How Sports Clubs And Organisations Can Counteract Modern Content Challenges

How do you approach the modern expectation of constant content across multiple platforms with a limited team and resources? Infront X believe they have the solution.

The world of content is becoming more and more challenging for all involved in it. There is now an expectation for most sports organisations to push out a tremendous amount of content on a daily or weekly basis.

With that expectation comes the challenge of resources, a pain point highlighted by Damian Browarnik, Chief Innovation Officer of Infront X and Managing Director of Infront X Lab,  during our Content & Distribution eMasterclass in August.

“There is the need to create high quality, engaging content. That’s costly and time-consuming, many teams don’t have the necessary funds and time to do this.”

A couple of years ago, Infront Sports and Media launched iX, which was recently integrated with the company’s innovation branch, Infront Lab, to create Infront X, a full service, digital media solutions, business and sports tech research and development unit.

“Creating content in today’s sporting environment and for today’s fans is a hard task,” Browarnik explained. “You need to cater to different languages, age groups, preferences and so on. But before content teams can even think about tailoring content, they have the issue of resources.

“There is the need to create high-quality, engaging content. That’s costly and time-consuming, many teams don’t have the necessary funds and time to do this. But there’s also the issue of how many platforms there are that fans expect content from, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and others…

“This also leads to the issues of workflows and analytics, teams want a better view of this but do not have proper platforms. You need to plan properly and then replan according to the performance, which is a tedious and repetitive process.”

So when all of this is clicking, how does it benefit the organisation overall?

“The goal here is to reach what we call content maturity,” he explains. “Having a high level of content maturity means that you can create consistent content where you can leverage the technology to improve your workflows. You can then share your content across all platforms to fit your fans, and then you can provide sponsors with the content to enable monetisation.”

Over the past eighteen months, particularly during the main Covid period across the summer of 2020, creating content for all sporting teams and organisations was even more vital than ever, and the ease at which they had the ability to do so was critical for the business.

“Content X automatically generates content plans and campaigns. It’s then able to produce relevant highlights, including graphics, and even writes the copy for them.”

To try and provide a resolution to this content issue, which affects many around the sports industry, Infront X Lab developed Content X, a new product which eases the content production workflow. 

“Content X automatically generates content plans and campaigns. It’s then able to produce relevant highlights, including graphics, and even writes the copy for them. So you have everything in one place and then all the content team has to do is to review the post and approve it. If they want to tweak it a bit they can, but automating this process will save several hours a day.”

The modern day, worldwide nature of sport also plays into this. Teams and leagues now have access to not just their existing, local fans, but potential new ones from all around the world as well. There is only one drawback: it means operating in different languages and spending additional time or monetary resources to hire a person or team to create content for those markets.

Browarnik noted that the platform is able to not only facilitate the creation of content in different languages, but organisations can use key players or influencers from those countries as advocates who share the content to create better engagement. The ease at which both the organisation itself and partners can share content from the system simplifies this process even more.

“This is a tool that allows you as the content owner to share the content with your partners. It could be with broadcasters, with players, sponsors that have the rights to share or even influencers,” Browarnik added.

Of course, once this has occurred, another key part of content and social media that is extremely valuable for organisations is analytics, with sponsorship deals being monitored to ensure they are producing the greatest value possible for brands.

The difficulty within this comes from the fact that there are many numbers and figures across  numerous platforms to monitor, which is yet another aspect that takes up a great deal of time. Brownarik noted that Content X is able to provide a solution to this issue.

“This analytics area is key. You can determine how effective each post is based on the channels and discover the true media value behind the content.”

“Once you share your post you’re able to track the content that was shared by your partners and then check the performance to see whether the value is there. There are additional tools within the platform that will allow the content owner to really see what’s going on and they can even reply directly [to fans] from our platform.

“This analytics area is key, you have the holistic view of the performance and you can track all the content, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. You can determine how effective each post is based on the channels and discover the true media value behind the content.”