It’s that time of year when football is on everyone’s minds! With the World Cup now over, football fans are looking forward to the upcoming English Premier League season, which starts up in August. For football clubs across the country, it’s also the perfect time to consider your own football marketing strategies. In this post, we’ll coach you on how to market your local, national or university football club for that winning gooooal!
Online Presence
The first coaching tip is to get found. Make it easy for people to find your club online with a slick website and social media channels. There are numerous free or low-cost website builders available to get stated. Many of these builders are based on easy-to-use templates, which means you don’t have to be a web guru or coder to build a great digital presence.
We’re admittedly skipping a few steps here, but once your site is live, establish a strategy and plan for keeping your online presence, including your social media channels, dynamic, up-to-date and engaging to help attract fans. For example, the Sydenhams Football League (Wessex) website features the latest in league and club news, upcoming matches, results and recent Tweets. Posting helpful information like this will engage and attract fans. You could also utilise your website to sell branded club merchandise for additional revenue.
Football Festivals
Another tip from your friendly Rocket Badge coach is to organise a football festival and bring your players, fans and the public together to celebrate your club. Combine entertainment, education and training to rally support and gain publicity for your team. For family fun, try hosting a youth game where pairs of young players can register, play and compete for prizes.
The Canton Rangers Football Club, for example, hosts a summer festival at a park, complete with youth teams from across the UK, face painting, activities and food and beverages. One marketing idea for your football festival is to create custom medals to award the winners or participants with a special prize.
Another idea for your event is to host a memorial football festival to honour members who have contributed to the club or perhaps who have passed away. To make the event most memorable, create a customised shirt or other items that features your club and the name and reason for the person being celebrated.
Free Trainings
Another winning move is to host a free training event. Offer a few free daily drills or training sessions over the course of a week and invite public youth to join. They’ll make new friends, train with your team and have fun. Who knows, you might find some superstar future club members this way! To help participants remember the event, include a customised button badge for a special take-home gift.
Fundraisers
Scratching your head on how to raise a little extra money for your club? A few ideas we’ve seen include weekly raffles, lottery-style giveaways and clever usage of customised sports pins and badges. (See this blog post for more on how trading pins can help your club bring in a little cash.) One of our favourite marketing strategies is an annual pin drive – get all your club members or parents together and create a custom design for a collectable team trading pin that you can sell on your club website or at games, football festivals and retail locations. Pick a new design every season so that your supporters can collect them over time for a long-term fundraising strategy.
Team Merchandise
Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of a tried-and-true marketing strategy: customised team merchandise. Create and sell creative products that feature your football club to build awareness, tap into fan loyalty and earn extra money for your club. Offer a range of items of different prices and purposes, like branded team shirts and training gear and smaller ticket items like keyrings and button badges. The Leicester City Football Club, for example, offers everything from club jigsaw puzzles to scarves to pet accessories. They even let people customise their own LCF gifts with their names.
This football season, don’t just bet on your winning bracket, bet on these winning football marketing strategies to help your football club score big. Take it from the expert coaches at Rocket Blog, we’ll help you find the perfect moves when it comes to merchandise and marketing you club.
