Nowadays, digital marketing is more than just a way to advertise your products or services. It’s an essential measure for reaching a target audience and gaining recognition among customers. With a smart online marketing strategy, sports retailers can boost sales and increase brand awareness.
According to MarketingWeek’s research, the demand for marketing tools grew by 13.6% compared to 2021. So, it’s time you explore what web technology has to offer to boost your sports equipment company’s popularity. Read on!
How to promote your sporting goods on the web
Digital advertising has made it possible for sports business leaders to reach a broader target audience. There are different types of digital marketing approaches that you may consider. Discover them one by one to better understand what would be more suitable for your sports equipment business.
Content marketing
Providing value without requiring customers to purchase is more important than having a website with a superior design and goods in demand. That is where content marketing comes into play. The first things you should think about are your website, its content, and on-page optimization. Start with your landing page.
Landing page
This is the single most important part of your sales funnel. Firstly, your landing page should not only include a description of your product. It should contain a high-value promise for a customer, answering the following question: “What is in it for me?”
Secondly, make sure there is authentic social proof. It soothes any fears or doubts your website visitors have about committing to your offer and builds authority for your brand. Gather your best user testimonials and feature them on your landing page with permission.
Thirdly, incorporate a crystal clear call to action. You have between 5–10 seconds to convince customers to stay on your page before they bounce. Your call to action needs to be front and center, leaving no room for confusion on where your prospect should click next.
Corporate blog posts
At first sight, it’s not very clear how selling goods can be related to blogging, but blog posts help you to find and establish a distinctive voice for your brand and attract a lot of traffic. The posts you write will be indexed by search engines afterward, so promoting your website today with blogging means attracting new customers tomorrow.
Update your blog posts regularly. This is one of the paramount rules in content marketing. Before publishing an article, make sure it’s structured and logical. The mandatory thing is to add theme visuals; they boost content engagement and open rates by about 40%. It is worth noting that it is important to take care of the quality and legitimacy of your visuals. For instance, if you write about golf, check out https://depositphotos.com for over 28K golf-related high-quality licensed images.
On-page optimization
Simply put, on-page SEO can be described as the optimization of contents and HTML source code of any web page. Some of the most important things taken care of by on-page optimization are:
- title and description (meta tags);
- image Alt tags;
- heading tags;
- internal linking.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing brings around 20% of traffic and sales to your website. So, you should focus on increasing your engagement rate on social media. The fastest method for a boost is to run contests, giveaways, and interactive promotions. Relevant questions, polls, and surveys are also good ways to engage your audience and make them buy.
SMM provides quick, real-time marketing results that allow sports equipment businesses to elaborate and optimize marketing tools to maximize income. Marketers and consumers can cooperate through different social media channels that don’t levy a single cent, and the documentation is in electronic copies stored on a website.
Sports equipment businesses, irrespective of their size, can utilize social marketing to reach their target market, get in touch with potential customers, and change them to regulars.
Tasks that can be solved using SMM:
- brand promotion;
- social support for marketing activities on the Internet;
- social promotion—popularizing the social value of the marketing subject of the company;
- trade marketing—holding encouraging events among the social community.
Email marketing
The advantages of email marketing are obvious. It is relatively low-cost when compared to other marketing channels, offers ease of production, and has the ability to reach multitudes of people around the globe in seconds. So, the first thing you can do to promote your sports equipment online using this approach is to build a mailing list.
If you send emails to your subscribers only encouraging them to buy something, they will eventually unsubscribe. Instead, keep adding value between sales pitches by sending them helpful or interesting blog posts. Not only will this get potential customers back to your website, but these people may also share your content on social media, expanding your reach.
- Send emails to launch your new posts. Send an email to your subscribers to tell them you published something new.
- Send an email newsletter. Most sports bloggers publish 2–3 times a week. Why not compile those posts with a few others from stars in this niche to build an email newsletter your subscribers will love? That’s a great way to share your new content again, maybe add a few of your older posts, and make the time you put into social media content curation totally worth it by sharing those posts again.
- Enable social media shares directly from the email. It’s easy to create a click-to-share link to drive social media shares right from your emails. Including click-to-tweet links in your plain text emails helps get an average of 12 shares for each blog post within the first couple of hours after the emails go out.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & backlinks
These two terms are interrelated. Backlinks behave like a mirror through which your brand is seen. They are intended to help promote your brand and expose it online. SEO is the process of enhancing the positions of your website in different search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) Most of the time, it’s done by purchasing or placing the links to your website on different relevant pages.
As an SEO tool, backlinks increase your website visibility and improve its ranking on Google. Note that your site must be backlinked to a source that is not just relevant to what you do, but is of high quality.
In SEO, quality is considered more important than quantity. Thus, having a few quality backlinks is a better SEO strategy than having many vague and irrelevant backlinks. This brings us to the idea of a niche. Therefore, you must link sports equipment sites to other sites in the same niche. Using irrelevant backlinks will not help your website since Google adjusted their crawlers’ algorithm; they are now pickier and will ignore anything unrelated.
Backlinks are like paths on which crawlers walk while searching for your website. If their quality is high, they lead the crawlers to your website. This helps drive traffic to the site.
How to gain as many backlinks as possible
There are two ways: to earn it (contact website owners, agree on publishing your link in their article, pay for it, or make it on barter terms) or purchase backlinks from relevant services.
Final thoughts
Web promotion is the best way to reach a broad audience fast. There are a lot of strategies you can apply to advertise your sports equipment online. Which one should you choose? The best option is to explore the presented options, analyze your goals, and select the most pertinent approach to promoting your products.
