James Haskell is certainly on my shortlist of Rugby players to watch but more interesting is his hidden marketers talent….
Since university I noticed his nutrition brand in The Reading University Gym but more recently has been his social media content through Instagram and YouTube.
The Australia tour including clips with Owen Farrell ‘his best mate’ really grabbed the attention of the internet.
In a very recent Instagram moan James talked about his 30k subscriber success but equally the disappointment with the rate of growth. So should he be disappointed and if so, are there a few simple tactics to help this?
From a brief analysis and comparison to other influencers here are a few thoughts….
- Consistency
- Easy to compare to sport - to become the best you need to follow a strategy but on a consistent basis. This also resonates with Haskell training and current rehabilitation. Pushing content out on an inconsistent basis does not allow your audience to make your content part of their behaviour. This is most prevalently seen with YouTube but can also be used across Instagram and Snapchat. A good example is Casey Neistat whose content is engaging and consistent through Daily Vlogs, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Beme
- Data
- Who are you marketing to? No doubt James is reviewing the performance of his content. YouTube provide a superb reporting service to understand drop off rates of your videos for example, is there a common theme to this?
- Different upload times? Deloitte’s recent mobile study states almost half of 18-24years check their mobile phones at night. Maybe you could obtain precious attention span by capturing this audience at night.
- Distribution
- I believe this will be the key to supercharging James’ followers. If you combine the followers of his closest peer group at Wasps then he amplify through their networks. Equally Haskell, whether on purpose or not, was a genius to include other professional players in his content.
Most importantly, keep the conversation going and make sure your audience have somewhere to comeback too. The Haskell website is packed full of fantastic content but a decision needs to be made of where traffic is being driven (website or YouTube).
Attention spans are short so away from the YouTube ‘hero’ content, use micro blogs, snapchat/instagram stories to keep the audience engaged with a side of twitter and Facebook Live.
I am off to the Ricoh now to see Wasps take on Newcastle!
