Sainsbury’s misses early opportunity to build on London Paralympics sponsorship
- Added:
- Aug 02, 2010
Supermarket giant Sainsbury’s missed an early online opportunity to build on its sponsorship of the London Paralympics 2012, according to new research from search and social media agency Tamar.
Sainsbury’s recently announced its intention to become the first full sponsor of the London Paralympics in 2012 and with the London Olympics opening in exactly two years’ time (27th July 2012), both news events have brought huge spikes of interest online.
Rapidly growing interest in this part of the Olympics movement, with Channel 4 covering the Paralympics from its start on August 29th to the closing ceremony on September 9th, means that it will be a centre-stage attraction in just over two years from now.
Tamar Sports Index Vol 3 reveals the spikes in online interest around the Games, which are perfect opportunities for associated brands to raise awareness, pull people to sites, win more customers and drive revenues. The white paper also offers an SEO checklist for brands planning online marketing strategies around sponsorship.
Sainsbury’s news announcement about the ground-breaking sponsorship was extremely well received. The news was mentioned in a phenomenal number of online and offline sources but the research highlights that supermarket brand failed to build on this brief spike in online attention.
Very few sources that picked up the news provided links to Sainsbury’s web assets and the announcement from the company itself had no visible links to the Paralympics or to any online resources created by the supermarket brand, either on its consumer site or on the corporate site.
The brand harnessed social sharing sites, like Twitter and Flickr to spread the initial news but appeared to have little more to offer in terms of sustained engagement through social media through links back to relevant Paralympics sponsorship content.
A Paralympics section on the main website would have leveraged the impressive online spike in attention over the longer term, adding more value by association to the brand. With relevant sports content or even a simple official announcement page, many people would have linked back to this information and Sainsbury’s would have been seen by the search engines as having highly relevant content, which would have raise its profile on the search page returns.
Tanya Goodin, CEO of Tamar, comments: “We’re sure that the sponsorship will be a huge boost for the Paralympics athletes in two years’ time but for all brands developing online strategies associated with sponsorship, the windows of opportunity can be very small – and they should make the most of them.
“While Sainsbury’s received significant exposure for the innovative and very welcome sponsorship, the first wave of publicity lacked the marketing punch as none of the online articles contained links back to Sainsbury’s and only a few linked to the Paralympics site.”
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Tamar top SEO Paralympics tips for brands to maximise traditional media exposure |
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Make sure you have an Olympics event resource on your main website that can be linked. Use links that are relevant and stay within the Olympics guidelines. Do not use official logos. |
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Ensure that you have a link to full details of the official Olympics news release on your main site’s home page, including links to coverage. |
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A purpose built Olympics micro-site can work effectively if there are limitations around the sponsorship’s brand association. |
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An Olympics micro-site can also work to drive traffic to the main brand site as it can be more directly relevant to the campaign and so would attract more links. This would work well for longer-term event association. Be aware of the Olympics restrictions. |
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Add engaging Olympics elements to the site to attract more attention – make sure people can find easy sharing links to social networks, which is great for continued traffic and exposure. |
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Dynamic Olympics elements such as “Pick a mascot name” or “Design a flag”, mixed in with voting/social elements, will produce multiple links from blogs and online news sites (newspapers, magazines, broadcasters). The more engaging and fun these are the better. |
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Include multiple, shareable Olympics media elements and not just text. Having a single and highly visible source where others can grab the relevant URL or download/share images, videos and RSS feeds will encourage people to share and link back to you. |
Full white paper available at http://www.tamar.com/thinking/white-papers
Source: www.tamar.com
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