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Online Marketing of Professional Sports Clubs: Engaging Fans on a New Playing Field

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Online Marketing of Professional Sports Clubs: Engaging Fans on a New Playing Field
Executive summary

Online sports marketing has become the best foundation for building fan communities for professional sports league and teams. With the development of more powerful technologies, access to the internet has increased. Websites are now including media such as audio and video files, podcasts and live broadcasts of league games. More powerful media has also enabled more user interaction and user empowerment. Two key elements in the increasing use of online services to increase the effectiveness of online sports marketing are multimedia and user interaction. Together, they provide an increasingly sophisticated, powerful and user-based medium that offers marketing challenges and opportunities to business organisations including professional sport organisations.

Related to improved user engagement is the increasing sophistication of sports websites. Creating value for fans has become more difficult because they want more benefits from online experiences, including the development of social connections. Teams could take advantage of fans' attachment by creating interactive web spaces, extending team experiences and building fan loyalty.

In Europe and North America, the world wide web (the web) hosts 234 million websites and has 1.8 billion users. By 2011, advertising revenues from online advertising at sports sites will likely exceed US$1 billion, a three-fold increase since 2006. Many teams have incorporated media-based content and opportunities for fans to interact online with teams and with each other.

This study reviews recent literature about the evolution of the web, identifying and discussing opportunities for a sports organisation to increase its fan base and online user interaction as a key marketing strategy. It also investigates use of the web for enabling fan interaction by 12 professional sports teams in four top-tier leagues (hockey, football, rugby, soccer) in North America and Europe.

All 12 teams in the sample investigated

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