The NCAA has adopted an interim policy suspending name, image, and likeness rules for all student athletes. This means that college athletes can now sign endorsement deals and actually get paid. This step in the right direction will have an immediate impact not only on the athletes themselves but also on the teams and colleges.
As sports marketers shift their focus to digital platforms, the Rover Platform is helping them achieve their marketing goals. Dozens of professional sports teams and NCAA schools are using our platform to create engaging in-app experiences for their students, fans, and supporters.
Events like signing day, training camps, and home openers attract new fans and interactions. Personalized content, signings, and sponsorship opportunities are expected to contribute to the continuous growth of mobile content.
Now that athletes have been included in the equation, it's time for digital teams to seize this opportunity.
Here are four ways Rover can help:
1) Highlight Individual Athletes
Rover’s dynamic app templates provide teams’ with the ability to quickly highlight breaking news, players performances and highlights without having to increase internal resources. Making the athlete-to-fan connection engaging and fun.
2) Build Interactive Sponsored Activations
Virtual tailgates, game-day previews, and interactive in-venue fan activations can now feature student-athletes in trivia, predictive gaming, scratch-offs, and more to entertain fans of all ages. We’ve seen numerous examples of highlighting players through sponsored activations with the Rover platform, leading to high engagement on sponsored posts.
3) Create Engaging Signing Day Experiences
Introducing incoming student-athletes creates an enormous amount of hype that must be taken advantage of. Using Rover, signing day can be taken to the next level through featured stats, graphics, highlights and even interactive sponsored experiences to help welcome incoming athletes.
4) Deliver Story-Style Content
Story-Style content and student-athletes go together like peanut butter and jelly. Help drive engagement in your native app with behind the scenes images, while highlighting athletes. This provides an opportunity to seamlessly integrate sponsors into your content, without disrupting the users experience.
Why Rover?
Rover has been instrumental in assisting sports teams create and deliver personalized experiences to their fans through their apps. Recently, NCAA schools have followed this trend by shifting their marketing strategy to mobile platforms. They are integrating their brand, promoting partnerships, and enhancing revenue.
Over the years, we have witnessed a significant growth in athletes' mobile presence. The digitally adept nature of young athletes has allowed them to organically expand their personal brand and market themselves, all without compensation.
Now that student-athletes have become an integral part of the equation, digital teams must seize this opportunity for mobile engagement. Student-athletes are poised to revolutionize how schools approach marketing their athletics. Rover is prepared to assist them in delivering a flawless fan experience.