Endorsing sports products has been actively practiced long before the term “influencer marketing” became a buzzword. Celebrity athletes have been endorsing products for decades, and sports goods apparel is one of the major markets in the fitness & fashion industry.
Moreover, it’s already common sense for big-name brands to sign multi-million dollar contracts with superstar athletes for the promotion of their products.
Still, some questions need answers:
- Why influencer marketing in sports is trendy?
- Does it make sense to pay multi-million checks to celebrity athletes?
- How small businesses should collaborate with athletes?
- How to find the right sports influencer for your business?
- How to collaborate with multiple influencers simultaneously?
In this post, we are sharing our thoughts on influencer marketing in sports, and answering the highlighted questions.
The Sports industry market overview
The global sports clothing market is estimated to reach $221.3 billion by 2026. The most recognizable brands are Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Puma. Only Nike generated $35 billion in revenue in 2021.
Why influencer marketing in sports is trendy?
Statistics show, that sports is a global trend for the last 5 years. Especially fitness and a healthy lifestyle are highly popular among the millennials and generation Z.
While Covid has destroyed almost every sector of the sports industry, people locked in their apartments were struggling to find a way to stay physically active. These circumstances instantly boosted health & fitness-related content on social media. Fitness bloggers and professional athletes started to share tips on how to exercise at home and stay fit under Covid conditions.
Many brands who were quick to realize where the customer attention is moving, started to collaborate with sports influencers to sell their products online. As a result, online sales spiked, while sports influencers became a powerful marketing channel for generating sales.
Currently, sports & fitness are one of the most popular categories on social media and sports influencers are one of the highest-paid content creators.
Does it make sense to pay multi-million checks to superstar athletes?
Athletes have always been an inspiration for people. Usually, they become superheroes of their generation. Take for example Pele, Maradona, or Garrincha they were playing soccer decades ago but people still share the stories of their greatness.
Athletes also have a huge impact on their fans’ decision-making, which is successfully used by marketers for driving sales. Though celebrity athletes are asking for multi-million contracts, brands like Nike, Adidas, or Puma are ready to pay the checks, to reach their potential buyers anyway.
Neymar signed a contract with Puma for $30 million annually. Messi signed a lifetime contract with Adidas for $25 million annually. Cristiano signed a lifetime contract with Nike for $20 million annually.
Are these contracts bringing expected ROI (return on investment), or are the brands just trapped in the savvier competition?
The answer is YES…. and No.
Brands are ready to spend such crazy budgets, as they know that by investing in celebrity athletes they are automatically becoming the favorite brand of their fans.
Yes Case: Neymar & Puma saga
Puma has an undeniable heritage in football apparel manufacturing. In 2018 Puma was working on their new KING football boots, which were previously endorsed by legends such as Pele, Maradona, and Johan Cruyff. Puma was desperate to find a player who is worthy of continuing the story of the legendary boots. The ideal candidate became Neymar JR who was representing Nike for 15 years at that time. After tough negotiations, Neymar and Puma agreed on a record-breaking deal with a $30 million annual paycheck for Neymar.
In three days after the announcement of the partnership, Puma saw an unprecedented explosion in its social media channels with 58,3 million impressions and 2,95 million engagements. After 6 months of the collaboration, they saw 500K followers increase with a 13.5% average growth rate.
Puma closed 2019 with a 9.1% sales increase despite the Covid pandemic, recording its best sales revenue of $6 billion.
It’s clear that this deal was a smart decision from Puma and helped the company to make a strong statement to their main rivals (Nike, Adidas) that they are ready to compete on the highest level.
No Case: Ronaldo and Facial Fitness Pao
In 2012 Cristiano Ronaldo teamed up with a Japanese bizarre fitness brand to promote a smile trainer tool, which became a meme right after the launch.
The video immediately became a meme. All the major news websites were discussing why Ronaldo agreed on doing this commercial. The project was shortly terminated. Clearly, this is a collaboration that Ronaldo would be happy to forget.
Conclusion:
Big-name athletes can bring a huge positive impact on your brand awareness or sales, but if you make it wrong, it’s just going to be a waste of money.
Alright, we have discussed how celebrities collaborate with top brands and how this can be both effective and destructive, now let’s talk about businesses that can’t afford to collaborate with celebrities.
How small businesses should collaborate with athletes?
Despite the fact that small and medium businesses can approach any celebrity on Instagram by just DM-ing them, it is unlikely they will get any response.
Instead, we suggest businesses focus on non-celebrity athletes, who are easier to start a conversation with.
Collaborating with Non-celebrity athletes has several advantages:
- They are easygoing
- They have a higher engagement rate
- They are more affordable
You may probably hear of the general influencer types:
- Celebrities
- Mega influencers
- Mid-tier influencers
- Micro-Influencers
- Nao Influencers
We have decided to make a similar gradation for the sports industry.
- Celebrity athletes
- Superstars like Neymar, Michal Jordan, or Roger Federer who have millions of followers and multi-million contracts with top brands
- Mid-tier athletes
- Popular sportsmen like Rakitich, Carvajal, and Bonucci, who has a strong follower base but are not active on social media.
- Micro athletes
- Athletes who are popular only in their sports niche or team’s fan base like Colby Bishop, Jonson Clarke-Harris, or John Marquis usually have a smaller follower count but the strongest engagement rate among all categories.
Each of these groups has its pros and cons, which we will discuss in a separate article.
Now, let’s discuss how to choose the right influencer for your marketing campaign.
How to find the right sports influencer for your business?
When you are looking for the right person to collaborate with, you should follow the influencer marketing golden rule: The Influencer should be relevant to your brand or product.
You can find the right influencer:
- Manually, by searching on social media and connecting with them directly
- You can hire an agency that will handle the process from A-Z
- You can use various influencer marketing tools to automate the process.
All these options are working well if you are collaborating with 5-10 influencers and have enough money and time.
What if you are willing to collaborate with 20 – 50 influencers simultaneously?
It’s a nightmare to manage them all! Agencies will ask a lot of money while existing software doesn’t provide such a solution.
How to collaborate with multiple influencers simultaneously?
We suggest you try our all-in-one solution for influencer marketing. With our tools, you can automatically get connected with relevant influencers, collaborate with 100+ athletes simultaneously, and forget about micro-management.
- Register your business account on Famoso, it is free.
- Create a new project and define your objectives such as Brand awareness, Website traffic, Message, and Conversion
- Target who you want to reach: Location, Gender, Age, Sports category
- Tell us a number of influencers you would like to involve in your campaign
- Define your budget and dates
- Choose one of the post samples from our system or upload your own
After reviewing your project, our system will automatically invite the best matching influencers to your project.
You can manually review each candidate’s profile or proceed with trusting our platform’s choice.
Our team will take care of the rest including:
- Influencer management
- Deadlines
- Content quality
- Payments
You can monitor the workflow and watch the reports from your dashboard whenever you want.
If you are looking for a free consultation for your influencer marketing campaign with experts, don’t hesitate to create your free account and request a consultation with one of our professionals.
