Sportradar gathered sports marketing leaders and industry experts together to exchange valuable marketing insights at the Sportradar Connect US ad:s Summit in Times Square – and we’ve collected the seven most valuable takeaways from this premier knowledge sharing event!

1. Drive engagement with individualized selling and contextual relevance

Successful performance relies on audience engagement. To drive engagement, advertisers need to capture consumers when they’re in the right mindset. This means that the content must be contextually relevant to the individual consumer and reach them when they are most inclined to act. In doing so, advertisers are better able to strengthen connection with consumers which is a key path for message delivery. For instance, advertisers can immerse themselves in fans’ excitement around a team’s lead during a specific game, by serving a relevant message to the team’s fans directly after they’ve taken the lead.

2. Don’t fear experimentation, but clearly define measurement expectations

Experimentation is crucial. Different channels and platforms behave differently, so marketers need to constantly experiment to uncover what messaging and creative approaches drive optimal success across different channels. Through experimentation, marketers can better evolve their messaging to create a cohesive omnichannel strategy that resonates with consumers.

Furthermore, to define the value of these experiments, marketers need to clearly define success and measurement expectations with partners. For optimal success, these expectations should be defined before campaign launch and specified for each channel.

3. Align social media campaigns with audience expectations

Social media campaigns prove to be most effective when brand’s exhibit in-depth understanding of their key audiences’ perception, why consumers engage with their brand, and embrace this understanding when crafting and launching social media campaigns. When brands demonstrate this knowledge through personality in social campaigns, they’re able to build trust among consumers and facilitate continued engagement. For instance, an airline can poke fun at their cheap flight prices, a sportswear brand highlighting the everyday athlete, or a fast-food chain resurfacing popular decades old campaigns for nostalgia.

4. Diversify social content

All social media platforms behave differently, so the more optimized and curated the creative per platform the better the message will resonate with consumers. Social creative requires a unique approach for each channel, emphasizing the need for tailored content and a diverse collection of ad types (i.e., awareness, dynamic and interactive ads). To enhance the effectiveness of social media advertising, advertisers should involve creative, strategy and communications teams as early as possible to develop these diverse campaigns while preserving the brand’s personality.

5. Embrace AI for scale and efficiency

Efficiently creating a diverse collection of ad types and creative variations has proven to be a challenge for marketers as advertising channels and advertising consumption has evolved. AI enables the creation of numerous ad variations and creative at scale. Facilitating delivery to larger audiences, while eliminating the manual effort and time of designing specific creative ads based on different outcomes or events.

AI has the capability to automate and streamline creative production, allowing seamless delivery of the most relevant messaging to consumers. For example, by incorporating live data, advertisers on social media can serve very specific creative to fans of a player set to break a certain record, the second that record is broken. The creative is produced for this event and tailored for each channel – automatically.

6. Sports betting has quickly evolved fan engagement

Sports betting has led to deeper fan engagement, giving fans another opportunity to connect with the action, their favorite sports, teams, players and most importantly another path to connect with other fans. Betting contributes to increased viewership and offers a richer second-screen experience for sports leagues and teams, fostering more live in-game conversations and data generation.

This evolving avenue of engagement gives advertisers the ability to join the conversation and meet sports fans when and where they’re most engaged. When advertisers join these conversations authentically and offer relevant messaging that encourages action, they’re able to build more genuine trust among sports fans.

7. Sportsbooks have expanded from acquisition to fan engagement and retention

The objectives of sportsbooks are expanding from customer acquisition to retention and fan engagement. Thus, sportsbook sponsorships are now not only tools for acquisition but also as means to enhance retention of sports fans. By tapping into this new and evolving avenue of fan engagement, partners and sponsors of sportsbooks can unlock new opportunities to build unique lasting relationships with this cohort of fans.

Watch the full Sportradar Connect US ad:s Summit HERE