Digital Marketing Strategy Proposal – Matchroom Boxing

This strategy proposal is for Matchroom Boxing, a UK based boxing promotion company who are currently in the process of expanding into the US market.  This proposal will look at certain digital marketing initiatives that can help with penetrating the US boxing market.

Strategy

Matchroom’s decision to move into the US at this time is due to the fact they have one of the most exciting talents in Boxing today, Anthony Joshua. Joshua holds three of the five heavyweight belts and the goal of himself and his promoters have been to unify the division. Joshua fights for one of the belts in March and providing he wins, it will set up a fight with unbeaten American champion Deontay Wilder. Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s promoter, in an interview with IFL TV said he wanted to build the profile of both Joshua and indeed Wilder in America to maximise returns from the fight. Therefore, the goal now is to build these profiles to a point where there is a very high public interest both in the UK, US & worldwide. Matchroom have made one major step in signing broadcasting deals with two major US boxing broadcasters HBO & Showtime. With the recent set up of Matchroom USA as well, a successful show with these two fighters and a strong undercard could leave Americans with a very positive impression of Matchroom and would be a great foundation to increase brand awareness in the US. Due to the PPV model of Matchroom, these big PPV nights in boxing can create a terrific fan base and platform for a promotion to build from.

As of 26/01/18 off Official IG pages

Influencer Marketing

One digital marketing initiative on the rise is influencer marketing. eMarketer in 2016 revealed brands spent somewhere upwards of $570 million alone on influencer marketing on Instagram. Matchroom can use this to their advantage to help them build Joshua’s brand in the US. Joshua and Hearn have built Joshua’s brand very well in the UK attracting big brands such as Beats by Dre, Jaguar, Under Armour and many more. The way influencer marketing works is brands choose a public figure of influence to represent their brand and influence the public to become a customer of that brand. However, Joshua and Matchroom could greatly benefit from reversing the role and encouraging those brands that are popular in America to increase their content on Joshua. The fact of the matter for Matchroom is the bigger Joshua’s brand in the US becomes the bigger Matchroom’s become. This is in part due to the public figure promoter Eddie Hearn has become and whenever Joshua is in the public discussing boxing, Hearn is with him. One brand in particular that comes to mind is Beats by Dre as the demographic is in line with a sports demographic and is a huge presence in America. This is very obvious from their IG page. All their content is athletes wearing Beats.

Taken from BeatbyDre Instagram Account

 As you can see, their page is full of athlete’s such as LeBron James, Tom Brady and the Williams sisters wearing their products, and Joshua has featured on there before also:

Taken from Beats IG Account

There would be great benefit for Beats as well. Joshua wears Beats to many public appearances and it would be great brand exposure for Beats to be associated with Joshua in the build-up to what is one of the most highly anticipated match-ups in boxing today and it is in the hugely appealing heavyweight division. This match up will attract a lot of media attention globally equalling high brand exposure for Beats. Personal appearances at Beats events, advertising campaigns and exclusive interviews  with Joshua would be great at increasing his awareness in the US and would lead to more brand exposure and advertising for Beats.

Matchroom Boxing App 

The second digital marketing initiative I would suggest is an app. Apps are becoming increasingly popular and for Matchroom it could be a huge asset. An app can provide a hub for boxing news, fighters and upcoming events. It is easy to update and people can access it with one click and get all the news they need providing they have internet. It also gives your organisation a presence and pushes branding out to a wider audience due to the global availability of app stores. Matchroom also have the perfect platform to promote an app as they have some big events with broadcast partners on the horizon and they will be able to advertise it on the boards behind fighters during the press conferences, in ring sponsorship and be able to discuss it in the media. Furthermore, no other boxing organisation has an app, and there isn’t a successful app for boxing news either therefore this would give them a competitive advantage and differentiate themselves from other promotions.

Apps cut out waiting times, they are quicker than a web page as a lot of the info is stored in the app already, it increases visibility as it is constantly on a customer’s phone, it increases consumer engagement, making it easier for customers to interact with the brand and find out information on the brand, such as fights, champions, and general news. Lastly it reduces marketing costs as you can post information on the app, and with alerts people can receive notifications to their phone whenever there is news. This would be the best way for Matchroom to improve communications with their audience.

BENEFIT

• Potential Reach

Social media offers a cost efficient and effective way of reaching a very large audience, a good reason why so many organisations have dedicated social media marketing teams now.

A report by Salesforce in 2015 revealed that 66% of marketers had appointed such a team in response to the size of the available audience’s constant growth. We are Social/Hootsuite’s carried out a study showing results as of January 2017, as shown below. The figures I would like to highlight are the active social media users and the active mobile social users. The active mobile social users had grown by 30% compared to the previous year, confirming easier and more frequent access to a huge database.

• Higher Conversion Rates

Increased visibility on social media means there are growing opportunities for conversion. One benefit of social media is it enables companies to personify their brand through constant interaction with their customers and followers. This increases both transparency and consumer trust in an organisation. A study by HubSpot revealed that social media has a 100% higher lead to close rate than outbound marketing. Another report by Social Media Examiner showed 66% of marketers saw lead generation benefits by using social media platforms 6 hours per week.

• Improved Brand Loyalty

Elite Daily & Crowd Twist produced figures showing that millennials (people born between the mid-1980s and the early-2000s) are the most brand loyal generation with 50.5% saying they are extremely or quite loyal to their favourite brands. Elite Daily also found that customers are 62% more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media. Brand Loyalty is vital for an organisation on two counts. Firstly, it is cheaper to retain customers than market to new ones. Secondly, these loyal customers are more likely to share content on a product or service and post their experiences with a brand so generating positive eWOM.

• Gain Marketplace Insights

Because social media is so immediate, it enables people to see the views of others within seconds of sharing. This provides a unique opportunity for brands to monitor their marketplace and keep across the latest consumer trends. Companies can use social media as a complementary research tool to better understand the marketplace. Sites such as Sprout Social allow marketers to measure engagement, performance and monitor ongoing campaigns enabling brands to maximise and update the effectiveness of their platforms constantly.

RISKS  

• Negative Feedback

While one of the benefits of social media marketing is that a successful campaign achieves instant impact in the market spreading positive eWOM like wildfire, this is a dangerous two-way street. Users are more inclined to share negative feedback and bad news has a habit of travelling faster than good. An example of this reaction came when food company epicurious made an ill-considered reference to the Boston Marathon tragedy to promote a product in honour of the victims:

Unsurprisingly, their crass tweet provoked a strong response from users that felt it disrespectful in the extreme and jumped on social media to voice their anger and publicly shame the company:

A mistake of this proportion gives a new product a branding and reputation that it is difficult to shake off or fully apologise for. Due to the nature of social media a tweet is public and permanent in the ‘webiverse’ and can never be fully erased.

• Potential for embarrassment

Embarrassment for a company is another risk if their social media account is poorly managed or maintained. Disgruntled customers or, in some cases, employees have a platform on which to share their grievances with millions of people that might not otherwise been aware of the failings of a product or service. The greater the reach that a company achieves in search of positive marketing, the greater the risk of negative publicity going viral. HMV found this out the hard way. The company made 60 workers redundant at a time when an unhappy employee was manning the twitter account:

These tweets portrayed the brand in an extremely negative light because they provided an insider’s view of HMV. What made this particularly damaging was that it was tweeted to followers of the company who, because of their active interest in the organisation, were more likely to share the tweets and therefore the ill feeling.

• Time Intensive

Due to the fast and constant pace of the internet, social media marketing can be extremely time-consuming and labour intensive. Companies with small social media teams may not be able to devote the resources necessary to maintaining a regular presence on platforms or to monitoring potential problems and dealing with them. A strong team will continually check and update all networks, responding to questions and feedback as well as recycling valuable positive reviews. If an organisation is unable to maintain a favourable round-the-clock profile it can often be more damaging than not having an online presence at all.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is still a relatively new idea and so constantly evolving as companies become better at understanding the different platforms and new trends emerge to engage in a more focussed way with their audience. Hootusite has produced a list of the top themes on social media for 2017.