Football competitions: 17 ideas for interactive football marketing campaigns

Is your marketing ready for the exciting upcoming football competitions in 2022?

As you may know, two main football competitions are taking place this year:

1. The European Women’s Football Championship, played in England between 6th and 31st July 2022
2. The World Men’s Football Championship, played in Qatar between 21st November 2022 and 18th December 2022

Around the world, millions of people will be watching these two football competitions, and many brands will be trying to capitalise on this interest to build up some excitement and brand awareness for themselves. What about you? How will you use this opportunity to differentiate your brand from the competition? What will you do to attract and retain customers?

To help you to make the most out of the football season, we’ve compiled 17 campaign ideas to launch before, during and after any football competition based on the game and interactive content. 17 campaign ideas around football, ideal for:

1. Surfing the news
2. Capturing your customers’ and prospects’ attention
3. Generating traffic
4. Collecting first- and zero-party data
5. Segmenting your audience

So don’t wait any longer and read the article below to be inspired!

BEFORE THE COMPETITION

1. Build your team

Launch a team selection campaign! Let your users create their own football team and find out who are the most popular players in your community.

Participants build their “starting eleven” from a list of available players that you define. Once their team is created, participants receive a preview of their selection, with the popularity index of the players they chose. They can then share their own selection on Facebook and encourage their friends to participate in turn. It’s an easy to set up and fun campaign that not only engages your audience but also collects preference data that you can use later on.

2. Review the football rules

Help your audience to review the football rules! Create a quiz based on videos or photos, and ask your audience to identify the fault, tell you who is at fault or give you the right rule. After each wrong answer, add a box with the justification.

Challenge your participants by adding a stopwatch or by eliminating the players at the first wrong answer. An effective technique to encourage them to come back and try their luck the following days and to keep them loyal. Offer a gift to attract even more participants!

3. The competition countdown

The calendar is much more than a Christmas format! You can create one for any type of event and choose the number of boxes you want to display. We suggest that you create one to take advantage of the pre-competition and retain your audience. Every day, a new window opens to unlock a promotion, a game, a gift, exclusive info or any other content. Through the calendar, you will encourage your participants to return to your channels until the tournament is launched.

4. Earn your fan gear

Prepare your users for the competition by offering them their supporter gear! How can you do this? Via a wheel of fortune! Define the accessories you put into play, then let the participants spin the wheel to see if they have won. You can use this simple and fun format to entertain your audience, promote your products or highlight one of your partners.

5. Group stage predictions

Launch a ranking before the competition and ask participants to predict the countries’ order for each group. Implementing this campaign is ideal to both engage your audience and increase your website traffic.

DURING THE COMPETITION

1. Who’s gonna win?

Here we propose you to launch a cumulative prediction contest! Propose to your Internet users to predict the score of each match. After each game, display a ranking of all your participants. Calculate their score daily based on their predictions and, if necessary, add a subsidiary question or a draw to decide the winners at the end of the event.

This type of campaign has a great potential for virality: it creates interaction with your audience, but even more so between your participants.

2. Where’s the supporter?

Put football fans under the spotlight with a hidden object campaign! Following the same logic as the “Where’s Willy?” game, take a photo of a full stadium, spot a fan and ask your Internet users to find him among the crowd.

For more originality, we suggest you customize your photo. Here’s how it works: create a photo contest “The most beautiful supporter” before the competition. Then, take the fan with the most votes and insert it in a stadium (thanks to Photoshop). Finally, invite your users to find the most beautiful supporter in the stadium, match after match. A fun and entertaining campaign that will delight football fans!

3. Catch the ball

We propose you a shell game with a twist. Instead of inviting your users to guess which container is hiding an object, invite them to put themselves in the shoes of the goalkeeper. Let them guess where the ball will land: on the right, in the middle or on the left. A campaign you can launch before, during or after the competition!

4. Guess the anthem

Test the participants’ knowledge of national anthems through a blind test. If you work in the travel and tourism industry, this campaign can be an opportunity to offer a trip to the participants with the correct answers. For brands in the food and beverage industry, you can also use this campaign to introduce your users to the different countries’ specialities.

AFTER THE COMPETITION

1. Which player are you?

The personality test is often unanimously approved. Do like the PSG and offer your users the opportunity to learn more about themselves. The club offered their audience a test entitled “Which PSG player are you?”. Participants could then share their profile on their social media. An interesting format to collect data on your audience, which you can then exploit in your other communications channels.

2. The best training

Imagine a video contest for the best training. Offer amateur football clubs the opportunity to film their training and post it online! Then encourage them to collect as many votes as possible to win a year’s supply of beer, food or any other gift. An original way to give a voice to your community.

3. The best player

Who was the best player? Who was the best team? Who should have won the competition? Quickly and easily launch surveys among your audience to continue to engage them after the end of the competition. By asking your audience to express their opinions and preferences, you will be able to collect interesting data for future communications.

4. Celebrate the best teams

Each tournament has a long and rich history that has thrilled football fans over the years. Build an instant check quiz and test your fans’ football knowledge. Gather the best teams that made the history of these tournaments and ask participants to guess their names.

So here you have it: 17 ideas for interactive football campaigns that will allow you to drive traffic, engage your audience and collect preference data.

Interested in creating one of the above campaigns? Or want to know more about the Qualifio Engage platform? Contact us now and receive a demo with examples tailored to your industry.