Get ready to change the game for your sports league! In the previous article, you have learned about 7 Gamification Opportunities for Your Sports League. Today, we'll dive deeper into leveraging the power of gamification marketing to add immense value to your sponsors and partners. This will help you make your league or association stand out from the crowd. It will help you become more interesting for your audience and set grounds for generating more revenue. Your fans will enjoy more enjoyable and interactive experiences, while your sponsors and partners will gain lots of attention.

Are you ready to explore the mix of online and offline gamification?

Let's dive into how you can make this happen with online branded games and other approaches that will boost your sponsorship game like never before!

7 Sponsorship Gamification Boosters for Your Sports League

Website / App Content

Improve your website with embedded online branded games that not only increase lead generation and sponsor visibility but also keep visitors engaged for longer periods. You can offer fully branded games to your sponsors, as well as just opportunities to be featured in a form of prizes to participants or in individual game elements. These can be done as quick 1 day/week activations, but also as longer term partnerships.

Using shorter time frames helps you get additional content for your audience in addition to more revenue opportunities. It will take a while for the audience to learn about the offerings on your website so it's necessary to spread the word actively to get the best results. Be loud about it!

Placement on the website is very important - of course, the more premium position you allocate for these, the better results you will get.

If your website or app supports individual accounts, you can place multiple experiences without any need for submitting emails or phone numbers. But you can use the opportunity to source other data - e.g., a favourite team.

Always-On Campaigns

Reward fan loyalty with campaigns that will turn their number of visits into lottery tickets. If you have standardized ticketing system, you can use unique ticket numbers in a Lucky Number online branded game. Otherwise, you can generate a number of unique codes for each team to give one to each visitor. The more games the person attends, the more codes they can input to the special campaign page. And the more codes they have input, the higher their chance for winning a prize is.

This can be a season-long campaign which can be co-branded with one of the sponsors. Additionally, there can be prizes of other partners in the pool. You can even utilize categories as during events - e.g., General Partner, Reward Partner, Distribution Partner.

To make it even more interesting, there can be a team competition, as well as The Most Active Supporter competition. It can be a monthly leaderboard or a split between regular season and play-offs. This way, you can recognize and engage your most active audience to foster long-lasting connections with your teams.

Regular Campaigns

Keep fans engaged with weekly score guessing, best player voting, and other interactive activities. These campaigns can be distributed across multiple channels and they would be repetitive - to create behavioural habits among your audience. It opens new visibility opportunities for sponsors, while activating the audience and encouraging their participation.

In most of these, you don't even need to be too generous on the rewards side. Other elements of human motivation are triggered. Yes, you can add some draws, or a prize for TOP10 most accurate score guessers, but many of these campaigns will just be interesting for the possibility to participate. They will give the audience the opportunity to make an impact through the vote.

Special Social Media Campaigns

Launch unique, spontaneous social media campaigns to increase lead generation, sponsor visibility, and fan engagement. Leverage paid partnerships to maximize reach and results. You can see these as quick (1-3 days) activations for a specific social media channel. Use various happenings in the society, special days, as well as spontaneous opportunities. How about a quick Vappu (May Day) activation?

Consider whether you can offer these in regular sponsor packages, or as an extra opportunity. Would it be offered to long-term sponsors only, or would you let any brand take part (except for those competing with your sponsors)?

For example, take the player of the month, build a story of them going for a pizza, and let the audience vote the one to taste. Sell the campaign visibility spot to a pizza company, take some videos (e.g., account takeover) for additional content, and draw pizza vouchers among the participants. The top prize can be a pizza meeting with the player. And all non-winning participants can get a special offer to incentivize a visit in the pizzeria.

Live Experience during Games

Offer exclusive in-game campaigns that boost the audience excitement and engagement. It can be a score guessing campaign for the first period result, a Memory game with starting line up pairs, or a Bingo / Word Search game from the game speaker announcements. Or you can just use a simple Mystery Box campaign with a QR code on each ticket or game bulletin.

Remember to provide leaderboards where relevant, and make live winner announcements. Also think of your audience watching live stream online.

This is an opportunity to either use league sponsors, or to enable individual teams to add visibility to their local partners. In the end, the more interesting each of the game visits becomes and the more fans it brings to the arena, the better it is for the whole league.

Personal Rewards through Visitor Passes

Encourage fans to visit all arenas and collect digital stamps or NFTs, culminating in a grand prize draw. It's like collecting lunch stamps, but from multiple places in this case.

There can be various levels of draws based on the participant activity. Someone who has collected, for example, at least 15 visits from 5 different locations could get into the grand prize draw, whereas those who only have 1 location would be in the Level 2 draw. This also brings an opportunity for local rewards, such as season cards for the next season.

Alternatively, these can be just unique collectibles. But the whole concept can still carry a sponsor name. And this may help you create a lucrative sponsorship product for a new segment of companies (especially if using NFTs).

City Introduction

Use GPS-powered street games to introduce fans to new cities, or deepen their knowledge of their own city. This can be a great way to get the youth moving and to drive traffic to local partner businesses.

You can also use it for the league teams to connect with the local community - you can make those special events where players are a part of the participating teams.

This experience with players involved can be used as a reward from some of the previous activations. You can also use sponsors throughout the city game by including their questions and products as prizes hidden in AR boxes. Teams performance leaderboard will then reveal the TOP3 for additional prizes.

You might find this being your problem, too: Your league is full of boomer audience and you struggle attracting the younger generations. So what should you do?

Embrace these gamification marketing opportunities to engage your fans and boost sponsor value. You don't have to use all of them at once, but you we can start implementing them step by step to your operations. Successful implementation will ultimately lead to becoming more interesting to your new and future audience, growing your offerings to sponsors and partners, as well as growing your sports league or association as a whole.

The ideas you have read about in this article are examples that can and should be further tailored to your needs. They should be properly implemented into your current funnel while gamification strategy would become a strong element of your overall operations.

Which of the ideas is your most favourite? 🏆

Let's fill the empty seat in all arenas with super excited and loyal audience. It's time to start now! 🤩

(By the way, have you thought of tokenizing the whole league? That sure is a topic for an article on its own! Stay tuned.)