Green Bay Packers Sports Marketing Plan and Strategy

Traditional Media Strategies

The use of traditional media in sports marketing remains popular. Sports marketers spend a great deal of resources on television, print, and radio advertising, with sports comprising a substantial portion of ad spending for television and radio channels. A significant percentage of sports fans actually watch sports events for the commercials, often enjoying them as much as — or more than — the game itself. Traditional media enables sports marketers to reach geographically dispersed consumers at a fairly low cost per exposure (Swayne, 2011). Take an event like the FIFA World Cup, for instance. The event draws followers from virtually every corner of the world. Without television, radio, and print media, it would be quite difficult to communicate with such a geographically dispersed fan base. For this plan, it would be important to incorporate traditional media. In fact, traditional media should be allocated a significant fraction of the marketing budget if the desired marketing outcomes are to be effectively achieved. Therefore, for the Green Bay Packers, it is essential to choose media channels that are most popular with the target audience.

Non-Traditional Marketing Strategies

Non-traditional techniques can also be highly valuable in marketing for the Green Bay Packers, and can significantly boost the impact of traditional media. Guerrilla marketing is one technique that can be particularly useful in this regard. This approach enables Green Bay Packers marketers to use creative, unconventional methods to capture the attention of the target market in a memorable way and at a more personal level (Swayne, 2011). Guerrilla marketing takes advantage of public spaces such as streets and shopping centers, grassroots campaigns, road shows, posters, billboards, viral marketing, and other unconventional methods. Viral marketing has become especially common in sports marketing, with video streaming platforms such as YouTube providing a valuable channel for presenting marketing messages in creative ways. Viral sports videos have grown increasingly common in recent years. A major advantage of guerrilla marketing techniques is that they involve low costs while simultaneously generating high impact (Bruton, 2016). It would, therefore, be important to make strategic use of non-traditional approaches for the Green Bay Packers.

Digital Marketing Strategies

While the importance of traditional media in sports marketing cannot be overstated, the value of contemporary digital media cannot be ignored. Social media has become a vital marketing tool for sports organizations. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other popular social networking platforms enable two-way communication, one-on-one marketing, active fan engagement, user-generated content, unstructured communication, and informal language — all of which make them ideal for sports marketing (Bruton, 2016). Social media has fundamentally changed the way marketers and consumers interact. Given the extensive loyalty sports fans exhibit toward their favorite teams and players, fans increasingly desire to be engaged in a more intimate, unstructured, and real-time manner. Social media enables this kind of engagement at a significantly low cost, allowing fans to interact with brands at a more personal level. For the desired outcomes to be achieved for the Green Bay Packers, it is important to identify the most appropriate social media channels to use and, most importantly, how to engage fans effectively within those channels.

References

Bruton, D. (2016). Sports marketing. Burlington: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Shilbury, D., Westerbeek, H., Quick, S., Funk, D., & Karg, A. (2014). Strategic sport marketing (4th ed.). Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

Swayne, L. (2011). Encyclopaedia of sports management and marketing. London: SAGE Publications.