Action Sports Industry Internet Marketing Analysis

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Internet Marketing Analysis: Action Sports Industry

In the spirit of the upcoming Summer Olympics, I'm introducing a new blog series titled "The Marketing Olympics" which will feature summer action sports industry categories such as wakeboarding, surfing, skateboarding, waterskiing and motocross. These sports have little to do with traditional Olympic sports, but they are sports I have personal and professional experience with, so a good place to start.

An Internet marketing analysis of multiple action sports categories is a very broad study, so I'll be focusing on segments that are more easily measurable with the goal of determining which brands are clearly standing out as internet marketing leaders within their industry. In most cases I believe you will see a direct relationship between each brand's overall internet marketing results and their actual market-share position. This is a bold statement since internet marketing success can be achieved without having the largest marketing budget. 

So in a nutshell, internet marketing is about creating, promoting and measuring the success of unique optimized content published online. My analysis of each industry will include measurements of each brand's website effectiveness as well as their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  It will not include detailed analysis of specific content, lead generation techniques or social media engagement stats. A complete competitive analysis can dive deeper, but for the purpose of making this series interesting, I'll keep the stats basic, but clear enough to tell who is putting forth the most marketing effort within their industry. 

Starting the series off is an analysis of the waterski industry. I have been involved in this industry for most of my career and before wakeboards existed, so it makes perfect sense that I start off here. I'm going to focus on brands that manufacture high-end slalom skis since this is where the waterski industry focuses most of their marketing effort. The brands in my study include: HO, Connelly, O'Brien, Radar, Goode, D3 and AM.

Make sure you don’t miss any of the articles in this series because I have some great data to share. So sign up to receive this blog via email or the RSS feed.

Also, I'm searching for current action sports photos to include in this series, so send me a photo or two and I'll place where appropriate with photo credits.

What brands do you think should be included?