Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is a prof­itable av­enue for busi­ness­es in­volved in the sports in­dus­try (Per­rin 2012). Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts or brands through var­i­ous chan­nels of elec­tron­ic so­cial me­dia (Twit­ter, Face­book, Youtube, web­sites, on­line games, mo­bile apps) which al­lows busi­ness­es to analyse their mar­ket­ing strate­gies to de­ter­mine which is most ef­fec­tive in re­al time (Per­rin 2012). Through so­cial me­dia, sport rights hold­ers can en­gage fans in new com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels which can be mea­sured and val­ued as a new com­mer­cial op­por­tu­ni­ty with spon­sors (Miller and Cave 2015). Ad­di­tion­al­ly, busi­ness­es that get in­volved through spon­sor­ship and so­cial me­dia pro­mo­tions, al­so ben­e­fit from in­creased brand affin­i­ty and loy­al­ty (Miller and Cave 2015).

So­cial net­works are the short­est, fastest and most di­rect way to reach your au­di­ence through ath­letes who, in that spe­cif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, have more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any­one. Ath­letes pro­vide their spon­sors with a con­sumer base of mil­lions of peo­ple who every day are in­ter­est­ed in what they do, what they feel, what they con­sume (Ba­con 2015; Miller and Cave 2015; Jo­han Cruyff In­sti­tute 201). Ad­di­tion­al­ly, so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing saves ath­letes time and has­sle from hav­ing to be di­rect­ly in­volved in tra­di­tion­al ad­ver­tise­ments.

In 2015 Barcelona was the world's largest sports club on so­cial me­dia with 150 mil­lion fol­low­ers (Cave and Miller 2015. In 2014, Barcelona and IMG sport mar­ket­ing agency ex­am­ined the val­ue of so­cial me­dia added to its shirt spon­sor­ship and in one week­end it had a 61 mil­lion web im­pres­sion of the Qatar Foun­da­tion's spon­sor­ship of the club's shirts. Ac­cord­ing to its Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of brand strat­e­gy “We found there was an ex­tra­or­di­nary amount of val­ue that the shirt spon­sor of Barcelona was re­ceiv­ing on so­cial me­dia, which wasn't re­al­ly fac­tored in­to the spon­sor­ship,” (Cave & Miller 2015). The of­fi­cial stat­ed fur­ther that “Our work there told us that so­cial me­dia is the next great fron­tier for sports spon­sor­ships.” (Cave and Miller 2015).

For­mu­la E Cham­pi­onship mo­tor rac­ing for elec­tric cars al­so ex­pe­ri­enced a pos­i­tive im­pact through the in­tro­duc­tion of a Fan­Boost, where fans on­line vot­ing im­pact­ed on the struc­ture of the race (Cave and Miller 2015). Ac­cord­ing to CEO For­mu­la E “Through so­cial me­dia, fans are hav­ing a re­al im­pact on the re­sult of a race. It's no longer 100pc about the skill of the dri­ver and per­for­mance of the car. It's al­so about fans' in­put” (Cave and Miller 2015). Sim­i­lar­ly, the PGA Eu­ro­pean Tour's head of tele­vi­sion, dig­i­tal me­dia and tech­nol­o­gy, 'We now have a di­a­logue with the fan­base. We nev­er had that be­fore. We were just a busi­ness-to-busi­ness in­dus­try sell­ing our con­tent to broad­cast­ers and rights to spon­sors.” (Cave and Miller 2015). Through the use of dig­i­tal plat­forms, fans ac­quire un­for­get­table ex­pe­ri­ences which al­lows them to share their own cre­ative brand-re­lat­ed con­tent in the cre­ation of fan­ta­sy leagues and on­line games.

It is ev­i­dent that dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing of­fers tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties for sports spon­sor­ship- in­crease rev­enue, seg­ment­ed mar­ket, and greater dy­nam­ic fan base. Its costs are less com­pared to phys­i­cal medi­ums and it al­lows spon­sors to cus­tomize prod­ucts to meet seg­ment­ed mar­kets based on dif­fer­ent so­cioe­co­nom­ic de­mo­graph­ics.

"I don't feel it is nec­es­sary to know ex­act­ly what I am. The main in­ter­est in life and work is to be­come some­one else that you were not in the be­gin­ning." Michel Fou­cault