Building MarketPryce’s brand to stand out from the NIL crowd
At any given point in my time with MarketPryce, we had 30+ competitors.
So how did we close 77 clients in 2024?
Gen Z energy was our brand’s bedrock.
Student-athletes were the hero.
We sold relationships.
After pivoting our SaaS platform to automatically match brands with student-athletes for Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) opportunities, we raced against our runway to market it.
We only needed until September to close 77 customers. Leading brands like Bombas, Bizzy Cold Brew, and My/Mochi subscribed at price points ranging from $500 to $1,500+ per month.
On top of that? Our team of four supported one of the GOATs — Nike — through a multi-month pilot program to source student-athlete affiliates at scale.
Here are a few principles I followed to build a brand that backed up a great product.
The Arizona softball team reveals a surprise NIL deal with GOAT Fuel. This is the Gen Z energy that drove our marketing.
“For those who shape culture”
It’s a tagline that celebrates student-athletes: The culture drivers on every campus.
I made student-athletes the face of our marketing.
You can see why it works in this screenshot of our IG feed. Instead of telling brands about the power of authentic Gen Z partnerships, we showed them. And that turbocharged our SaaS sales pitch.
A screenshot from MarketPryce's IG feed.
Athletes also drove our site copy and positioning.
I wanted brands to understand athletes as people, and by extension, brand fans who shared their values: “Real Leaders. Real Book Worms. Real Makeup Artists.” These are just a few of the traits our matching algorithm used to help brands find “Quality Matches.”
Our customers loved saving time on MarketPryce, too. Turns out arduous Instagram searching, often fruitless DMs and back-and-forth negotiations were a huge pain point, so we leaned in: “No wasted time.”
Site design via Adam Baumgartner
As we built momentum, we needed case studies to show it off.
Here, too, I made athletes and their sought-after UGC the focal point.
Focusing on the founder brand
I ghost wrote for our CEO to keep his LinkedIn buzzing.
Through weekly interviews to shape the writing, we focused on his experience as a founder, the benefits of marketing with student-athletes and sports culture. His audience swelled to 5,400 and he picked up honors like Forbes 30-under-30 Sports.
These posts routinely drove warm leads to book sales calls, so we doubled down. I’d update our founder brand content calendar weekly with 3-5 posts like this one, about Nike.
But we also mixed in posts about Jason’s personal life.
This was a holistic brand building process, too. Not just another thought leader, but a human with passions who connected with his audience and prospective clients.
Launching the “Season of Gifting”
We found success driving sales and partnerships through on-campus experiences. So we came up with a way to make digital moments feel just as exciting: The Season of Gifting.
We marketed exclusive gifting campaigns around key marketing dates (i.e. Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Holiday Season) and used them as a time-based incentive to close new business.
It worked like magic. Dozens of brands closed and thousands of products were gifted.
I ran these campaigns top-to-bottom.
Taking big swings on social
I’ve got a separate case study on the Dream Deal series because it’s some of my favorite marketing work.
It engaged on social, drove real business and helped an otherwise under-the-radar student-athlete make a few thousand bucks.
This recap video shows how willing we were to be scrappy, take chances and go all-in when it worked.
Highlights
In less than one year, MarketPryce found product-market fit, closing nearly 80 brands.
Primarily through social media, we built a roster of 1,800+ fully opted-in student-athletes (with address, personal interests etc.).
My marketing strategy helped MarketPryce stand out from 30+ competitors. As the CEO put it: “I get compliments almost weekly about our branding, and that’s all thanks to Dakota.”
I worked closely with Adam Baumgartner (Head of Product) and Zach Samuelson (Lead Engineer) to make sure we marketed against our strengths. Their work along with relentless sales efforts from Jason Bergman (CEO + Founder) made these successes possible.
While I did manage a small marketing team at times, I served most of my tenure independently. The work linked above is almost entirely edited, designed, written, posted, shared and sent by me.
The UCLA women's basketball team celebrates after a content creation contest.