Why TikTok offers so much potential for rightsholders
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Sports now have no choice but to embrace TikTok or face losing the battle for online attention
If you’ve ever fallen down a TikTok rabbit hole, you’ll know just how much influence this social media platform can wield. The average TikTok user spends almost an hour a day scrolling through the app – making TikTok a hugely valuable marketing tool and offering rightsholders appealing opportunities to use it as an additional channel for pre-existing partners.
Especially with the GenZ, sport clubs and brands need to reach the target group where they are active. They have to ensure to engage on eye-level and understand what this generation is looking for, if they want to succeed.
Mara Kottke
Published on October 24th, 2022
In this Insight:
Young target group on TikTok
The Gen Z target group (aged between 14 and 21) is of great relevance to rights holders, and TikTok is by far the most effective way to reach them. In other words, rights holders can use this platform to create brand awareness and a digital communications channel with their community. These activities focus on the faces of well-known individual athletes, in particular, who generally have a greater reach than the clubs or brands behind them. This is because TikTok users set great store by personalisation. Instead of the standard clips of matches, they prefer personal insights or challenges posted by well-known players.
These are the TikTok user
Sports is booming on TikTok
Last year, TikTok accounts held by sports leagues saw the greatest growth, ahead of other sectors like news, streaming, TV or entertainment. Individual sports teams were able to identify this positive development at the start of the year, boosting their monthly content output by 63%, on average. With its strong positioning as an entertainment platform and a highly engaged, young audience keen to discover the next big thing, TikTok is the perfect channel for rights holders in the sports industry.
Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA’s Marketing Director: ‘We’re delighted to be working with TikTok again, this time for the biggest UEFA women’s EURO of all time. TikTok’s football community, comprising teams, fans, makers and clubs, is constantly growing. We’re delighted to be using unique, creative content to showcase the summer’s most important sports event with some of the best female footballers in the world. It’s an exciting time to be a football fan.’
Future of TikTok in Sports
Growing numbers of teams and brands from the sports industry have discovered TikTok for themselves. And athletes are also expanding their accounts on the platform to support their marketing. It looks like this trend is not going anywhere any time soon. On the contrary: we will see even more content being brought to the platform in the near future. TikTok is likely not going to be a flash in the pan but will rather become a core component of the marketing strategies pursued by rightsholders and sports brands.
"TikTok’s football community, comprising teams, fans, makers and clubs, is constantly growing. It’s an exciting time to be a football fan."
Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA’s Marketing Director
