As many of you know my entire career has been spent in tourism and sports. I've gone into how you can help these industries today. If you're someone that is still collecting regular checks and care to have these things once restrictions are removed you should take ownership today. I wrote an entire article about this. This will be especially hard on smaller communities such as a West Lafayette, Iowa City, Pullman or State College. Even the schools that do plan to play will take a big hit. Think: Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Clemson.
With a potential cancellation of a college football season how do I see this playing out? I'm going to put on my Master's in Sport Management hat to take a crack. 1. Furloughs of staffs with the exception of absolutely essential employees. I would expect to see this happening for any game day staff, but if there are no media contracts to fulfill this is when the layoff/furloughs could get bad. Outside of merchandise sales, how do you make money? You could go the route of some art museums and auction off some luxury pieces of merchandise that have no real place in the current or future narrative of your school. Basically hold an auction or a yard sale. 2. Cutting sports that are neither profit generators, haven't seen recent large infusions of investment nor are used to balance the gender scholarship scale. Football is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room of every D-1 athletic department. Dozens of them produce well into the eight or nine digit revenue streams. However, the truth is there should only be a fraction of the number of teams there are nationwide if we're just looking at profit margins. These major football programs also occupy 85 scholarships and need to be matched proportionately from women's sports. Some schools get clever with this by financing teams like women's rowing that is relatively cheap to operate and have major rosters. In most cases the female equivalent sports have a handful of addition scholarships as opposed to the male counterparts. What I could see happening is an athletic department placing schools into three buckets: Profit Generators, Gender Scholarship Balancers or Recent Large Investments. What I mean by this is your profit generators are likely football and men's basketball. Your gender scholarship balancers are basically what I described in the above paragraph and there are other programs that for the sake of timing have seen large financial investments int their facilities or teams. If you're a sport that doesn't clearly go in any of those three buckets I'd start to worry. Universities at the highest level only need to have I believe 17 varsity sports to keep their status. You've already seen this start to happen around the country, probably most highlights by Stanford cutting 11 sports. 3. Eating into financial reserves that might have been earmarked for facility improvements or budget increases. Make no bones about it, major college football is an arms race. Who has the biggest recruiting budget? Who has the most swagged out locker rooms? It's all about the bells and whistles to attract recruits. Without great players it is obviously difficult to win. What could credibly happen is improvement projects that aren't coming directly from a donor could get postponed or even cancelled. As this carries over into communities.....I'll take off my sports hat and put back on my tourism hat. 1. Minimal overnight stays This is a no-duh item. If there is no event to go to, then you simply won't stay. College sports is an event driven business and without crowds there is no reason to come. The only overnight options I could possibly see doing well through all of this is remote home shares and possibly resort style locations with the capacity to social distance. 2. Slow restaurants This is a no duh. Many restaurants operate on razor thin margins during the best of times. A prolonged dead period is taking the razor to the juggler of some restaurants throughout the country. When restaurants or even whole complexes (i.e. St. Louis' Ballpark Village) depend on pre-game and post-game crowds to make hay when the sun in shining it is hard, if not impossible to turn in a positive year. In university towns slow summers are often cured by busy falls. I would expect fall to be busier with students returning, but all of restrictions of not being able to move around freely to talk to other groups will be a huge hindrance. 3. Retail stores taking a beating If I ran a local popular retail store I would really double down on a social media push out to the alumni of whatever school I was at for merchandise. Really pull on that tearjerker emotion of missing out on a season. If you aren't active through eCommerce, you should get on the ball quickly. Once again HELP THESE BUSINESSES TODAY! If you're still getting paid, don't stay home for every meal or cancel your travel plans. This is especially true if you are driving to your destination. Buy gift cards from these businesses, shop local, buy from them online and share your experiences with friends.
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I'm going to take you through some of the mistakes I most commonly see in marketing, media buying and tracking results. I've got 10+ years of marketing in sports and tourism under my belt and have learned some key lessons along the way. I've cleaned email lists to being a point of a strength in an organization, doubled web traffic in an established brand, quadrupled social media followers and negotiated advertising rates down to fit $88,000 in media buy into a $40,000 budget. Note: Don't advertise in Times Square as seen above. I would get called at least once a year by someone selling the space at a deeply discounted price. It was still like $15,000. Don't fall in love with the idea of marketing somewhere, but do it because it makes sense and you will get a return-on-investment. Now onto the mistakes and lessons... Only Investing in Branding Out of the Shoot You want to get your name out there? Cool! The problem is that it takes years to build a reliable brand that people trust. You should worry more about conversions and being a cost-effective problem solver out of the shoot. Yes, it's nice to have pretty ads and be everywhere, but many small businesses can't afford that. Work on developing a small core of customers that you go above and beyond for. What is nice about this is that they will talk you up to friends, family and neighbors and it is also money in your register. Not Being Clear About Your Brand and Its Ability to Be a Problem Solver Tying into my first point you need to think about your marketing messages in a way that focuses more on how do you solve someone's problem in a more effective way than your competition. People buy things because they're trying to solve a problem or finish an errand in their life. Think through the last 10 items you paid for. I bet the moments before you bought them you thought about a problem and how it could be solved. For example, I finished up at the gym last night and wanted a quick, easy and healthy meal for a good cost. The quick, easy and good cost are low hanging fruit in a college town, but the healthy can be a bit challenging. I have a soft spot for locally owned places, so I hit up Yallah Taco for a chicken bowl in salad form. Having No Data Before You Spend Marketing Dollars You don't need a pile of money to develop insight into who your customer is. If you're a traditional business you can build a quantitative profile from your Google Analytics on your site, your receipts and your social media analytics. Odds are pretty good that they will align and each will give you a few more pieces of the puzzle. Your goal should be to go after the customer you already have and those most like them, not going after the customer you dream of having. Having No Mechanism in Place for Tracking Your Success This is super common, especially when businesses are just starting out. They will launch a website, but forget to put on Google Tag Manager, analytics tracking or tie their social media platforms to their website. They are so eager to get an ad in the market that they forget to have a clear trackable Call-to-Action (CTA) in every message they put out there. Once your money is spent you should know exactly what marketing messages and outlets created the best results for you. Double down on the best outlets and pull your money out of the bottom 25% of those that don't. Investing in Poor Outlets I'm going to go into some of my least favorite options for marketing that I've gained from 10+ years of marketing experience. Billboards There is too much to worry about here and only a very small percentage of people get this right. Frankly, I think most people buy billboards so they can see their message personally and beat their chest that it is out there. The problem is you're dealing with drivers that are cruising at 65 MPH watching the road and at best you have 2-3 seconds of exposure. This is assuming the lighting on the billboard is correct and you aren't rotating with nine other advertisers. Oh and there aren't leaves on the trees blocking views. Sports Marketing That Isn't Creative Sports marketing with teams/leagues is expensive. I'm talking like 2x-3x what you would spend in the open market for comparable ads. Sports marketing sales teams sweeten deals by throwing in free food, a private event or some tickets to make you feel special. They'll make claims like "Oh, our fans collect the programs and hand them around to 10-12 family members." There might be one fan where this is true, but certainly isn't the normal experience. Like most businesses their goal is to make as much money and build value-added without spending any dollars out of their pockets. Listen, I've worked a good portion of my career in sports and there are people that sell sports marketing opportunities correctly and those that don't. Most people fit into the second group and do what other places do, which made sense 15-20 years ago. Those that do it well look to add to the fan experience while making the sponsor feel like the key to making that happen. Think you're invited to the coolest party, but they just need another case of beer to take it to awesome. The best way to get the most out of your sports marketing investment is to never tell the rep how much you're willing to spend, but just that it is over their minimum investment. They'll always call and say "I was thinking of you when this opportunity came up", because they know you have money and you're really like call seven after the other six turned him down. Make them go fishing over and over. If you're going to go down this route make sure that every little piece of the deal should be a home-run if executed correctly. I had a lot of success with ticket giveaways through social media that built up my email marketing lists. Sponsor a memorable segment on the video board (i.e. official hype video), a very visible addition to the game experience that might not be possible without your investment and of course take advantage of tickets and food expenditures to woo potential clients. You'll get some pushback from sales reps telling you that this costs them money. That might be true, but it won't be nearly as much as the check you're writing. TV Ads That Can't Be Paused To Take Down Your CTA I'm not sure why investing in TV for homes that can't pause your message is still a thing. There are some people that can go back and watch your message again with cable, but it isn't the majority of people. It takes time to find a pen and paper to write down a CTA. This is why you should focus more of your effort into the YouTube and streaming side of things. Before you invest you should be 100% sure on the genre and audiences of the shows you will be running during. You don't want to be a meat salesman running ads during a show about vegetarians, just because you got a good rate. Clickable ads from say YouTube make tracking the easiest and allows you to refine your efforts. Radio Ads Much like the TV ads, no one pulls their car over to write down the CTA from a radio ad. If you're going to spend money on radio ads it would be wiser to do so with a custom web address only used for radio ads. There is a long-standing debate on how many people actually still listen to the radio when things like iTunes, Spotify and podcasts are gaining more of the monopoly on our ears. Print Newspaper Ads You can do well in newspapers, but it is here one day and gone the next. When you're talking to the sales rep make sure you ask them what their circulation is and how many papers go unsold or undelivered. It isn't unreasonable to ask for a discount off the sales rate comparable to the papers not seen. For example: they have a claimed circulation of 100,000 and 5,000 come back unsold from news stands. Ask for a 5% discount at the minimum. In this day-in-age, you can probably do a lot better than that as most companies are digital heavy. Something that news sales reps I've dealt with don't do that they should is comparing the ability to easily see and take advantage of the CTA without needing to pull over or pause an ad. When working with sales reps they often represent a family of newspapers or magazines. They'll often try to up-sell you to several days and outlets. I wouldn't enter an agreement with a newspaper unless I was confident of my data I gathered from a few steps above. Investments in Poorly Maintained Email Lists Email lists are valuable, if used correctly and well maintained. The lists should be earned and built honestly as well. Here are the four questions you should ask someone selling an email marketing campaign: 1. What are your total number of subscribers and how were they added? You don't EVER want bought lists. That goes for your email efforts or paying for advertising through an outlet. It isn't unusual to be approached by a shady character willing to sell you 50,000 names and emails for a few hundred dollars. The problem with this is they send this message to about 2,000 potential buyers and maybe get 60 dumb enough to buy into it. These poor people get bombarded with 60 emails they didn't opt into and it gives your company's reputation a bad bruise. You can legally only send to this list once and it isn't worth it to do so. Work with a company that is the right context for your audience and did it the hard way of building a loyal list slowly. 2. What is your list's open and click rate for a typical email? You should be paying for the number of people that open an email, not their subscriber list total. If they have an incredible low click rate (think 2% or under) it is probably because their email presentation is poor and no one takes the time to read them. 3. How often do you clean your list and how do you go about it? Traditionally, I've unsubscribed anyone that hasn't opened any of my last 10 campaigns. This keeps my open rates high, click rates high and keeps me in people's inboxes. A good email marketing relationship should be a two-way street of you providing good content and them rewarding you with engagement. 4. How many other advertisers go into this email? You don't want the email to be too watered down with messages from sponsors. You want the email to be of value and not interruption to users. Banner Ads That Aren't Re-Marketing or Fit That Site's Context The only time people should see a banner ad from your brand is if they're been to your website before or your brand goes hand-and-hand perfectly with the website they're seeing it on. Don't fall in love with buying 5 million ad impressions, because it sounds awesome. That is for the big boys that already have widespread name recognition. An example I have is I worked with a blogger that was a perfect fit with my brand and my click-through and conversion rate was as good as anything I invested in. Within a couple of years this blogger switched over to a Google AdSense style of banner ads to save time. Now their visitors were seeing ads for Tide, Quilted Northern and my brand which diluted my message and took away from the credibility of their site. With re-marketing you are just sending them a reminder to keep top of mind. It is a really affordable option and gives you another touch point to bring people back to your website. The equivalent of these kind of ads is the subtle wave from across a busy street when you see someone that you know walking the other way. They probably won't come and talk to you, but they'll be thinking about you for a minute or two. Not Replacing the Weakest Link in Your Sales Funnel
There should be clearly defined steps in your buying process. Most people consider it "awareness", "research", "consideration"and finally "purchase". Awareness should be your audience built by the demographics that you compiled from every data source that you have available to you. The truth is most people won't get beyond awareness. If you have a monster drop-off between awareness and research you might have a problem in your messaging or outlets. Next comes research. This means they're likely on your website gathering information on your brand. If they aren't satisfied with the information they're presented or the experience they aren't coming back no matter what you do. However, this is when you get people into the re-marketing funnel using banner ads (if your click rate is low, they probably got what they needed or had a bad experience) that hopefully gets them to return to do some more digging and get them to the next step of.... Consideration. You're in the finalists for where they want to spend their money. They're looking at individual items or prices to see if it fits in their budget. In most eCommerce businesses this leads to very specific product re-marketing and why you see that pair of shoes you were looking at on Dick's Sporting Goods show up 10 minutes later on Facebook. This step is pretty easy, because if people are on your product page and not adding it to a cart or they're leaving an abandoned cart or they get frustrated with the payment process you can look to fix that. Lastly, you have the sale, which gives you a true return-on-investment (ROI) on your advertising spend. You should know what step causes the greatest damage to a potential conversion and look into fixing it. Eliminating the Bottom 25% of Your Marketing Investments A lot of times businesses go on auto-pilot doing the same thing every single year and never audit how their marketing is going. Either they get busy with other tasks or they don't know how to track their marketing efforts into sales. Sometimes the lowest performing marketing outlet might be the nicest man/lady you know and you feel bad pulling your business. Sometimes it is as simple as saying "Hey, it didn't work this way, what other opportunities do you think would work better? Always look to cut your bottom 25% of marketing ads and double down in your top 10-15%, but leave some cash open for new opportunities. You Should Be Able to Trust Your Sales Rep Trust comes with time, just like anything. I've always been suspicious of companies that send me a new sales rep every six months. What this tells me is the company either pays poorly, treats its employees poorly or is just badly managed. Basically the Donald Trump White House Administration. When I have to introduce myself to a new sales rep every year, I'm not investing with that company, because it is a red flag. When you see your sales rep coming you should recognize them and be excited to see them. The sales reps that last the test of time are the ones that do what they say they are going to do, go to bat for you with their organization and check in with you regularly. It isn't about the short-term what money can I get from you now feel, but the I want a lifetime relationship that we can evolve. Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate I grew up in spending a ton of time in flea markets as both and buyer and seller. By the age of 18 I was an absolute veteran of the wheel-and-deal. To this day I love negotiating, but not everyone is like me and thinks finding the best terms is a confrontation. What I've learned is that both parties need to be relatively honest in their approach and have their interests on the table. Most times the seller is trying to maximize the money they can take from me, where I'm wanting maximum media value and ROI. An example of something I do is I will email 8-10 sales reps that I have some interest in working with and tell them "Hey, I have $10,000 to invest what is the best package you can put together for me? I've emailed a handful other finalists I think could be a good fit. You have until Friday at noon to email me your proposal." What is often the truth is I really have about $30,000-$50,000 and I'm looking to take the best 3-5 deals of the 8 or 9 I get back. This is an example of how I would regularly get $75,000-$90,000 in media value for the price of $30,000-$50,000. You can do this at a lower scale and frankly it is kind of fun. Define your goals for the website Why do you need a website? Is it to tell your brand's story? Do you want to use it for eCommerce and online sales? Is it to create qualified leads that you want to walk through the door, such as a restaurant? These are all important things to think about before you even explore the prospects of building a website. It is wise to build a wish list of goals and have micro-objectives that build up to that goal. Build a site map that funnels visitors towards your goals What is a site map? That is a great question that the average person might not know, but every website you have ever been on has one. I'm a huge fan of GlooMaps when it comes to creating a site map for a new project. More or less, take what you did in the step above and build them into an online with the goals being most important and micro-objectives being under the goals. Below is a quick example I created for a restaurant. A piece of advice I have for this is to keep pages clean and uncluttered, but give your visitors to the website no more than 5-6 options on where to click next. It should be easy to navigate. Find a content management system that you're comfortable with There are a bunch of content management systems out there. Some of the most popular are WordPress and Wix. Obviously, I've chosen to make my website using Weebly because I have brand loyalty with a company that was founded at Penn State, my alma mater. If there are two pieces of advice I have for picking a platform it is make sure you're comfortable using it and that there is a good support community of users facing the same issues and problems. You will find chat boards, YouTube videos and Q&A articles that will answer most, if not all of your questions. Match your website's look to your brand A brand is much more than just a logo. It is people, culture, a feeling you get, history and much more. Your website should be a reflection of what a customer should expect when they work with your business. That includes the colors found in your logo; the tone that you most use with customers and have content that best sells your product or service. An example of this could be a baseball team in a historic stadium. The website could make subtle baseball references like instead of an arrow you scroll around with a baseball and click on bats under the section of the website you want to go to. There can be many subtle and not so subtle references to baseball terminology as you travel through the website. Maybe when you land on the homepage there is a static beautiful view of the packed ballpark to greet you. Also, the text on the website matches the team's colors. Purchase a short URL that is easy to remember The fewer total letters, the better. You need it to be unique to your brand and location, but not be a mouthful that someone driving along in their car can't remember. I really recommend that you use a .com at the end of your address, because I think it is the most common ending in comparison to .net or.org or .us or a host of other options. Remember that this will be on most, if not all, of your marketing materials, so keep it simple. Make sure 2-4 people have access to make changes This is vital if you have a company with turnover or heaven-forbid an accident occurs that knocks the person that manages your website out. Have a clear hierarchy of who handles the changes and stick to it, but also make sure that you have safety in numbers when it comes to checking email, log-in information and checking your website's analytics. Build in Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels at the minimum
Speaking of analytics, the first thing you should do to the back-end of your website is install Google Tag Manager. What is Google Tag Manager? Think about it like it is a filing cabinet with all of tracking information for people visiting your website. What is nice about Google Tag Manager is that you only have to put a couple lines of code on your website and you can manage all of your relationships with Google Analytics (which tracks your website visitors), Facebook/Instagram pixels, the ability to re-market to people that visit your website. Setting up GTM goes a long way to building a smooth marketing process. Populate your website with relevant copy, but keep it simple You've got your site map built; the content management system (CMS) chosen; the site matching your brand; you've got your tracking code installed; a clear hierarchy of who does what and now it is time to fill the website with content. This can be a mixture of videos, pictures, graphics, copy or audio. You want to get your points across, but also not bombard your web visitor with so much content that it frustrates them. A good rule of thumb here is to have about 150-200 words on each page of your website. If you decide to go the adding a blog route, which I recommend for search engine optimization purposes, then shoot for 800-1,000 words on those pages. I go into that in another article. Test your site Before you start publicizing your new website make sure you try it a variety of settings: desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile. In addition to that make sure you know how it works on browsers like Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome to make sure the experience is consistent. Launch Your Site Now that you feel confident that all of the above steps are taken care of you can hit that "Publish" button and start getting people to your website, signing up for your e-newsletter, follow you on social media and most importantly spend money in your business. From here it will be about driving traffic to your website so that you can track it and turn it into conversions. From here you will have to decide a marketing budget to determine how to get people to your website or back to your website to turn into conversions. That is where your Google Tag Manager tags such as Facebook, IG or Google Ads comes into play There is nothing more frustrating than putting together a beautiful 1,000+ word piece of content only to see it never go anywhere. I don't want this to ever happen to you or the hard work that you put in. There is a saying that for every minute you spend producing the content you should spend four pushing it out. The same generally goes for investing funds to advertise your blog. I'm going to take you through the recipe that helped me grow blogs over the years.
Step 1: Research Topics and Build a Content List I have a few tips that I use to figure out a content list to work on or farm out to freelance writers. The first tool I invest in is Buzzsumo. What Buzzsumo does is I can plug in 30-40 competitive blog websites to find out what is resonating with audiences through social media. The cost for a basic membership is $99/month for a for-profit or $49/month for a non-profit. I typically run this exercise about once a month to see what is working by season. If it is working for one audience, it will probably carry over to mine. The second thing I do is figure out through Google Search Console what people are searching for. More often than not you have the content that people are already looking for, but occasionally you will find 4-6 topics to add to your Buzzsumo list to work on. The third tactic I take is simply following many of my competitors through social media to see what has exploded for them for myself. I make note of what works and whether I have something similar. Step 2: Produce the Content, Preferably With Evergreen Topics What is evergreen? It means the topic has no particular timeline to it. It could be something like "Best Hiking Trails Near Pittsburgh" rather than the timely one-and-done "Best Trails Near Pittsburgh in April 2017" You can go three routes with producing the content: doing it yourself, guest blogging or hiring freelancers. I have done all three, so let's go through the pros and cons of all three. Doing It Yourself: Pros: You will have it just the way you want it. Cons: Time and Talent. Writing the content yourself takes up a lot of your time and you might not be the most talented writer. Guest Blogging: Pros: I really like guest blogging and the concept of cross-promotion. You get an expert take and you get to hit two audiences when promoting the content. Cons: They will negotiate expectations. This could be money or promises for pushing out their content. Hiring Freelancers Pros: You save a bunch of time and they are often more talented. Cons: It can get expensive pretty quickly. $100-$300/article is usually a pretty fair amount. Step 3: SEO Make sure to create a title that plays into the way people are searching. Don't try to be cute using nicknames or trendy copy. Take yourself out of your shoes and put your feet where the person sitting at the Google search bar is. Make sure your title is short and to the point, preferably in seven words or less. Also, your secondary supporting evidence on why someone should click on your article over others should be made in the meta-description in 1-2 sentences. Step 4: Push It Through Social Media Now that you've created the content and made sure it will be attractive once it is indexed through Google, it is time to plan out the push for your content through social media. The first step I started with was my Facebook audience. Typically with an article I would see whether it was seasonal or not and then schedule out posts in advance. Many brands make the mistake of only publishing a piece of content once on Facebook. In reality, each post is probably only hitting 6-10% of your audience at best. You should look to space out your content and post it 4-6 times in total with about 2-5 weeks between each post. You'd be surprised how many times you hit new audiences that haven't seen that particular article before. I'd recommend throwing $5+ behind each article, just to fuel the fire a bit. My next step is usually Twitter. The lifespan of a post on Twitter is about an hour at best. You should look to post each piece of content on Twitter a minimum of 10x. Space is out about once every 1-2 weeks to hit new eyes. Make sure there is a visual to make someone stop scrolling. Instagram is tricky, because organic posts don't allow for links. There are a few routes you can take with this including posting your content in Instagram Stories, posting a regular post referencing the link in your profile or simply paying up $5-$10 to hit more eyes and embed a link. LinkedIn is another route you should take, particularly if your business has a lot of partners. I've found that LinkedIn usually does the best job of hitting a number that is close to my follower count, so don't forget about this route. If you have employees willing to share it out, even better. There are other routes such as Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest you can use to push out your content. Step 5: Email Newsletter Every single piece of content with meat on it you created should go out to your email newsletter list. Throughout my career I've built and managed several lists with open rates typically in the 28%-40% range. I try not to email anymore than once every other week and ideally just once a month. However, in every email I link every piece of content that was created within the last month. These are some of your most engaged fans, so keep feeding them content. Even if these same people follow you through social media, there is still a good chance they missed your content. Step 6: Contact the Partners You Mention Something that should have been mentioned in the social media aspect of this article is tagging every single partner that is mentioned in your content in your posts. It will open their eyes to you giving them some love and it is likely they will at minimum throw you a comment or like, but most of the time they will share the content to their audience. You should link out from your content to their website, so that when they look into their Google Analytics report they see that you are sending referral traffic. Making those businesses aware of what you're doing will spread your message without spending a cent. Step 7: Refresh Your Content This is usually the step people most forget. A lot of times businesses create the content, but never recycle it by updating and building on content they already have. Even worse, they end up creating content that rivals or competes for traffic with something that already exists.You should look to update your content at minimum once every six months. You often get more value out of updating content that already exists than you do with creating new content. With this in mind, you shouldn't ever have more blog posts than you could possibly ever dedicate time to updating. Step 8: Create Supporting Visuals for Your Most Successful Pieces This could mean commissioning a video or creating an infograph, but find ways to keep your reader engaged and sharing your content. I very rarely create visual pieces before I know the success of a traditional text piece. I want to know there is demand so the dollars and time I spend in creating something visual doesn't fall on an empty audience. |
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About the AuthorAndy Rupert is a Penn State (B.A. John Curley Center for Sports Journalism 08') and a Southern Miss (M.S. Sport Management 09'). He has spent his whole career working in sports and tourism digital marketing and metrics. |