June. That wonderful time of year when the days last a little longer, the number on the temperature gauge rises, and the rays of the summer sun start beating down on us. But, this page of the calendar also signals one other thing to me: It’s time for the NBA Finals.
No matter which two teams are in the hunt for the Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy in a given year, the Finals are almost always an exciting time (I say almost because of articles like this one). With more than eight months of preseason, regular season and playoff basketball games culminating in a best-of-seven series, the teams know that everything is on the line, and the tension is palpable to everyone watching.
With that pressure cooker of a situation unfolding right now as the Cavaliers hold a 2–1 lead against the Warriors in the hunt for the 2015 title, I wanted to lighten the mood a bit and focus on the marketing efforts of the teams behind the teams in the league. Looking back on the 2014–15 season, here are three marketing lessons you can take away from the NBA.
1. Be a content-generating machine.
Try this experiment. Visit NBA.com or any of the NBA teams’ websites every day for a week and note how much of the homepage changes between visits. If your experience is like mine has been, each new day brings almost a completely new site. These online all-stars know that videos, articles, blog posts, and more are a great driver for getting visitors to their websites, and that if they create engaging subject matter and add to their content library frequently, visitors will have more motivation to come back to the site regularly or even subscribe to the team’s emails to make sure they do not miss out on anything of value.
Does following that model seem daunting? Especially if you don’t have an army of staff members available to help you? It may seem like a stretch to maintain an ever-changing site like you find for an NBA team, and there aren’t “3 Easy Steps” to doing so. My advice, however, is to get started tackling one thing at a time, or as Calvin Coolidge said, “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”
As you produce and publish items your audience wants, you will see results, which will make it easier to justify further investment in content creation to the budget powers that be in your organization. And, to help you get started, the web has a lot of great resources that can inspire your first content-generating steps, like these four:
- “How to Become a Topic Generating Machine” from Content Customs Blog may spark ideas for what to write about.
- “The Advanced Content Marketing Guide” from QuickSprout gives a ton of guidance on structuring your content based on what you have to say.
- HubSpot’s “78 Free Templates to Make Content Creation Faster & Easier” can be used as a quick-start guide once you have determined your structure and topic.
2. Let your personality shine.
Often, the most-loved sports figures are those that show they are much more than talented athletes. Basketball fans love players that are relatable. They do their job with flair, they show emotion based on how a game is unfolding, and, ultimately, fans feel as though they know what kind of person the player is off the court and they like that person. How does an NBA player achieve that relationship with the public? Simply put, he and the marketing teams behind him put his personality on display and sometimes even have a little fun (gasp!). Here are a few examples to show what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKfK7EjAOSY
Businesses can do this, too. Jackson Rawlings wrote in a Business 2 Community post that blogging is largely about personality. “Make your words stand out by letting your own weird and wonderful characteristics shine through.” In a HubSpot blog post, Corey Eridon claimed that “best business bloggers I see create posts that pack a hell of a lot of personality punch. My theory on why this works? People like people. It’s nice to feel like you’re reading something from a person – not a content farm or an encyclopedia entry. Have some fun, infuse your personality, and allow yourself to go ‘off-brand’ for a bit.”
To sum up, aim less for a corporate robot and more for showing what makes you and your company unique.
3. Show that you have a heart
The philanthropic arm of the NBA, NBA Cares, is a huge focus of the organization. According to their 2014–2015 report, the league under NBA Cares has raised $253 million dollars for community programs and spent 3.2 million hours of hands-on service since 2006. Those numbers are impressive, regardless of whose scoreboard you are looking at. Beyond the community impact felt by those efforts, however, NBA Cares goes a long way in combatting one key criticism that the NBA is merely about greed. When you see people at every level of the NBA involved in the good of the community, any image of a money-hungry corporate conglomerate starts to melt away. But, it wouldn’t do that if no one knew about NBA Cares. So, it may sound counterintuitive, but, however your company chooses to get involved in its community, make sure you spread the news. As Phoebe and Joey from the TV show Friends taught us, “There’s no such thing as a selfless good deed.”
Why should an organization give back to its community? According to Truist.com, outreach has internal benefits, like increasing employee engagement and building a sense of teamwork, and external benefits, such as building a positive public opinion of your brand. Plus, a 2014 survey by America’s Charities showed that 68% of companies say their staff members expect them to support volunteerism. There are a number of ways that a company can show it’s a giver, but if yours hasn’t recently, consider one of these suggestions to get started.
So, there’s my quick list of a few NBA tactics your team can adopt. What do you think? Are there others you would add to the list? Feel free to add a comment below!