Internet marketing benefits among sport organisations in South Africa.

Internet marketing has gained prominence as an effective practice in the sport industry. This has lead to the adoption of Internet marketing by many sport organisations that intend to receive the pertinent paybacks associated with the practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate the benefits of Internet marketing among sport organisations in South Africa and to establish whether Internet marketing benefits vary across gender. This subject has not received sufficient empirical investigation in the past. A self-administered survey questionnaire was used to collect information from a sample of 164 website owners, web administrators or webmasters based in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and independent t-tests. The findings of the study indicate that that all nine benefits identified for the purposes of the study were important to sport organisations. These are; reaching out to the demographics of the region, establishing customer loyalty, reaching global markets, creating brand positioning, creating a data base of information, enabling one-to-one marketing, reducing marketing costs, reducing marketing costs, gaining website marketing experience and accessing online purchases/buyers. Among these, accessing online buyers emerged as the most important benefit to sport organisations. The result of the independent sample t-tests reveal that two Internet marketing benefits namely customer loyalty and one-to- one marketing vary across gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]