We’ve all seen the bright, ever changing advertising loops which surround the pitch of a World Cup football match, and there is a good reason the world’s largest companies want to magnify their business on what is thought to be the biggest platform of them all.
However, your company doesn't have to be a mammoth, multinational corporation to benefit from the biggest event of the year.
Football is often described as ‘the world’s game’, a universal language that brings people from all parts of the globe in unison to focus on and celebrate the sport they love.
Marketing and advertising head honchos recognised this early on and through rather nefarious negotiations, some industry big hitters managed to monopolise TV rights for the World Cup, meaning they had total control over what the world was seeing.
Since greater industry regulation has reduced a lot of the early corruption surrounding World Cup marketing, official World Cup advertising, licensing and sponsorship now follows a more structured, transparent approach.
A reported 3.5 billion people watched the last World Cup held in Russia in 2018, this is a larger audience than the Olympics and the Super Bowl!
So it’s easy to see the reach of the tournament and why sponsors are clambering to have their companies placed in front of billions of pairs of eyes.
We understand that paying an astronomical amount of money to have your company logo visible at the side of the pitch during a 90 minute football match isn’t feasible for everyone, but the skill and art of marketing can be much more cost effective and far more elegant than that.
In the world of digital marketing, relevance and topicality are extremely important, to miss the band wagon of something with literally billions of viewers, conversations and searches, could be disastrous, especially if your competitors are wise to the game.
It’s not just the big boys of Coca-Cola, Adidas or McDonald’s that utilise the vehicle of the World's most popular sporting event. On a much more localised scale there is a wave of thousands of online industries in some way attempting to capitalise on this winter's World Cup.
Just by carrying out some analytics and including some well placed phrasing such as: “World Cup”, “Qatar 2022” or even simply “Football” within an SEO marketing strategy, you could see the benefit of a mass enhancement of organically generated site traffic.
The boosting of interactions or searches as related to a site could in turn massively increase engagement with that particular company's products, messages or campaigns.
Since the last World Cup over four years ago, the restrictive nature of the COVID-19 pandemic through yoyo lockdown periods combined with an ever increasing presence of technology use, has exploded new social media platforms such as TikTok.
The popularity and rapid ascent of TikTok, means through a carefully curated marketing strategy, a company can aim for widespread or viral communication with literally millions of people within a matter of hours.
This unprecedented conductivity of the new age of social media, in particular visual content, is extremely powerful with several ‘viral moments’ already capturing the attention of mass numbers around the world from Qatar 2022.
An in-stadium, 2 minute public spat between a Qatar supporter and an opposing Ecuador fan on the first evening of the tournament had within a few hours garnered millions of views across combined social media outlets.
Every day, new World Cup content in the form of a video or image has taken the internet by storm, highlighting the popularity and wider reach that anything connected to the World Cup has in modern social media and personal device culture.
As mentioned, football fans don't just passively watch World Cup matches, they actively participate in the posting of their own opinions, with 618,000 tweets per minute being shared during the 2014 World Cup Final in Brazil, as well as millions of google searches in the same time period.
So it’s important to join the conversation but vary the content you post in terms of platform or channel, there is no point having an extremely active company instagram account but a stagnant TikTok.
By being aware of the impact multi-channel engagement can have, you give yourself the best chance of communicating to the largest possible audience, increasing the chance of potential business interaction.
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