As part of our ongoing PDS Spotlight series, we have been speaking with seasoned professionals from different industries around the world. Recently, we caught up with Marat Oganesyan, Director of Business Development at Texas Legends – an NBA G League team, and the minor league affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks – to find out more about his journey, industry challenges and more. Read on!
Tell us a bit about your journey.
I’ve definitely had an interesting journey. I began school as an enthusiastic sports fan who wanted to pursue physical therapy – this was my way of getting myself into the sports industry. I was always told that obtaining a position in sports was extremely difficult, and that a medical field would be the way to do it.
As most college kids do, I switched majors after realizing I was completely disinterested in rehabbing athletes. I decided to change my path and became business oriented. This led me to a school project – we had to reach out to various marketing managers in the area and I decided to reach out to my current team, The Texas Legends. Through this experience, I obtained my internship and the rest is history! I’ve worked hard to display my abilities in order to differentiate myself from the rest of the interns.
What are the top two challenges your industry faces today?
It truly varies based on the sports organization. For instance, the Dallas Cowboys have different challenges compared to us. So, I wouldn’t call it an industry challenge. Our clientele differs from traditional sports organizations. We aren’t competing with the Mavericks, Rangers and Cowboys. We are competing with the local family entertainment market – movie theaters, bowling, top golf and entertainment venues like that. We are very family centric in regards to our game day audience.
Any digital marketing challenges?
Believe it or not, its CREATIVITY. With sports, there is so much social media competition. You always have to change your approach because if you’re not changing, you are falling behind.
What do you think differentiates average marketing from results-driven digital marketing?
With digital marketing, you can make it fun. It’s as creative as you let it be. Our traditional marketing methods support our digital marketing efforts. The two do not operate in exclusion from each other. But, we only use hard copy marketing materials to further strengthen a relationship with a contact, referral partner or client. We don’t invest in television or radio ads anymore, for example, but we will give brochures to someone who is interested in our services. Rather than taking an all or nothing approach, it appears that a multi-channel approach that leverages the unique benefits of paper with the convenience and accessibility of digital will perform best.
Any apps do you swear by?
I swear by my calendar app. Without that, I am not sure if I would continue to have a job. I am no good with time – without my alerts, I would be so lost.
The ESPN app is near and dear to me. Most people that I meet with enjoy small talk about the sporting industry, so ESPN helps me stay informed.
What are some of the marketing solutions/tools you wish existed?
This might exist, but I’ve never found one – a dynamic content aggregation and cleanliness service that can be used to feed marketing automation systems from disparate e-commerce sites through scraping front end vs. CMS integration. The power of a tool like that is it could be applied through the front end of any web portal, be trained to the product schema, and then give back that information to marketing automation tools.
For more information about Texas Legends, visit www.texlegends.com.
