If you want a successful, sustainable club, then you have to find ways of getting your name out there. That means spreading the word about what you’re all about, what you offer, and why people should look closer at your club. Marketing feeds into that bigger picture of identity and community. It’s how you get across what your club stands for and what you want to achieve. Importantly, effective marketing can play an essential role in opening the door to new funding opportunities.
More immediately, marketing can help your club flourish. Because without marketing, and without regular communication, you’re not going to grow your team, get new players, attract volunteers, or even get new supporters to your games.
What are your biggest tips for marketing a club?
The truth is, marketing doesn’t have to come with a price tag, so don’t feel like you need to have a Liverpool FC-sized budget to really make an impact. You can do so much without spending any money at all.
Social media for example is a free platform and is one of the biggest areas your club can use to get noticed. So, tip number one is to build your audience up on different platforms, with engaging content such as interviews, match reports, game photography, and competitions. These are all things you can capture with a good set of volunteers, especially with some of your younger or more creative ones who may live and breathe social media and enjoy getting involved.
Another area to focus on is PR. PR is simply getting good news stories out there to generate positive publicity. So, tip number three is producing good pieces of PR by writing engaging press releases. You’re already doing newsworthy things week in, week out. Maybe that’s setting up a new Wildcats centre, hosting a walk-in football session, putting a spotlight on a volunteer who’s gone above and beyond, reaching a new landmark as a club, or something unusual that’s happened within your club. There’s always something you can shout about.
So, what makes a good press release?
In the simplest terms, it just needs an engaging story and a decent image. Local papers are always looking for good news stories. In less than an hour, you can get a short press release written up and sent to your local press, and the result can be a half-page piece in the local paper or even a request for an interview from your local radio or BBC news
station.
How often should your club be marketing itself?
When it comes to social media, if you’ve got something to say then say it, but don’t feel pressured to post a certain amount of times a day just for the sake of it. That’s where content becomes stagnant and less engaging, which isn’t going to help you build followers. To achieve cut-through and to create the impact you want, think about quality and consistency. If
you want to post three times a week then stick to that, or if you have enough content for once a day then that’s fine too. Helpfully, there are free scheduling tools you can use to help keep things consistent so you can plan in advance.
How can your club manage your marketing and communications effectively?
If you’re looking for long-term impact, it’s always a good idea to write down your monthly or quarterly goals. For example, you may want to attract 500 new people to your website or bring 100 new supporters to your home games by the end of the season. From here you can break these goals down into smaller targets so it’s easier to manage. So if you want to get the 100 extra supporters to your games as in our example, have micro targets on all the things that will help you get there. Maybe that’s posting three social posts a week, writing to your local paper every other week, or producing one monthly poster. Creating a bite-sized structure that feeds into the bigger picture makes your goals much easier to
manage. And it means you can more easily split tasks up between different volunteers, with easily achievable timelines.
How do you find the right people to support you in your marketing?
Your club is likely no different from most clubs in that you’ll have people who are less sporty and more creative. Marketing is a great chance to give a role in your football community to those more creative people. Whether that’s amongst your existing volunteers, parents or supporters, there will be people who are great at taking photos, writing good copy, and having great ideas. There will be those with a passion for posting on social media or YouTube. Every club has these people, it’s about reaching out and showing them how they can be involved in helping your club in a big way.
So, marketing and communications can be free, easy and effective. It’s all about having a plan and using the resources you already have available to tell the stories you want to tell about what makes
your club so special.