Sport is a universal language that unites the world. Everyone loves to watch sports. If not live, then on television. These days, technological advancement has made things easier. From the convenience of your mobile device, you can easily connect to your favorite sports – whether to stream it live, read news about your favorite team, or check important team statistics.
If you’ve just developed a sports app, you’ve done a great job. You’ve entered into a fast-growing market that promises great returns. Statistics have it that sports lovers increase by over 74 percent every year. So, you see, there’s no shortage of users for your app.
However, you’ll need to scale up your app to become one of the best sports apps in the mobile app stores. Let’s face it, there are thousands of sports apps in the mobile app stores right now. The competition is stiff. If there’s any chance that you’ll attract the volume of audience you want, you’ll need to put in serious work.
Serious work here will comprise the look and feel of your app, its functionality, and features and the marketing strategies you put in place to promote the sports app. Having an amazing sports app idea is essential to building the best sports app, but what eventually makes the app the best is how effectively you market it.
So, in this article, we’ll show you how to market a sports app to make it attract a massive number of downloads, engage your users, and become so much of an addiction to them that they wouldn’t mind paying for the app.
Let’s go!
Business Model of Sports Apps
Before venturing into any business, it’s important to know what’s in it for you. If you’ve already carried out your research before building your sports app, that’s great! If you haven’t let’s open your eyes to how profitable a sports app is with some statistics.
According to Think with Google, sports app users spend up to 50 minutes of their time each day on sports apps. That’s almost an hour your app can be getting from your users every day. The more engaging your app is, the longer they stay. To add to this, Think with Google also informs us that mobile app users come back to their favorite games, sports, entertainment, and news app two to three times a day.
Now, let’s go to the potential market for sports apps. In the USA, over 56 percent of Americans love sports. This implies that more than half of the entire population of America can get hooked to your sports app if you take its marketing seriously. Around the world, football alone attracts about 4 billion fans. Then 50 percent of the world population are interested in other kinds of sport that aren’t football.
Additional statistics from Appventurez show us that majority of users skip watching television for watching sports with apps. And while they are at this, 70 percent of American adults choose to use a second screen when watching sports online. So, you shouldn’t be bothered about the small display size of mobile devices if you want to develop a sports streaming app. The users will take care of that. What they need first and foremost is the sports streaming mobile app with a difference.
Moving on, when it comes to the part of the world that generates the most revenue for the sports industry, you should target North America. Recent statistics from Statista show that as of 2020, North America’s sports market was estimated to be worth $76.05, and the market size for this continent grows bigger each year.
There are no two ways about it; people are interested in sports. There is no lack of users in the sports app market. The potential of making a considerable profit is there. However, you’ll need a good marketing strategy for sports apps to snatch a handful of this massive profit. The best way to proceed with this is a quick competitor analysis.
If you follow the trend, especially football trends, you’ll discover that every football club has its sports app. It’s the same for many popular sports and big sports companies. You can quickly confirm this by visiting both the Apple app store and Google Play store. Navigating to the sports category will show you an infinite scroll of sports apps.
The competition is stiff, especially as there are aggregator apps in the sports category that provide content that sports users are interested in without infusing in-app purchases. There are also the paid apps with a large number of installs. These apps are mostly sports app owned by sports radio stations and simulators.
You should know in the business of sports app from analyzing the mobile app stores that the biggest earners in the sports app category are those apps that offer content on a specific sport. The business model for most of these apps is freemium. They offer basic features to the users for free, then demand that they pay for premium features.
Equipped with this information, you should go back to your drawing board and look into the goals of your app, its key features, its unique selling point, and business model. Like it or not, there’s money to be made if you learn how to market a sports app successfully.
Let’s now show you what you need to do!
How to Market Sports Apps
If you’ve decided on the business model for your sports app and are determined to make it one of the best sports apps on the app stores, the next step is to promote the app.
Here are sports marketing tips that will help you engage users of your sports app and guarantee your return on investment (ROI):
Customize for the Fanatics
With the availability of so many sports apps in the mobile app stores, you’ll need personalization to set your app apart from the pack. Personalization is one growing trend not just in sports apps but in mobile app in general. It ensures that the users can choose what they want to see. What this implies is that part of the onboarding process of your sports app should include selecting interests. When the users have selected their interest, it’s left for your app to now display information to your users based on their interest.
One of the best sports score and news app that does personalization well is ESPN. What this app publisher does is that it saves its users’ preferences and then offers them information based on their preferences. As simple as this is, it’s the decider of whether users will get addicted to your app or flee from it. By selecting an interest, especially for sports apps, we may mean allowing your app users to select their favorite teams. Bleacher Report’s Team sports streaming app is one app that does this well. It allows its users to select the kind of sports they love as well as their favorite teams.Doingg this saves the users the time it’ll take them to apply filters to sieve the right information they want from a load of content that they don’t want.
You can also do to offer users of your app the option to customize the look and feel of the app. That way, they feel in control of the app and look forward to returning to the app whenever they close the app. See, personalization is very key to user retention. You don’t want to joke with it. Statistics show that mobile apps lose over 70 percent of their users to competitors after the third month of downloading the app because of lack of customization.
Here are some of the reasons why you have to learn how to customize your sports score app:
- It increases user loyalty. Customer loyalty comes when a user sees that the app has them at heart. A loyal customer grows addicted to the app and recommends the app to their friends. Personalizing the content that you send to your users will help you win them over as loyal users.
One of the goals to keep when marketing your sports app is user engagement. · It boosts engagement. Keep the user in the app as long as possible, and you may just be able to sell something of interest to them. But you can’t do this if you push every single content on the app to them. Based on their preferences, suggest features of the app that will make them get the best of the app, which they aren’t already using.
If you want your users to stay and not dump your app for those of your competitors, personalization is the key. · It drives user retention. This is especially true if your app is based on subscriptions. You may be doing enough to keep the users engaged but once the rigors of renewing their subscription are impossible, they’ll leave your app. So, it’s time to start focusing on subscription status in addition to providing personalized content to your users.
- It increases purchases. What personalization helps you do is to see the user’s in-app behavior. Studying this can give you pointers on when to send the user push notification as well as the kind of message the notifications should have. Thuuz Sports app does this very well. They customize their adverts based on the user data, like the one that points to the period when they are most likely to be online, and the user interest to boost conversion and return on investment (ROI).
Show Game Statistics
One thing that is clear about sports is that it thrives on statistics. Every sports lover knows this, so they go for apps that are not just rich in providing them news feed about their favorite teams or sports but useful statistics that can better help them analyze and predict a game.
Some of the best sports score apps understand this, so they build their app such that they are useful to even users who aren’t sports lovers. Users who need their data once in a while. Now, it is not also enough to provide enough data for different games, you also have to be able to present it in a way that is beautiful, easily accessible, and easily understood.
A common trend in some of the best sports score app is that they are beginning to integrate sports betting into their app. An example is Livescore. Understanding that some of their users aren’t necessarily sporting lovers but need the correct statistics to be able to predict and win bets, they have incorporated their bet feature into their app. This way, users don’t have to leave their app to return to their betting app. They find everything they want in the app. This is a function of convenience, which is part of why sports lovers choose sports apps over watching sports on TV.
Sometimes, it doesn’t stop at just building your app with game statistics, you also have to remind them when history is about to be made. What we’re simply saying is sending your users to push notifications to remind them of an upcoming game involving their favorite team while providing all the right details and statistics of the game that they need to get excited about the game. Yahoo Sports is a king at this. They understand that it’s easy for users to forget about an app, so they use push notifications to remind users that there’s something they’re missing, and it works!
Stream Players’ Stories
In as much as your sports app is the go-to place for your users to stream games, view scores in real-time, and get news about their favorite sports or team, it’s not enough. There’s so much going on in the world of sports that it’s difficult to capture all. One of the ways to draw your users in, however, is the ability to show them what they’re probably missing.
You need in-app stories like the kind you find on Facebook and Instagram. While this will help you highlight important information that they may have missed in the pile of information in your app, it also helps you stay up to date with trends in the world of mobile apps. If you’ve been researching well, you’ll find that in-app stories are no longer a feature for just social media apps. Apps in other categories are implementing now and enjoying an increased in-app engagement.
There are a lot of things you can do with Players’ stories in your app. You can use it to assist your users in building their fantasy sports teams. Fantasy sports is revolutionizing the world of sports, increasing the way sports fanatics enjoy the game by building virtual teams. When you regularly update players’ performances on Player’s stories and inform your users of the best players after each game, they look forward to visiting your app after every game.
Also, Players’ stories help demystify the players and show their personalities to the world. If your Players’ stories regularly update the lives of their favorite players outside the pitch, your users are better able to connect with their stars. They want to log on to your app at the slightest thought of their favorite player to see what they are up to lately.
Bring the Stadium to the App
Come to think of it; the stadium is more than a place where you go to see your favorite game live. It’s also a place to meet with fans and discuss the game. It’s a place to meet new friends and build lasting relationships. So, while you’ve built a sports streaming app to enable your users to watch live games, a good marketing strategy is building a community in the app.
No rule states that having a community feature in apps is an exclusive feature for social media apps. When you develop a community in the app, you provide fans the opportunity to connect and discuss the game before, during, or after it is over. The communal spirit created in mobile app communities makes an app never grow old as the community members may help explain features of the app to users who are finding it difficult to use these features.
One sports app that is strong in the social community feature is Forza Football. This app creates a community of sports fanatics and encourages them to air their opinion and share it with the rest of the world. What this indirectly does is that it advertises the app with user-generated content. It is like digital word of mouth, and you know how effective word of mouth advertising can be.
Another advantage of making a social community out of your sports app is that it helps you launch successful marketing promotion campaigns. You can quickly go to the communities to offer them promotions geared towards making more sales. These people will more likely respond to your campaign than users who are just hearing about the app for the first time.
Final Thoughts
To effectively promote your sports app, you must have first developed one, irrespective of the type – be it live stream, news updates, or live scores. Then, you must have a business model for your sports app to get a good ROI for the app. To do this, you should decide if your app is going to be aggregated or dedicated. Dedicated apps are more likely to attract paid users. With all these settled, you can then employ the strategies we’ve shared in this article to market your sports app effectively.
