How to Take Gold With Your Olympics Digital Marketing Strategy

The Olympics is one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. With over 11,000 athletes from 206 countries competing in 339 events all going for the gold. Tokyo 2020 has been grabbing even more headlines since these Olympic Games were the first to be postponed – ever.

That’s right, the Olympics have been canceled three times due to world wars, but never postponed. So, how do you create a winning marketing strategy during this unprecedented time?

You take notes from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the sponsors who worked tirelessly to keep fans hyped from the stay-at-home era through today.

With just a week to go before the opening ceremony, we’re examining the most powerful digitally-driven and people-centric marketing efforts around this summer’s Games. We’ll also give you a plan to help you craft your own Olympics-worthy marketing campaign using Similarweb’s digital marketing intelligence.

Three, two, one, go!

Keeping the dream alive #StrongerTogether

The Tokyo 2020 Games are now on the calendar for a July 23, 2021 opening, exactly a year and a day after the intended date, with the Paralympic Games to follow on August 24, 2021.

Instead of a few short months of advertising for such a colossal event, the IOC and sponsors had an entire year to plan for.

Leading the charge is Christopher Carroll, the Olympic Games’ Director of Digital Engagement and marketing guru, who changed the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model to DTP – direct to people.

In a period when people worldwide were only able to connect digitally, Carroll and his Olympic team developed a multi-channel content strategy that tapped into the desire for a sense of connection.

In an interview with The Drum in July 2020, he explained:

“We need to think globally but act locally, serving a personal and localized experience. If you’re a hockey fan from Glasgow and you exchange your preferences with us, we’ll be able to cater to your content preferences through our own Olympic channel as well as through our digital partnerships.”

According to Ryan McConnell, the senior vice president for consulting at the research firm Kantar, “Somewhere between half the world and two-thirds of the world are going to tune in at some point.” Meaning at least half our population are fans of some aspect of the Olympics.

Carroll’s digitally-driven DTP campaign needed to have a strong leading message and #StrongerTogether delivers just that. This promotional video was the first of many inspirational videos used to create a buzz and keep the torch lit in fans hearts:

The #StrongerTogether YouTube series tells the story of world-renowned Olympians, past and present. New videos continue to be released regularly, covering stories from Jamaican sprinting legend, Usain Bolt, and Japanese tennis champ, Naomi Osaka, to Syrian swimmer, Yusra Mardini. It also features legendary skateboarder, Tony Hawk, as he represents the community in their first-ever games.

By adding a mix of content including virtual experiences, interactive events, and beautifully crafted videos around the most successful and well-known athletes, the IOC is successfully engaging fans and fostering its digital community.

Olympics sponsors stick the landing

The challenge of promoting a postponed Olympics doesn’t only affect the IOC, the sponsors felt it too.

No one more than, Airbnb the newest company to join the golden circle of Worldwide Olympic Sponsors as the official housing sponsor.

Airbnb

What do you do when there is no housing and no tourists allowed at the big event? You give sports fans the opportunity to meet an olympian online, of course.

Keeping the spirit of the Olympics and Paralympics alive online is the name of the 2020 Games. Airbnb, the IOC, and the International Paralympic Committee teamed up to bring fans the Olympian & Paralympian Online Experience with over 100 online virtual experiences hosted by top-class athletes from all over the world representing many different sports and topics. The five days festival started on July 24, 2020, the original opening day of the Tokyo Games.

The Airbnb-hosted event also gave direct earning opportunities to athletes who hosted events. These athletes were unable to compete in 2020, so this event was a win-win-win. Airbnb promoted their brand, Olympians and Paralympians made income, and fans connected with their favorite athletes virtually.

Alibaba

Beating Amazon is no small feat, but Alibaba beat the U.S. eCommerce giant for a spot as an Olympics Sponsor back in 2017.

Alibaba worked with the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and Intel in September 2018 to launch the OBS Cloud, which is meant to provide broadcast innovations for the Games, including a full production slate in 8K, ultra-high-definition (UHD) for the Tokyo Games.

There are talks of virtual reality (VR) technology being worked into live and post-Olympics coverage available via an app.

Chris Tung, Alibaba’s chief marketing officer, stated “In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are exploring some digital solutions with the IOC and OBS, such as a venue simulation platform.”

Tung added, “We always believe innovation and technology are the two key elements we could contribute to the Games, in order to help accelerate the digital transformation of the world’s biggest sports event…It helps brands to capture opportunities that emerged from the behavioral changes brought by the pandemic.”

It will be a thrill to see what Alibaba comes up with, especially now that crowds are not allowed into the events to cheer the athletes on.

Here is a look at their powerful first global Tokyo Olympics campaign:

Visa

Visa is a veteran of Olympic sponsorships, but still faced challenges with the historic postponement. The company has been sponsoring the Olympics since 1986, but this year left the multinational financial services corp changing gears at the last minute.

Chris Curtin, Visa’s chief brand and innovation marketing officer explained to SportsPro in April 2020, “The largest of the pivots has been the Olympics. We were in the final stages of going to market with an enormous effort within Visa, and then beyond Visa with our clients, behind the Tokyo 2020 Games. We believed it was going to be, and hopefully still will be, the largest and most successful Olympics to date.”

With the original creative ads and marketing efforts halted, Curtin and his team at visa went back to the drawing board.

“A lot was planned and a lot can be reapplied in some way, shape or form,” he added.

“At the end of the day, it’s the same city and much of what was going to be part of the mix, part of the go-to-market plan for Visa, we hope to be maintained and preserved. That’s part of the reason we felt postponement – not by weeks, not by months, but by a year – made sense, at least from our perspective.”

Once the official announcement was made to postpone the Olympics to 2021, Visa extended its sponsorship offer to its athletes into 2020, it was the first major sponsor to do so. Meaning it’s 96 athletes participating in 27 different sports will compete with Visa behind them next week.

With the athletes on board, it makes perfect sense that their new focus would be the digital front, launching a new campaign called ‘Do Your Part like an Olympian.’ They asked some of their Olympic and Paralympic ambassadors to create home videos asking the world to #stayhome and stay safe.

Their original creative work was developed pre-corona when the world was in a very different place. The sentiment Visa intended for the Olympics shifted and the messaging and intent, therefore, needed to shift to better represent the role Visa intends to play in this new reality.

Their new campaign repurposed around 80% of the videos from the pre-postponement concept. Visa worked with New York-based creative agency BBDO to run this ad instead of the original one and create a buzz around the summer Games.

“It was effectively a PSA,” explains Curtin.

“It was shot at home or in a training facility on an iPhone or Android device. It was a creative construct that we had that was intended to be about their athleticism and the ease of Visa products. We just swapped out the Visa products for the COVID-19 PSA and it worked really well. Even the informality, even some of the production imperfections, just gave it a very authentic feel.”

Curtin explained, “The athletes were so cool to be willing to do this and get it. We communicated to them by email on how to do this. This was no fancy Hollywood production and it came together really well.”

This idea to shoot with phones, and show the real-world struggles even Olympians face, brings people closer to the athletes and the brand. Curtin explains it perfectly:

“I think it’s less advertising and more [about] what does your business do that can authentically and genuinely play a constructive role in the recovery, and ultimately the reopening of the world marketplace,” he notes.

“Is there a value to that role? Is there a value to that impact? How do you depict it in a way that people feel like you’re contributing to the greater good? Fundamentally it’s a business question first, and then it’s what’s the best way to bring that to market.”

“The sentiment of the world, from where I sit, is one that is eager for goodwill stories, goodwill actions and goodwill investments, and companies that are doing their part, in any way, shape or form, to help us get through this and recover after it. Those are the companies and brands that people want to root for and be affiliated with. When you’re marketing, that’s really important.”

How to keep up with Olympic-sized competition

Considering these campaigns in the context of your own brand can help you generate ideas to connect with your audience during the Olympics and beyond. But how do you know the most effective way to reach your audience in this ever-changing digital world?

The secret to finishing first is a three-step process. Similarweb has the digital data to help you get there. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Research

Want to rank for the best keywords? You have to know what’s trending and what people are looking for.

Want to make the best ads? You have to know what the best ones are out there. In honor of the Olympics let’s look at the most inspiring Olympics ads:

P&G ‘Thank You, Mom’ Campaign Ad: “Strong” (Rio 2016 Olympics)

Virgin: Usain Bolt: #BeTheFastest

Channel 4: We’re The Superhumans

You can look to ads, social media, even email marketing to channel inspiration for your next creative campaign. Similarweb provides the web traffic data to show you just how well your competition is performing. Then, using your newfound insights you can jump in the race and brainstorm ways to relate your product, service, and/or brand to the Olympics. It is one of the best advertising plays of the summer season.

2. Build a targeted seasonal strategy

Leverage organic and paid search for seasonality

Strong seasonal events, like the Olympics, are powerful times to review your keyword strategies for SEO and PPC. After all, they are both major traffic drivers.

Start with effective keyword research for organic searches and competitor analysis, followed by a review of your pages, and optimize relevant pages, blogs, reports, and white papers according to your research findings.

For SEO, it’s crucial that your pages stay focused on topics and related keywords which means your meta tags need to be relevant and your pages need to include related and relevant information around the target keyword, something like Olympics 2020 or Tokyo 2020 in this case.

Another important factor is that your content needs to be linked to other pages on your site as well as to/from other websites. As your content pages gain authority and rank over time, they will move up the search engine results page (SERP).

Try to leverage marketing partnerships to create backlinks to your site and to partner material that can be mutually beneficial.

Optimize for strong PPC campaigns

Keyword analysis for PPC is one of those critical tasks for any seasonal event. To get optimal results with PPC, you need to keep up with the latest trending keywords.

This is the time to finalize your campaign budgets and adjust your bids, so you can easily adapt and pivot during the busier times ahead (or if another coronavirus wave resurges).

Keep agile as you monitor campaign results and gain an understanding of how your audience is responding. You may also want to adjust based on what your competitors are doing to drive clicks.

Find Olympics-related keywords

You can use our keyword research tool to receive the freshest keyword-related data and identify trends before anyone else.

Can you see how you would lead the keyword competition for organic and paid traffic? The tool also lets you generate and prioritize keywords, optimize traffic share, benchmark against your industry, and more. It provided you with data from the last two years to the last seven days.

Contrary to other keyword research tools, Digital Marketing Intelligence uses actual user search queries and clicks to provide highly reliable data.

Referral sites and a display ads strategy are crucial FTW (for the win)

Why? Consumers are looking for connections to the game. Here’s your opportunity to generate more traffic to your site. A display publisher will show your display ads on the ad space of their websites. Rather than publishing your display ads by yourself, use affiliates to do it for you. The same goes for other referral sites such as deal comparison sites and review sites that can help you win a bigger chunk of the traffic share.

Simply, jump on the Olympics bandwagon and create engaging display and affiliate ads that can be shared loud and proud.

Use Similarweb’s Affiliate Research toolkit to find your best affiliates by analyzing the performance statistics of display publishers and referral sites.

You can compare relevant sites and identify the biggest traffic providers. The tool also lets you benchmark against your main competitors for traffic from significant sites.

3. Keep relevant and stay top of mind

In order to really make an impact, you need to make sure you stay top of mind for your audience. Whether it’s the Olympics, the holiday season, or another trending event, keeping your campaigns relevant and connected to your audience helps you keep their attention – whether they realize it or not.

Case in point: The Coca-Cola Company.

You might, like many, take for granted that Coca-Cola rules the soft drink market. How does the little bottle of refreshing soda stay ahead of the competition?

Let’s look at the Coca-Cola Olympics strategy to understand the global corporation’s continued marketing success. After all, according to Coca-Cola’s website, it “has been associated with the Olympic Games continuously since 1928, longer than any other corporate supporter.”

In an article by Quartz, Ryan McConnell, the senior vice president for consulting at the research firm Kantar said it best, “As much as you might think everyone knows Coke, you need to remind people. If you stop sponsorship, it might not happen tomorrow, but over the long term, your brand takes a hit, and that affects sales.”

Apart from the stage the Olympics gives its sponsors to spread their message, just the associates is a powerful brand awareness play. The Coca-Cola company probably wouldn’t be where it was today without the Olympics. If Pepsi had officially sponsored instead of Coke, maybe they would be the beverage industry leader in market share. That’s not a maybe Coke is willing to gamble away.

“You want to take the love that people have for the Olympics and use that to borrow that equity for your brand,” explains Elizabeth Lindsey, president of brands and properties at Wasserman, U. S.based sports marketing company.

Coronavirus is also creating an opportunity for these brands to be seen as not giving up on the Olympics, much like the actual athletes. “There’s an opportunity for even greater brand affinity if you don’t just abandon them,” Lindsey added.

“One of the only things that has transcended these challenges is live sports,” Lindsey argued. “And the Olympics, in particular, are even transcendent of that.”

Olympics marketing lesson from a legend

Tokyo 2020 +1, as they’re calling it, can teach us how despite planning and strategizing for some of your biggest campaigns, you need to stay agile and look to your audience, fans, and consumers to build a connection and succeed.

When asked, what are the marketing lessons he can share from his time in the role so far, by The Drum, Christopher Carroll answered simply, “You need to live agile, live the fans’ lives,” he explains, urging marketers to put themselves in the shoes of the public when making any decisions.

At the same time, he says, marketers need to adopt the Olympic athlete mindset.

“Your training phase is only as good as your preparation phase. The preparation phase is only as good as the performance phase. And your performance phase is only as good as your recovery phase.”