In basic terms, marketing is the process of developing marketing campaigns to engage with your fans and attract business sponsors. In contrast, advertising is the exercise of promoting your personal brand through paid channels. In other words, advertising is a component of marketing.
Endorsement Deals
Imagine making a few million dollars for wearing a specific brand of shoes or wearing a specific brand of shirt and making a commercial about it. It’s definitely an attractive offer that we can help make a reality, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. It requires much deliberation, and the athlete will need to perform a number of tasks rather than just have their face appear beside products.
With endorsement work, you’ll sign up with a company for a specified period of time such as a year, and you become the company’s representative during that period. This can be more than standard advertising or commercials; some companies may require you to physically be present for the launch of the product in question. You might be needed at a board of director’s meeting to present the product. These are the part of the reason that the company will pay highly for your work and likeness.
How We Can Get You Endorsed
Most athletes will find themselves asking certain questions regarding sports endorsements:
- What can I do to get sponsored?
- Is it possible for me to get sponsorship?
- Can I get a sponsor even if I’m not technically a pro?
The answer to all of these is a resounding yes.
Whether you’re already a professional athlete or are just starting out, many different companies exist that may wish to give you cash or equipment to endorse their products while following a few simple rules. Endorsements are no easy task, but they’re not particularly difficult either. You will need to make some changes to sell yourself, however.
With that in mind, allow us to present our initial three-point plan for getting you the endorsements you need.
01. – FLESH OUT THE BRAND
If you don’t take yourself seriously, how can anyone else? Remember you’re a brand and you must know what that is and how you’re getting to the top. With no plan, there’s no vision, and without one of those, who will follow?
By having a goal, you show yourself to have great organization and planning skills — two things that companies ultimately love and crave. This lets them plan a campaign around your brand to help create synergistic buzz.
02. – MAP OUT THE CHANNELS
All brands need marketing, and you are no different. For this step, we will work with you to map out all of your existing social media aspects and touchpoints; these are the points through which your fans may interact with you, whether in person or online.
We must ultimately determine the channels and methods that work best for your sport; you can try to cover all aspects, but overcommitting to excess channels spreads your resources thin, sure to leave some fans unhappy. We will pick two or three that work best for your given free time and work to make custom content for each one.
Remember that you are the brand, so we will also grab a domain name. If you already own one, it’s worth getting all variations of the domain as well, such as firstname-lastname.com, FirstMiddleLast.com, and similar. For example, you may own MikeJones.com, but anyone could purchase Mike-Jones.com, MikeAdamJones.com, or MAJones.com. If you don’t already have a website associated with this domain, we must remedy that; some may argue that social media is sufficient, but this is a trap not worth getting into.
Social media is a noisy place where you cannot control everything. On your own website, you can place your biography, a profile of your career, and any other information that you want to become common knowledge. Not only this, but you’ll get the chance to have news articles and journalists link to your website, which increases the chance of relevant traffic and brand awareness.
03. – GET SOCIAL, VERY SOCIAL
Noisy as it may be, social media is still an important weapon to arm yourself with. Depending on how active you already are on these channels, we can exponentially increase the odds of getting you an endorsement. By gaining a decent following on social media, you become all the more attractive to a company needing a wide reach.
On these avenues, it is key to have great content here. Depending on your sport, it shouldn’t be too hard to create plenty. Video is a powerful medium that can be used on any network, for example, and fans will love to just hear about your everyday life. Remember you can also just post content to your personal website and put the link on social media channels to continue the drive in traffic.
One thing that is key, is ensuring all social media channels appear consistent and optimized for easy reading and accessing. We don’t just link to your various accounts on one page of the website; the way you post to Facebook shouldn’t be the same as Twitter. We would post individually per network at the proper time for gaining traction.
Hashtags are becoming more and more prominent as well, no matter how we may feel about them. They’re proven to get greater relevant exposure to a given subject as it reaches a wider audience. You’ll also be able to show a company recognition for its products.
Personal Branding
People trust people, not businesses. Digital communication allows companies to cross geographical barriers and reach more customers than ever before. Unfortunately, scammers can use the same avenues to contact unsuspecting victims.
Building a personal brand allows you to show your fans who you are and what you stand for. As a result, fans feel they have a relationship with you and can trust you.
Social Media
Between LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and more, the options for marketing yourself on social media are endless. What’s more, you can utilize each platform in different ways to optimize results that will ultimately enhance notoriety and hopefully boost profits.
Brand Collaborations
TCL helps Players connect with brands for free products, sponsorships, paid campaigns, and more.
Public Relations
PR in sports means promoting players through various media organizations as well as social media platforms. It aims to build and maximize a athlete’s image potential.
