Amateur Marketing and Management LLC specializes in providing creative and sustainable marketing strategies for athletes and sports brands. For founder Noelle Magann, however, a career in sports marketing wasn’t always a given.
“When I was little I wanted to be a zookeeper,” she smiles. “I wanted to take care of the alligators. I still do. I'm fully convinced I could wrestle an alligator, if given the opportunity.”
Given that Magann's running her own company while also studying for her Masters in Sport and Entertainment Management at the University of South Carolina, the only thing she's currently wrestling is her timetable.
Though working across myriad sports, Magann is particularly passionate about Formula One, as anyone who follows her on LinkedIn will attest.
Here, Magann talks about using social media for sports marketing, the growing trend of data ownership, the best community managers on the F1 grid, and much more…
What are the best practices for sports marketing on social media?
It depends who you are.
If you're an athlete versus a team versus a sponsor, there are different expectations with each one.
An athlete has to be really personal. And you have to make sure that everything reflects authenticity, who you are.
And then for a team, you have to stick with your brand. Teams don't reinvent their brand very often. And also, knowing who your fans are, because the team's fans are the whole reason they're there.
And then for a sponsor, you have to know that on your brand page, unless you're doing something really cool, you're probably not getting a lot of engagement. Your followers are going to be less than the athlete or the team. And you just have to know and be okay with that.
That's something I've struggled with before, helping a brand run a page and they’re like, ‘These numbers are so low, why does it look like that?’ Brands get [around] 2% engagement, and that's good. And you're like, okay, well, I've got 4%. So I'm doing great.
But overall, it's knowing who your audience is. That's where I always start with an athlete, with a team, with a brand. Who are you talking to? Who do you want to talk to?
And then once you find the audience, where are they? You're on YouTube, but your audience is on TikTok, so you might want to move. I've had athletes that are like, ‘I’ve got to be on Snapchat, that's the new thing.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, but why? Your fans are not there.’
"That's where I always start with an athlete, with a team, with a brand. Who are you talking to? Who do you want to talk to?"
Are you seeing any trends in the ways that athletes, leagues or brands are marketing via social media?
The trends change every day. I read a statistic once: 92% of the world's influencers, not just athletes, have an Instagram page. Instagram is the key to social media. Everyone's on it.
Instagram is the one pushing things forward for these younger athletes. And when the median athlete retirement age is 33, all of your athletes are really young. Doesn't matter the sport, they're all going to be young. So they're going to be on the platform that's popular with younger people.
My athletes don't like TikTok, that's not their primary platform. I tell them to use that as their creative sounding board – make stupid content. Go do you, and tell me if it does really good. Or tell me if it does really bad. And then we'll move on from there.
So it's not an important platform for them. But for other athletes TikTok is their most important.
Another trend, I think, is Twitter/X is on its way out. A lot of brands have already left the platform. If they haven't left it, they've probably stopped posting a lot. They're not investing in it as much. Unless my athlete has a significant following there I'm just like, ‘That can be like your TikTok, you can do things there.’
If they want to do written content – actually want to write their ideas out – I'd rather they do it on LinkedIn, if it's going to be professional. If it's going to be silly, I want you to do it on Threads.
Twitter has more users, however the users on Threads are higher quality, because there's less bot accounts, there's less fake accounts.
How powerful is Twitch for sports marketing, and how do you see people using it effectively?
It’s good for specific athletes. If you don't like to play video games, you shouldn't be on Twitch. Because that's why everyone's there. They're there to watch you play video games.
[McLaren F1 driver] Lando Norris is really good at it; him and his Quadrant company. They're expanding out of just Esports now, however when he started, it was him and some friends streaming on Twitch, playing games.
And I think that's really good to let people get to know you in a very easy way. They're getting to see you be casual. They're getting to see you hanging out with friends doing something. And if you're streaming on Twitch, you're probably at some point gonna get lost in the game. And that's when we really get to see your personality come out – which can be dangerous if you have a bad personality!
Can you think of any interesting or effective activations that have incorporated influencers in F1?
A good one was Red Bull. When they launched their car this year, they invited a bunch of influencers to organically push out that content. I thought that was really creative.
I'd love to see a team do it again, inviting a wide variety of influencers – let's get some Instagram ones who are fans, let's get some TikTok ones who are great at content. But let's get some LinkedIn ones who write about your team professionally, who will take a different stance. They're not going to do videos and photos.
Because Red Bull’s car is the same as last year, it looks the same. They didn't change the colors or the designs. So photos and videos aren't really going to get people excited. But writing about the team, writing about these new sponsors, what the sponsors did at the event, or videos and photos of your experience at the event, that's great. I think it's genius.
You've called Alpine the community management masters on the F1 grid. What makes them so good?
You can't just do it on one platform, you’ve got to do it on all of them. And when you reply, they need to be quality replies.
If you're just saying, ‘agreed’, heart, ‘same’, it's going to feel robotic, and it's not going to be as exciting when it keeps happening. Alpine will reply in a very personalized manner. There was one post I have a screenshot of, and the guy's name that the account was from, I think it's Matteo or something. They replied, using his name to make a rhyme. That was funny. It went viral on Threads in the F1 fandom.
From a marketing perspective, who do you see doing a good job of using their audience data to increase engagement and loyalty?
[Williams F1 driver] Alex Albon is crushing the game. He's got an app. But when you get the app, you have to say where you live, so they have your Zip code. So now they literally can put all of his fans on a map and see where they are.
That's data that he owns. When Instagram shuts down, like they did last week, you can't do anything, you can't see it anymore. But his app is totally within their control. So all the data they get there, no one else gets to have it. You can't find it any other way.
I think we're gonna see more of that. As the next few years roll out you're going to see more [doing] a newsletter or an email. They have your email now, they can send stuff to you; or they're going to have an app, a more developed website. Those are all channels they own, therefore they can manage them better.
Women's sport is going from strength to strength. Are you seeing big opportunities in women's sport now, in terms of growing their audience share, and also attracting sponsors?
I think we're seeing it, it's just going to take time. Because for women's sport, to get all this sponsorship, society has to change. That takes time.
There's an interesting stat: women's sports triple what a men's sports sponsorship would be. They're gonna give you better numbers. And Wasserman, the collective, has an amazing report on women's sports and women's sponsorship. And the numbers that women get are just insane – their engagement is higher, their fans are more dedicated, [the sponsors are] getting a better ROI. But no one's putting money in. No one's investing to get that ROI.
But once we invest more money, I think you'll see all the women's sports come to more of an equal playing field.
Visit Amateur Marketing and Management LLC here. Follow Noelle on LinkedIn here.
