Major sporting events often mean an increase in both app engagement and interest from users for relevant apps. And the 2024 Olympics and Euro Championship, kicking off in July, will likely have billions tuning in to watch their nation’s athletes compete.
As they watch, viewers will be looking to place their next food order, check the latest commentary, and buy their team’s merchandise. For marketers of QSR, news, e-commerce, and sports streaming apps, among others, this represents a huge opportunity to scale with highly engaged users.
To help you accomplish this, here are 4 ways to revitalize your campaigns for an Olympic surge in screen time this July and August.
1. Update your creatives with sports-themed elements
Updating creatives with themes related to a specific time or event has been seen to generate improvements in performance. Themed creatives are a powerful tool to connect your app with what’s top of mind for users. They also work as reminders for the event, igniting interest in related purchases.
Leading up to and during major sporting events like the Olympics or Euro Championship, update your creatives with sports-related imagery and themes to link the event with your app and make the global contest a part of your marketing. One simple way to do this is by featuring objects associated with the event in your creatives - like gold medals, podiums, scorecards, trophies, and flags.
2. Engage your audience with interactive polls and contests
Audience interaction is a core pillar of community building and brand recognition. And few things get an audience as emotionally engaged as asking for their opinion on their team’s performance and competing against others. By running interactive polls and contests you can incentivize users to engage with your social media channels, building brand awareness.
An example would be to run a poll on your app’s social media account asking followers who they believe will win in a given Olympic category. You can also run contests, like the first to respond with the correct answer to a Euro Championship trivia question wins a prize, to incentivize users to engage.
3. Create FOMO using time-limited seasonal offers
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is an incredibly motivating force. Limiting the availability of offers to a specific window is a great way to leverage FOMO to your advantage. A case in point is McDonald’s Szechuan sauce offer, which was only available for a limited time using the app. The limited offer generated international publicity for the fast-food giant and worked to drive users to place orders through the app.
Use major sporting events as an opportunity to create a limited offer associated with the event. This could be in the form of a discount on a subscription, a special sale on a particular product, or even releasing a themed product that ties into the event.
4. Diversify your marketing channels
The massive viewership of the Olympics, Euro Championship, and other major sporting events presents a golden opportunity to grow your app. Make sure you’re getting the most out of it by using a diverse mix of marketing channels. The more diverse and varied your channels, the better your chances to reach users when they want to make that next purchase or install their next app.
This is also a great time to innovate on top of what you know works - don’t just stick to social and traditional channels, try performance channels that enable you to reach new users in new ways. On-device channels, like Aura from Unity, are an example of how you can complement your existing channels with native placements directly on a user’s device which appear when they are most likely to install.
