibility for your brand with their own sense of humor and opinions.
Paid Media: There are always opportunities to buy advertising on TV, streaming services, radio, podcasts, digital, or print platforms associated with your sponsorship property. This may be in-game segments, commercials, features, etc. Depending on your budget and ability to be consistent throughout a season, paid media can be a nice addition to your sponsorship.
As with any media planning, consistency is the key. Make time to formulate a communication strategy that creates and distributes good content and leverages media opportunities.
