CIMSPA & DMI Partnership: Empowering Sports Professionals through Digital Marketing Training

The challenge for many in the sport and physical activity sector is that the world of digital marketing can be daunting, particularly for self-employed professionals, those part of a small team or organizations reliant on volunteers. 

Kate Dale, Director of Marketing at Sports England (a funder of the CIMSPA) says: “If you’re trying to reach new participants and retain existing ones, digital marketing is an incredibly valuable resource available – quite literally – at your fingertips. But it can be quite daunting knowing how to make best use of the channels, tools and techniques on offer.” 

The leisure, sport, fitness and health sector is dedicated to improving people’s mental and physical wellbeing through physical activity. It also wants to engage with low socio-economic groups which was proving to be a challenge as they were hard to reach without understanding how to use digital channels effectively. 

“When we started exploring digital marketing across sport and physical activity, we found that 63% of respondents according to research by CIMSPA & Digital Marketing Institute didn’t have a clear plan to attract new audiences through digital channels – even though 81% said that attracting new participants was very or extremely important,” says Ali Donnelly, Executive Director of Sport England. 

“This evidence was compelling enough to create the Digital Marketing Hub to help us close the skills gap so that the sector could emerge in an even stronger place than it was prior to Covid-19,” Donnelly concludes. 

To empower their members and professionals in the sector, CIMSPA looked to find a partner that could help them create an accessible and useful community platform with a focus on digital marketing.

After exploring the variety of training providers on the market, CIMSPA partnered with the Digital Marketing Institute and Google in 2021. As a result, the Digital Marketing Hub (DMH) was born!

“Our commitment to supporting the sports and physical activity community and professionals in achieving marketing success is driven by our mission to help marketers reach their full potential. In collaboration with CIMSPA, we’re thrilled to offer a variety of webinars, toolkits, digital marketing lessons, and more to enhance their digital marketing capabilities,” says Mischa McInerney, Marketing Director at the Digital Marketing Institute. 

As part of the partnership, DMI provided CIMSPA & DMH Community with award-winning digital marketing content ranging from digital strategy to social media and email marketing, resources, lessons, and hosted webinars with industry experts.