The FIFA World Cup is almost here. Millions of people will be visiting the host country and watching the games online or following content related to the world cup on social media. This presents a huge opportunity for businesses to leverage digital marketing strategies to target this massive audience base.

The FIFA World cup is one of those unique events that bring a majority of the global population together on the same subject. It is a great opportunity for brands to be creative and innovative. It’s the perfect time to launch a new product or service or promote a brand-new marketing campaign. As a small business owner, you can also take advantage of this event to generate more sales for your business without breaking the bank.

From online strategies to physical brand activation opportunities and omnichannel strategies that target both channels, there are several ways you can reach your audience to create brand awareness, generate sales, and grow your business during the FIFA world cup and after the world cup. In this article, we focus on 6 strategies that can help you accomplish these objectives.

So how can your business benefit from the upcoming event? Here are some ideas:

1. Social Media Engagement

Social media activity around the world is massive. Regardless of your industry, you should seek creative ways to tap into the substantial social media activity around the world cup to build brand exposure, generate leads and optimize sales for your offering.

Social media is a great place to keep your audience engaged while they’re watching the World Cup. You can do this by regularly posting updates on your social profiles and using hashtags to connect with fans who are talking about the FIFA World Cup.

There are a few helpful strategies you should consider.

• Creative content: big sporting events are often an opportunity for brands to stray off the regular path and experiment a bit with the type of content they create to engage their audience. Working with your digital partner, invest some time in and around the event to create unique content that can enhance engagement and create a talking point around the world cup. You can experiment with memes or witty content around events at the world cup. It is crucial here to A/B different formats and ad content to establish which ones resonate most with your target audience.

• Using Hashtags: Using hashtags are a useful way to group together conversations or content around a certain topic, making it easy for people to find content that interests them. A good post should include a mix of popular, relevant, and branded hashtags. In this instance, including popular hashtags around the world cup will help ensure your content gets featured in feeds around the world cup. Investing some time into researching trending hashtags around the world cup and creating relatable posts to include these hashtags in will help ensure your posts gets the maximum reach.

• Targeted Social media campaigns: with the heightened level of social media activity around the world cup, it is crucial to utilize audience targeting tools on each of the social media platforms your business is active on, to target prospective customers with a specific offering.

This is a unique opportunity to reach your customers when you can most certainly get their attention. It is important to tailor the ad copies to be relatable to particular games or events around the world cup in order to enhance engagement and drive CTA.

2. Merchandising Opportunities:

Depending on the product or services you offer, you can implement several ideas to connect with soccer fans around the world and drive sales for your offering. Some ideas that you could implement include.

• You can create limited-edition branded merchandise around the world cup to connect with soccer fans. You can create themes around the World cup to relate your brand’s offering to avid soccer fans.

• Run promotional offers valid for the duration of the world cup or key matches taking place during the world cup. This could help create urgency and drive CTA for your offering during the world cup        

• Themed offering: If your business has a physical venue, you can offer world cup theme décor that resonates with your customer base and encourage interaction with and sales of your offering. For online businesses, you can also offer themed products and services that include offers specific to the world cup to drive CTA and generate sales.

3. Search and Display Campaigns:

There is a significant surge in searches and online activity around the world cup. This creates a unique opportunity for you to target customers based on their affinity to content around the FIFA world cup.

When you think about it, who are soccer fans? They are people like you and me that have needs beyond their love of the game. So even though the touch point could be related to soccer, you can still use this point to target your offering for other services like healthcare, professional services, tourism, and travel. This is where creative copywriting comes into play. Spending some time to establish how you can tie the narrative of your brand to the World cup buzz will help you connect better with customers and drive sales for your offering.

You can use audience targeting tools like geographic targeting, affinity, similar audience tools and remarketing tools to target prospective customers. Once prospective customers have interacted with your brand through such campaigns, you can still retarget them even after the world cup to enhance conversion from such campaigns.

4. Community Building:

Another unique way to build a cult following for your brand is to create a community around the event which can later morph into your brand tribe after the FIFA world cup. The community can be online, in-person, or hybrid to allow members to interact locally and remotely for people in other geographical locations.

Think of how your brand story can be incorporated into the world cup events via viewing parties, quizzes, contests around games, and sustainable initiatives. The benefit of this strategy is that the world cup would serve as an ideal starting point to establish the community. Once established, you can continue to develop and grow the community after the world cup with content and activities around your brand.

An established brand community is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business and keep your brand top of mind through organic outreach. 

5. Leveraging Data and Analytics:

No matter what you do or how you do it, you need to track your campaigns and social media activity both organic and paid. You might be surprised at the data that is available and how much can be learned from it.

The best way to measure your social media campaigns is through analytics software. There are many different options that can help you determine which posts have been the most popular, which followers like particular types of content more than others and more.

Once this information has been collected, it will help you improve future campaigns by giving insights into what kind of content works best for your target audience as well as who they are most likely to engage with online (and why).

6. Optimizing your Website:

If you have a website that generates a lot of traffic, you can leverage that traffic to drive more people to enter a World Cup-themed offering that could generate more sales for your business.

Use a popup for this purpose. A simple exit or entry pop-up works well if you want to direct people to your contest page. If you want to keep your visitors on the page as long as possible, use a slide-in popup or opt-in bar instead. Make sure not to add your popup to pages where conversion is important such as your eCommerce checkout page.