The World Cup is coming, how can brands take advantage of it to promote their products?

When it comes to sports marketing, you may think that it is the business of big companies. After all, only big companies can afford to be the official sponsors of events. Conventional sports marketing routines (such as inviting stars and sponsorship) are actually not very useful for ordinary companies.

However, as the World Cup is the most important festival in 2018, ordinary companies can actually share in the billions of traffic dividends. Here are some common tactics that ordinary companies use to leverage the World Cup marketing .

1. World Cup themed packaging

If you are making an online product, it is normal to run themed activities based on festivals. The best way to attract users' attention is to change the UI to a World Cup theme, and then set up an activity page to host World Cup-related activities.

If you want to enhance users' sense of identity, you can even make different themed skins for each team for users to use and share. The motivation for users to share is to show others that they support a certain team.

In addition, you can also undertake promotional activities such as raffles through team stamp collecting, World Cup medals, online check-ins, etc., which can also effectively promote activity.

If it is an offline product, you can carry out theme promotion activities by making World Cup-themed product packaging; you can also promote users' second purchases through product materials such as "star cards", and guide users to share online through event QR codes or appearance designs.

2. Limited edition product gift packs

Based on the theme of the World Cup, we can launch a World Cup limited edition product package, which will only be sold during the World Cup.

For example, offline restaurants can launch World Cup packages. If they are more specific, they can also launch Brazil packages, Argentina packages, Spain packages, etc., just like when "My Love from the Star" was popular, many bars launched "fried chicken and beer packages". Online products and e-commerce products can all be operated and leveraged using the same idea.

If you want to increase the topic and sense of scarcity, you can also use some tricks such as "limited time supply", for example, the product can only be purchased a few hours before each game, just like the "Taobao Second Floor" of Taobao Mobile is only open at night.

3. Game -related interactive activities

Interactive H5 mini-games can be said to be standard in mobile marketing. For offline promotion , the content planning of many H5 mini-games can also be applied to store marketing activities . There are several ways to leverage the World Cup to create interactive games:

a. Shooting games

Users play penalty kicks or shooting games, and different discounts are given for different scores. Some team information and star information can also be added to the game content to increase the sense of immersion and topicality.

In fact, "penalty kicks" and "basketball shooting" games are a common warm-up activity offline, and can often be seen in real estate sales and large offline shopping malls.

b. Test games

There is no doubt that the screen-sweeping power of test games is unquestionable. For the World Cup, you can use various World Cup-themed questions and answers to test the most suitable star, the most suitable team temperament, the most suitable position in football, etc.

You can also use this year's online question-and-answer products to do some popular science questions and answers about past World Cups and football star trivia, and give out different rewards based on the scores.

c. Guessing game activities

The uncertainty of the game results can be added to the product promotion activities, such as "Free bill if Argentina wins" and "XX yuan off if you score a goal". These activities are gimmicky and can well graft the correlation between product marketing activities and the World Cup, which can easily attract consumers' attention and trigger dissemination.

You can also hold some game result guessing activities for every game, and use concepts such as "Prophecy Emperor" to package and promote it, and the effect will not be too bad.

d. Voting canvassing activities

Fans are like star-chasers, keen to cheer for their idol teams, and fans will argue endlessly about the topics before every world event.

Through canvassing for votes, we can promote the spontaneous spread of brand activities . I also believe that such phenomenal mini-programs /H5 cases will appear during this World Cup.

e. Live World Cup Event

Real human activities are mainly suitable for offline business promotion. For example, according to the World Cup schedule, the brand also holds a "World Cup" event, which can be a small real-life ball game, a table football game, or even a football game competition, an electronic game competition, etc.

4. Topic leverage and poster dissemination

Whenever you go to a major hotspot, there will definitely be posters from brands taking advantage of the situation. During the 2014 World Cup, excellent posters that took advantage of the situation emerged in large numbers. For example, BMW China's poster won praise from the industry.

The production of posters must not only conform to the brand characteristics, but also the personalities of the relevant characters in the World Cup and the progress of the game. Most brands usually express the theme of the World Cup through indirect methods. (Because most brands are not officially authorized)

Producing content posters tests the ability of a company’s marketing department to track hot topics. It requires topic analysis and public opinion observation to be carried out during the event. The most important thing is to act quickly, otherwise the hot topics will be fleeting. How to make the content popular and well-received really depends on the skills of the creative team.

5. General content dissemination

There are actually a lot of general content, which are more suitable for new media communication channels such as Weibo and WeChat , and are suitable for some regular thematic content output.

Representative content of this type includes: funny things that happen when girls are left out because boys are watching football, family battles for TV, quarrels between men and women because of watching football, and some tried-and-true inventory-type content, etc.

This type of theme can also extend to a lot of imaginative and humorous story content. Whether it is in the form of WeChat tweets , comics , or the short videos that have become popular this year, they are all very contagious.

Red line: Be aware of copyright risks

What brands need to pay attention to is the copyright issue. Whether it is the World Cup, NBA or the Olympics, they all have copyrights. Only officially authorized partners can use relevant logos. This is why many big brands’ posters are more indirect, just to take advantage of the popularity while avoiding copyright disputes.

In fact, there are many ways to circumvent copyright issues, such as using illustrations and silhouettes instead of photos of star players, using related words such as "football" instead of "World Cup", using copywriting techniques to guide indirectly... Carefully observing the event promotions and posters of major brands in the past, you can find some clever ways to circumvent copyright risks.

summary

The World Cup is the most watched event this year, and all major brands will do everything they can to attract consumers. Many brands have won praise for event marketing (such as Nike at the Olympics), and many brands have had good resources (even official sponsor resources) but have not received the response they deserve. In any case, there will definitely be brands that present us with wonderful marketing cases in this year's World Cup. Let's look forward to it together.

The author of this article @传播体操 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games