How to use the Super Bowl (and other big events) to your marketing advantage

Do you have $5 million to spend on advertising this weekend? Do you have a team of PR/marketing gurus helping you design the most talked about ad of the year?

No? Then you’ve come to the right spot!

The Super Bowl  isn’t just for Pepsi, Budweiser and Beyoncé anymore, and just because you can’t afford a several million dollar commercial ad doesn’t mean you can’t participate in the marketing frenzy.

Small businesses all over are starting to take advantage of this event in order to promote their own products and services. In fact, the NFL has trademarked the word “Super Bowl” to stop everyone from capitalizing on their big game. Being as you cannot actually brand any of your events as “Super Bowl” parties or use the word “Super Bowl” on any marketing materials, you can still make sure your business is apart of the action. Currently, the NFL has not been able to trademark the term “Big Game” or anything of the like, so feel free to use that or a similar term if you need to create marketing materials.

As with any big event, everyone wants a piece of the marketing pie, and that piece keeps getting smaller and smaller as more people begin to advertise on social platforms.

So how do you take part? Well first off, you don’t need to go viral in order to benefit from incorporating any big day into your promotions. You just need to think smart and be strategic.

Here are four areas to get you thinking on how you can be apart of the madness for either the Super Bowl (or any other big event!)

Game Day Deals

Stores can take advantage of the Super Bowl by offering sales and deals to celebrate the day. Gardiners Furniture in Baltimore let customers know that anyone who bought furniture between Jan. 31 and 3 p.m. on game day would receive their furniture for free if the Baltimore Ravens returned a kick for a touchdown during the game.

Gardiners ended up giving away over half a million dollars in furniture – which was luckily covered by an insurance policy that the owner took out just in case.

The payout was worth it for Gardiners as they received national coverage from the stint. I love the Gardiners example because it shows how you don’t need to be a bar to run game day specials. All it takes is a little creativity (equipped with a backup plan to minimize your risk)!

Hashtags

If you are hesitant to spend money during the game but still want to be able to participate, check out what hashtags are circulating and create a post which will appropriately incorporate them. Hashtagify is one of my go-to tools when I’m doing hashtag research. After searching for one hashtag you not only see how the hashtag is performing, you can view all other related hashtags.

The downside to relying on hashtags is you will be competing with hundreds of thousands of posts. The market will become extremely saturated with content and yours will likely get lost in the mix. Using hashtags won’t hurt but you shouldn’t rely solely on this method to gain attention.

Real Time Marketing

Posting content as it’s happening is also known as Real Time Marketing (RTM) (see this Adage article for some great examples) . I genuiely appreciate some good RTM. Although I don’t believe it to be a sustainable method, it gives your business/brand a personality – something your followers love to see from a business. RTM allows you to really connect with your followers and customers and shows them that your business is essentially one of them.

With RTM you likely aren’t going to go viral but that isn’t the point. Creating interactive and up to date content will generate conversation among your customers and give you momentum to extend your social reach.

Contests

Depending on your business, contests are a great way to get people invested.  When designing a contest try to think about things that revolve around the particular event you’re designing the contest for. This example from Copycat was a contest they hosted where they ask their followers to submit their favorite Super Bowl recipes.

A contest of this nature works because food and football go hand in hand. Try brainstorming a list of items that complement the event you are planning a contest for and see what ideas you can come up with.