Top Tips for Effectively Marketing and Promoting Your Sports Club
If you are running and managing a sports club and would like to contribute to your community’s success through your club, you would have to deliver a single thing: growth. But in order to achieve growth, you would have to be smart regarding how you handle your budget and, more importantly, how you handle your time. You also have to pay particular attention to how you recruit members and retain them, which is definitely one of the surefire ways you can achieve growth as a sports club. But with this comes a definitive marketing and promotional strategy as well. How, then, can you effectively marketing and promoting your sports club? Here are some top tips.
Know your top Ps
In modern times, there are some fundamental marketing principles you should remember. These include the top Ps, such as your product, your place, your price, your promotion, and your people. When it comes to product, what are you selling to prospective members? Your product is essentially your club, but it will also include such aspects as your venue. For place, think primarily about your grounds or facility, but it can also be places where you can hold fundraising events and where you can do some marketing. For price, consider your fees – would you offer annual memberships or monthly fees? Promotion involves how you are planning to get in touch with your audience. What are your prospective channels for promotion, and what tone should you choose to impart your message? The people are, of course, your current members plus prospective individuals you are targeting, such as new members of your team, new coaches, and so on.
Establish your platforms
You also need to establish which platforms you would like to use for the promotion of your sports club. Offline and online platforms are ideal nowadays, but while online is considered convenient and effective, there is still nothing like a direct marketing method to reach out to your target audience. You can, for instance, draw in new members by holding a fete or event at your playing field. Don’t forget community engagement, especially in terms of local businesses. You can hold different events as well, from a summer barbecue to a ‘bring a friend’ night or even a bonfire evening. And whilst it’s easy to rely on online tools to spread the word, the old-fashioned way is still considered best: word of mouth. Your members can endorse your sports club among their peers, parents can also do their part, and players can bring their friends. For a broader reach, make use of flyers and have your members distribute them as well.
It is also good to have a website and the proper email communication and to harness the power of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In order to effectively market your club online, make full use of social media networks where you can post images from your club’s latest event or game, spread your club’s story, and more. Greenfly is a great sports social media tool to promote off-season fan engagement.
To keep track of all your members and your administrators and coaches, you can help yourself along by relying on crucial membership software such as Coacha, which is loaded with other features such as coach notes, insights on athletes’ attendance, automated payments, SMS and email broadcast capabilities, and a lot more.
Image attributed to Pixabay.com