Helping brands to partner with athletes in their influencer marketing and sponsorship marketing campaigns

The world of Extreme Sports is a treasure trove of surreal and engaging content. Countless times large prints of photos from extreme sports have caught the eyes of consumers when they’re posted on walls of retail stores and outlet malls. When shopping for outdoor lifestyle gear, equipment, and clothing, I personally find myself more drawn to purchasing an item if it has a photo of someone wearing in its appropriate climate or terrain. As consumers, we have come to trust the validity of a product through reviews, photos, and videos of individuals using it prior to our purchase. Brands such as GoPro, Red Bull, and Anheuser-Busch have been taking advantage of this form of consumer behavior.

As shown in the chart above, we can see that GoPro has become the leader in sponsorships when it comes to the world of extreme sports. GoPro has gone with a very simplistic approach when it comes to sports sponsorships and content marketing. GoPro has made sure to offer independence to their ambassadors and sponsored athletes. Instead of entering the scene with their own agendas, the brand has done an excellent job of letting the sponsored athletes and the sport itself mandate the production of the content. GoPro, like many other brands listed above, understands the importance of curating and repurposing exciting content for their customers. Being in the outdoor lifestyle market, this has been the perfect strategy for GoPro to become the household brand for outdoor cameras and video recorders. When it comes to sponsorship strategies, GoPro has a portfolio of superstar athletes within extreme sports, as well as a number of annual sporting events. 

What GoPro does is very simple but effective, the marketing strategy is to curate content that shows the use of their products in the most organic and authentic way possible. There aren’t any short forceful videos of athletes holding the product and saying a generic line. These are athletes and outdoor enthusiasts using the products to showcase their skills and display the beauty in their own respective sports. The content consists of beautiful backdrops of mountains, slow-motion clips of surfing under a huge wave, and an overall appreciation for mother nature. The content that GoPro has been able to curate has given them the advantage when it comes to dominating the market. 

Brands such as GoPro, Anheuser-Busch, and Red Bull have done an excellent job at recognizing the potential of content marketing with extreme sports. However, this doesn’t mean that smaller brands can’t enter the scene and have their own successful content marketing campaigns within the sport. Thanks to the help of social media, content marketing isn’t exclusive to brands with million dollar marketing budgets. The easy to use platform called Opensponsorship can help your brand take advantage of content marketing campaigns at a cost that’s appropriate for your own budget.

Opensponsorship offers a wide range of options and filters which allows brands to run their own influencer marketing campaigns in their own specific ways. The platform is full of features; 20+ filters when searching for influencers, up to date data on the followers for each influencer, average costs indicators, campaign template/builder, and many more. Sending messages to potential brand ambassadors, negotiating prices, and getting mid to end campaign reports are just a few of the features that makes the whole process seamless on the Opensponsorship platform. Here are a few tips that will help your brand create the next viral campaign with the Opensponsorship platform:

Data on the Following-to-Engagement Ratio – View the up-to-date on the potential brand ambassadors, and see if they have their followers and your target audience match.

Brand Alignment – Check the past histories of campaigns that the influencer has been a part of. View their most used keywords and phrases to see if they’re the right fit for your brand.

Always Negotiate – Utilize Opensponsorship’s proposals feature to negotiate the payments for your influencers using a campaign-based partnership model. This means the influencer gets paid for doing a series of posts as opposed to a singular, one-off activations. You’ll get more content and more bang for your buck this way.

Provide Custom Promo Codes – Opensponsorship allows you to integrate with your Google Analytics or Shopify account to provide each influencer with a custom UTM link This will allow you to measure any traffic driven back to the brand’s website from each influencers post, as well as the number of new users and transactions completed with total spend.

Opensponsorship makes it easy for brands of all sizes to run their own content marketing campaigns. With more than 6,000 influencers and athletes on the platform, brands have the opportunity to specify every last detail of their marketing campaigns. Let's create great content that speaks to your brand!