2022 Worlds: Another Record-Breaking Event
The 2022 IMMAF World Championships was certainly one for the books. Let’s break down how Uni4m’s lead on content resulted in our client’s most successful event in its history!
The Event
The IMMAF World Championships is an annual amateur mixed martial arts event that invites countries from all around the world to compete for gold. The six-day competition took place in Belgrade, Serbia and was the first World Championships to be held in Europe. Since the pandemic set IMMAF events back a year, the 2022 IMMAF World Championships took place in February 2023 and was promoted as a 2022 event.
IMMAF holds several continental championships each year: Africa, Oceania, Pan America, Europe and Asia. The World Championships, however, is the most important competition of the year due to the involvement of every continent.
The 2022 IMMAF World Championships was anticipated to be the biggest event in IMMAF’s history, and the Uni4m team was determined to ensure it lived up to those expectations from a digital perspective.
The Promo
Our main aims were to promote IMMAF as a pathway organisation and build on relationships with national federations and their key athletes for future cooperation.
Social media promotion for the Worlds began in late November, once the news was publicly announced. From this point, we shifted our strategy to focus completely on promoting the different continents and their nations, to reflect themes of unity. We began to push more interactive graphics, gripping videos, and continent-focused imagery to deliver content that would both encourage athletes to sign up as well as build hype around the event.
Continent-focused content is effective when each continent is given the same level of promotion. This is because when spread out over the feed, users show enthusiasm around their own countries and are much more inclined to support any related social posts. So, over time when each continent has been targeted, you can expect a significant rise in numbers.
By frequently encouraging audiences to interact with our content through unique methods such as question graphics, ‘pick 8’ games, and more, we managed to flood fans with excitement as the big event edged closer.
‘Historic’ flashbacks further fed the campaign as we highlighted some of the most significant moments seen in World Championships history. For example, when New Zealand’s Gase Sanita became the first-ever female two-time World Champion, or when future UFC star Muhammad Mokaev won a trilogy of epic bouts to bag Junior World gold!
One thing that can easily be overlooked in terms of event promotion is the projection of key information. That’s why we made sure to get all the details out to our online audience including how to register, when the competition takes place, the location, athlete categories, and the significance of this year’s event. This is usually where the web articles came in clutch!
To complete our solid campaign, our design team created unique event branding (plus an internal guide) which took a whole new approach. Powerful red and gold colours really expressed the World Championships as a landmark event, whilst an image-heavy style of assets coupled with strong graphic design elements made the IMMAF channels visually appealing overall.
And how can we forget our exciting women’s campaign? The goal here was to push more female athletes to get involved, again using countries as the core of the designs. You can check out more on that here.
The Coverage
Our team worked both on-site and remotely to deliver quality content and full event coverage. The on-site team members were pumped to be part of such a ground-breaking event in an incredible atmosphere, whilst the rest of us were ecstatic to be part of the creative process and watch the magic from afar.
Check out a behind-the-scenes look at the action!
Content was present on all major platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Each of the platforms had its own basic strategy to maximise overall reach, for example, long-form fight videos on Facebook and shorter finish clips on Instagram.
Leveraging features like Instagram collaborations helped us meet our objectives as it allowed us to tighten the bond between IMMAF and its national federations. Since the Serbian MMA Federation were the hosts this year, we stressed this when posting daily productions.
A video-heavy strategy was crucial to rack up the numbers. We really went hard on video content throughout the entire event (though it helped that there was so much fantastic action going on), working closely with the production team in Serbia to guarantee top-quality material. This involved live clipping, sizzles, interviews, and other general productions. In addition to that, we stepped it up on TikTok, creating exclusive content for the channel and attracting younger audiences. Keeping in touch with young MMA influencers also granted the IMMAF page more exposure.
BTS (behind-the-scenes) was almost a shoulder to lean on at times, particularly for Story content. This piece of our strategy, which used exclusive footage, majorly helped in gaining interactions.
Big efforts were made to push more users to the live stream on IMMAF TV and subscribe to the Tournament Pass, with higher callout frequency and direct links.
In summary, we painted the event as action-fuelled, thrilling, unifying, and totally unmissable!
The Stats
Now let’s crunch the numbers.
Through the delivery of unmatched digital content, Uni4m invigorated the IMMAF platform to elevate in the online world more than ever before and break into greater audience metrics.
IMMAF gained 6,630,067 total impressions across the board; that’s over double the last World Championships.
IMMAF gained 2,061,145 total video views, making it another area we smashed it in compared to previous events.
TikTok views in particular were about 6x higher than the last World Championships period with about 300k. Follower rate increased by 299% during the event vs. the lead up.
Around 15,000 users visited the IMMAF website via organic search function (e.g. Google) with a large chunk of that coming from social media promotion alone.
In the media and press, audience reach was 1.2 billion across 57 countries.
As for the streaming, the IMMAF TV service gained over 300,000 views during the tournament and maintained strong traffic all week.
In conclusion, our elite content team reached new heights and delivered record-breaking numbers, marking the 2022 World Championships the most successful IMMAF event to date!
Need a bulletproof content plan? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at info@uni4mbrand.com