If your goal is to engage with sports fans, there are plenty of proven ways to drive traffic, start conversations, and inspire readers and customers to action. But doing so at scale is difficult, because the sports calendar is hectic and unpredictable.
Outside of the important work being done by sports journalists, most sports content is created to engage with fans in service of a company’s business objective, such as ad revenue or conversions to a first or third-party product or service. Major publishers flood the internet with “service content” ahead of sporting events, whether it’s information on betting lines, TV listings and other basic facts that serve as fantastic vessels for calls to action.
So if this content is helping move the needle on meaningful metrics that move your business forward, why isn’t every brand in the world of sports creating tons of great content to connect with the audience they know is waiting for them?
It’s really, really hard.
Sports never stop. There is literally no offseason for sports, and there’s nothing formulaic about the ups and downs of the seasons. Covering every event is just not feasible, yet between media outlets, fan blogs, and affiliates, there is going to be content for every event produced by someone out there. There will be a Google search engine results page (SERP) full of invitations to watch, sign up for, play fantasy of, or bet on pretty much any sporting event on the calendar.
So when Data Skrive talks about scalability, we mean our ability to get your name on all of those SERPs, quickly and easily, without putting a strain on your resources and people. There are four main ways that we can help you scale and reach the goals you’ve set forth for your sports content.
Cover more events and people
Have you thought to yourself that you’d love to promote a first-party initiative or expand upon an existing affiliate relationship, but you just don’t have the content to support a call to action for that campaign? Have you missed an opportunity to sell an American Football over the top of a streaming package, or weren’t able to capitalize on running a hockey betting promotion that has the right context to reach the right audience? You need to create the content about those sports using the language those fans use.
We create articles and blog posts with that context to get your campaign in front of the right eyes for the right topic, so you’re engaging with the avid fans who are most likely to respond favorably to your call to action. You don’t need an NFL beat writer or an NHL blogger, we’ve got you covered with content for both leagues that can drive readers to your website and to any links or other campaigns you wish to include.
And even if you do cover a particular sport, you might not have the time and bandwidth to add an additional article about every match to activate a particular marketing effort, but with our content, you can quickly scale up and hit that goal.
Reach more eyes
For any given event, there are countless possible searches a user might try to get information. And if you’re lucky, your existing preview of that event will hit a handful of them.
But at scale with Data Skrive, you have a full complement of optimized content that can reach fans with various search queries across teams and sports you might not even cover yet. We combine strong editorial standards with proven SEO expertise to create content that will get on the SERP and drive readers to your website, even if you already cover that sport or event.
There are multiple journeys to the destination – a conversion to your service or a visit to your sponsor’s landing page – and we help you scale up and provide more on-ramps along the way to bring in fans you previously might have missed with your existing content.
Empower your creators
Even if you do have a great content team, there’s only so much that a human can write against the nonstop sports calendar. Your NFL expert’s betting preview is fantastic, and might come with a built-in audience who follows their personality, but there are more angles to a single NFL game than just a betting preview.
We can help supplement your existing content with articles optimized to perform on Google, so your talented writers and editors can continue to build their audience while we provide a solid backbone of consistent organic search content across the different keywords and topics you just don’t have the bandwidth to reach.
We don’t intend to replace a human writer … the data doesn’t know the personal story of the athletes or have a hot take about the outcome of the latest match. Instead, we’ll cover the “meat and potatoes” preview or roundup that no one else really wants to write, so your staff can spend time on things that are more interesting, involved and engaging for them.
You scale by creating a diverse content portfolio that attracts all sorts of fans, and that is bolstered by letting Data Skrive handle the data-driven content that has proven performance, instead of wasting valuable resources on articles or events that are more practical and useful than they are thrilling to create.
Expand and multiply
No matter where you start with Data Skrive, there’s almost always more we can offer to further engage with and expand your audience. Happy with a preview for every match of the NFL season? What if we offer a “hub page” that links all of our previously delivered content together into a single destination for all of the week’s contests?
Seeing results from our NBA previews about how to watch every game? We can do the same for men’s and women’s college basketball, sports with 10 times the teams that are virtually impossible to cover without a serious increase in personnel.
The sky is truly the limit, because as long as it can be created with data-based insights and observations, we can curate the right content to build out a robust portfolio of high-performing posts for your website without you having to hire a writer or backread a blog.
Whether you want to drive your readers to watch, play, bet or anything else, if you want to scale up and reach some portion of the massive sports fandom out there, you’ll need some help.
And that’s what we do best.
