In hosting some of the most frequent and exhilarating live events known to the entertainment world, content libraries within the sports industry are overflowing with thousands of hours of video footage.

To put it into perspective:

“Each game is going to give you about 25-40 hours worth of records.”
Tab Butler, Major League Baseball

Sports marketing initiatives all begin with the content captured by the video and photography teams during live games and events, and preserving this content is highly valuable in creating memorable fan experiences. The bottleneck in this case is that often only a few individuals have in-depth knowledge of these assets and as a result, they’re constantly relied on to find the stills and videos that are crucial to telling your team’s story. This causes significant time delays and increases the chance for missing opportunities to interact with the team’s fans.

These pains are causing sports teams to turn to a digital asset management system to manage their growing content. By storing rich media files in a DAM, sports teams are able to provide self-serve access to the assets they need, resulting in strengthened workflow throughout the organization.

“Building a DAM for a sports league is a categorical imperative. You have to do it. No one really has the number of live events that we do over the course of a year, and you have to be able to find what you’re looking for.”
Grant Nodine, National Hockey League

Sports organizations see huge improvements to their results after implementing a DAM system, but these are two benefits we hear again and again:

Increase Revenue Generating Opportunities

As a digital marketer in the sports industry, there are many opportunities to drive revenue through your content and media library, but there are also opportunities lost due to the lack of organization and structure in your current file-storing and sharing systems. Think of your corporate partners for instance - if they can’t find the assets they need to streamline a sponsorship campaign, they miss the chance to increase revenue and build the sponsorship pipeline.

Your team can be spending days looking for a single asset across your different storage systems, which is where a central media library, like a DAM, comes into play. By making the library of team content accessible to support sponsorships, partners, and retail divisions, you’ll be increasing the productivity of these revenue generating departments.

Here’s how a DAM will help drive revenue across your organization:

1. Consumer and Product Marketing: allow easy access to all approved assets to expand content-driven campaigns to influence ticket sales.

2. Video Production, Digital Media and Publications: eliminate hours of administrative responses to image and media requests and maximize content and media usage.

3. Corporate Partnership Services: enable sponsorship teams to quickly search and browse through assets that can be used to create new, engaging content experiences.

4. Retail Operations: leverage discoverable content via functions like advanced search, browsing, and asset ratings in order to streamline new merchandise development.

5. Team Photography: increase productivity by reducing the amount of time spent by the team searching for and formatting content for other departments.

Whether it be game, interview, culture, fan, arena experience, or b-roll content, a DAM will allow you to enable your teams by providing immediate access to approved media and content. With these functionalities in mind, the ability to create new revenue generating opportunities throughout your organization will become increasingly practical.

Expand Fan Engagement

The rabid enthusiasm of sports fans is first established through their love of the game and the athletes involved. By having videos and stills of the sporting event available to be used for content driven-campaigns, fans are able to maintain this level of enthusiasm from pre to post game. Videos and photos are what respective sports fans typically engage with the most. Whether it’s an Instagram post or a TV ad, your assets are extremely valuable in creating conversation between your team and the fans. In order to truly maximize an omni-channel fan experience, the ability to search for and easily access your rich media files is crucial.

In the sports industry, your digital assets act as emotional connectors for the fans. Think of special moments at a game - like when a fan catches a ball from the stands and has that look of pure excitement on their face. You can probably also recount various situations in which footage of a player’s outstanding goal went viral. An essential step in increasing fan engagement is being be able to provide more of this memorable content, more often, through multiple digital channels and marketing materials.

Let’s look at how your team can utilize a DAM to strengthen fan experiences:

1. Consumer and Product Marketing: use advanced search capabilities and integrations (e.g., Hootsuite) to increase the consistency of fan experiences across all channels.

2. Video Production, Digital Media and Publications: enable self-serve access to the entire content library in order to quickly find and share game, interview, culture, fan, and many more assets that resonate with fans.

3. Corporate Partnership Services: provide a well-curated reference library to easily navigate through and drive engagement with new sponsorship campaigns.

4. Retail Operations: access merchandise designs, approved logos, and brand guidelines to ensure brand consistency and create new merchandise for fans to purchase.

5. Team Photography: enable quick uploading of finalized assets (post-game) to speed up the photo and video sharing process on your team’s digital channels.

It’s one thing to have a good media and PR strategy, but in order to amplify and productively execute these projects, you need to be able to easily access all approved game, corporate and community content. By leveraging a DAM system to access and share the whole breadth of your game and archive media, you will be sure to see an increase in fan engagement.

These are just a couple of the ways in which digital asset management can be the most valuable player in your next sports marketing initiative, but the list goes on!