In a technology age, people flock to the internet to search for answers, locate nearby businesses, socialize with friends, and shop online. It’s crucial for your youth sports business to remain current in your digital strategy, especially if you want to attract local or corporate sponsors.
Awhile back we wrote an article on 5 strategies on securing a youth sports sponsorship. This article, however, focuses on your digital presence. Your online marketing can broaden opportunities and expand your reach so your sports & fitness business is put in front of your desired audience be it new clients, or corporate supporters. The key is maintaining an active and steady presence that highlights the sports training or team and generates engagement from your audience. Then, as you create campaigns that are geared toward gaining youth sports sponsorship, they’ll be more apt to respond and participate because they know you have a consistent and active audience!
You can begin leveraging digital marketing today to better position your youth sports brand for sports sponsorships. Try these three methods to get started.
Growing a subscriber list is one of the most important components to a working online marketing strategy.
Whether you’re collecting contacts from parents, vendors or previous sponsors, growing your email list is crucial to building ongoing relationships and keeping clients in the know. Even if your email marketing merely consists of sending a monthly newsletter, this regular communication keeps your brand “top of mind” and promotes retention. There are two types of email to consider; bulk email and transactional email. Bulk email is essentially email marketing. You create an email campaign and send it to all your subscribers at once. Transactional email, on the other hand, is where the recipient triggers the email themselves by opening an account, placing an order or asking for a new password etc. In terms of transactional email tools, there’s an excellent range of tools on the market. Two of the best are Mailgun and SendGrid, which you can see compared at Mailgun vs Sendgrid.
Did you know that 71% of business bloggers say their blog increased visibility in their industries? Blogging is a great method of boosting your search engine ranking and positioning your youth sports brand as a leader in the industry. It gives you a platform to share valuable tips for parents, athletes, and even other coaches. This will give your business valuable content to share through email and social media accounts, bringing more exposure to your youth sports business. You might find that using social media marketing tools – such as this Instagram bot by Kenji – could help you with your engagement and exposure you need for your brand.
Social media rocks at spreading the word and building awareness around your brand. There’s so much you can do to create engagement. From hosting contests to social groups, broadcasting live-streaming videos, and sharing eye-catching images. The more buzz…the better! This is more often than not why you’ll find many businesses of any type looking to create more buzz by finding professional marketing teams, like this social media marketing Jacksonville FL agency for instance, to effectively target and market through various social media channels. Businesses are finding that outsourcing their marketing efforts creates greater brand engagement further down the line.
Instagram is the place to be for sports businesses. In fact, over 165 million Instagram users are sports fans, an ideal platform for your youth training to increase your presence. The focus is building a strong follower base where you’re regularly gaining new audience members and engaging people with your content. This type of audience is invaluable to potential sponsors. You may want to think about facebook advertising as well as they’re a great social media platform, you can create your own page or share photos to promote!
Digital marketing is your best friend in a technology-driven era. Implementing these tactics will build a solid foundation to your online marketing, helping attract future sponsors and building a strong presence. Finally, don’t forget to ask! Use the free sponsorship letter template below to help sell prospects on your vision.
There are many challenges when coaching and managing youth sports. Not only do you coach the future generation of athletes, you spend hours facing challenges such as planning programs, communicating with parents, scheduling practices and games, collecting payments, and the list goes on. However, there are tools and practices that make these challenges well, less challenging.
Marketing a sports business to the people you want isn’t always easy; maybe you offer multiple sports training, serve different ages, or see various groups come to your sessions. Creating a customer persona can be immensely helpful if you’re operating a sports business and facing uncertainty about your target market. Here’s how to create one (or a few) for your business.