Brands Adjust Influencer Marketing Strategies for NIL Engagement
Student-athletes create unique challenges and advantages for brands in the NIL market. As more businesses team up with student-athletes, brands will continue to adjust their marketing strategies to engage with this emerging market.
Most student-athletes are not inherently content creators.
A common issue for student-athletes is their lack of experience in creating engaging and quality content for brands. They often rely on help from athletic staff and outside resources, such as from third party companies that assist student-athletes in content creation and ideation.
Most student-athletes are out on their own creating content for the first time.
In a recent NIL Newsstand Athlete Interview, University of Cincinnati tennis player Gabrielle Guenther revealed her experience starting out in the NIL space:
"At the beginning I struggled with the social media aspect of building my brand. Through these past couple of months I have grown more confident and have been posting more frequently and campaigning my brand through social media."
She also relied on help from university resources to get started:
"We have had NIL classes throughout this semester that have helped me develop tools. I also meet with our NIL manager about every two weeks and he helps me with discovering my core values and what NIL opportunities align with them."
Student-athletes have strong local and regional followings.
Student-athletes often have strong local and regional followings within and around their university campuses. The strong bond between student-athletes and their communities creates unique opportunities for businesses to increase their brand exposure in these regions.
"Through NIL I have discovered that I really enjoy community engagement," Guenther said. "I feel it can really involve the community with its local student athletes. I enjoy making an impact on kids while sharing my story and engaging with them."
Opportunities are now available for athletes with smaller social media followings to partner with brands because of the hyper-locality aspect of college athletics.
Brands have to increase flexibility in scheduling and communication methods.
Most student-athletes are not personally represented by an agent in endorsement deals. This can create issues for brands.
For instance, email communication is frequently a challenge for student-athletes. They are more likely to respond to texts and DMs instead. Moreover, athletes are busy – extremely busy. While student-athletes may be able to leverage better content during the season, scheduling is very difficult during this time. Instead, many brands have to adjust their scheduling to engage in partnerships during the athletes' offseason.
With growing NIL awareness, brands will keep refining strategies to connect effectively with student-athletes.
