deriving the right content strategy from nfl's tv coverage split
DESCRIPTION
America’s National Football League is one of the most popular sporting leagues in the world. How popular? Let’s just say that 34 out of 35 of fall’s most watched TV shows in the US were NFL games. We’re not kidding. The average game got 17.6 million viewers and 205 million Americans watched at least one game. The most watched NFL game drew 31.7 million viewers, involving the Raiders and the Cowboys. If that’s not enough for you, you should know that the NFL’s highest paid player Aaron Rodgers draws a salary of $43 million USD/year. If you’re not an NFL fan and you’re wondering where you’ve heard that name – he was featured in State Farm’s hit “Discount Double Check” ad. But you’re a social media marketer. What does any of this have to do with you? A few days ago I came across a very interesting statistic. Interesting for me at least. Each conversation I brought it up in, I was given very strange looks by family and friends. So I’m trying my luck with you lot. Only 5.76% of the TV coverage of an NFL game involves showing the actual game action. Unbelievable? Maybe you’ll believe The Wall Street Journal. 7.85% of time was spent on showing replays, 32.98% of the time was spent showing commercials, 35.08% of the time the broadcast shows players… just standing around, and 18.32% of the time – you’re exposed to shots of the coach, crowd and cheerleaders. For those of you familiar with NFL games, this probably doesn’t come as a big shock. Being a social media marketer often asked questions about content strategy – the first connection I made was tying back the NFL’s television content strategy to a brand’s online content strategy. What if a brand were to do the same with their content online? I stretched my imagination, and tried to correlate what each category would mean for a brand on social. The entire reason the Wall Street Journal’s report made such big news was because it was shocking that just 5.76% of the television coverage was actually about the game. About what fans tuned in for. If you content strategy was along the same lines… you’d make the news too. Not in a good way. Therefore, ideally: 40% of your content should be about real, fresh content. 25% of your content should be infographics and insights based on that content. 20% of your content should be hardcore sales stuff (gotta do it!) 10% of your content should be contextual, timely content – talk about only that which directly can be tied to your brand. 5% of your content should be around your team – around the people of the brand. What does your current content split look like? Do you agree with the split that we came up with?TRANSCRIPT
