Five things you need to know about: Marketing at the 2010 FIFA World Cup

1. Know the fans, feel their passion.

Base your communication strategy on football fan insights. Football fans are a unique bunch, understand them, know how they consume football and ensure there is credibility in your communications. Create compelling content or a point of view that football fans will consume and share with their friends or colleagues - tap into the key talking points and ensure that your communications remain relevant throughout the tournament and flexible enough to deal with the unexpected.

2. Define your business and marketing objectives.

The World Cup is an incredible marketing vehicle rather than solely an awareness driver. Have clearly defined business and marketing objectives that your communications have to deliver against. Ensure that communications work throughout the purchase funnel and that they deliver not just on attitudinal but also on behavioural metrics as well.

3. Differentiate.

Many brands will look to leverage the event (both official and unofficial). Ensure you have a differentiated position and not seen just to badge the event. For official sponsors, exploit all the assets at your disposal, significant rights fees have been paid for the use of logos, designations, match footage etc. Use them or lose them.

4. Exploit, exploit, exploit.

For official brands that have category exclusivity, exploitation budgets should have been kept back to maximise involvement over the next four weeks. Leverage upon your official position, exploit the broadcast coverage and ensure the communications are linked to your products as well as driving masterbrand communication objectives. Bring your communications to life through all relevant channels and ensure you are maximising this opportunity across all your audiences. Think broader than just consumers, how can we exploit the assets to engage distribution/retail channels, how can we create compelling communications to motivate staff as well other key stakeholders.

Ensure you use paid, owned and earned channels to communicate your message. Paid channels will ensure the reach is delivered but utilise owned channels such as your website or brand created events to create rich and compelling experiences. Earned media could be the real winner, we know fans will watch the matches live but in between matches they will spend a huge amount of time online finding, creating and sharing football insights, data and information. Be a part of this social media phenomenon, the sophisticated football brands should be tapping into this experience.

5. So what?

There is little point in conducting any marketing activity if you don't know what has been achieved. Ensure that your measurement plan links back to the business and marketing objectives that you have set and learn from this. Sports marketing can polarise organisations and if there is no clear demonstration of the tangible brand and business benefits that have been delivered this will hinder longer term use of sponsorship or partnerships as a marketing vehicle within future brand communications.

Too often companies become emotionally involved in the asset and it's imperative that a rational ROI framework is deployed to ensure marketing accountability. Track digital communications as closely as you can and if it's not working, make sure your plan is flexible to course correct throughout the tournament.

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