Basketball Camp THINKTANK: Phase Six Marketing the Event!
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For the first five phases of the Basketball Camp THINKTANK head HERE!
Today’s phase is all about the marketing of an event, and I’ll use my basketball camp as the case study to show you the ways in which we will be promoting the event to reach capacity.
On a sidenote we have a few volunteer slots left for basketball coaches in the 8-12 and the 12-4 shifts on July 7th!
Giant Eagle, Graeter’s, Hutchison Media, and a few others have been gracious enough to step up with sponsorships but there’s also a few slots left.
If interested in either email me at mike@MarketingFunWithMike.com!
Why is marketing your event event important?
Well if you don’t market it then no one will know about it. If no one knows about it then you won’t have any attendees. With no attendees you don’t have an event.
Pretty simple to see why marketing an event is vital to its success!
What can you do to market an event?
You can choose to do grassroots marketing. Grassroots marketing is “free” marketing and most associated with smaller businesses, shoe string budgets, and those that want to hustle and grind.
You can also choose to take on paid marketing which would be choosing to run Facebook and Instagram ads, setting up a booth at a different prior to yours to promote your event, putting a flyer in a magazine, or purchasing radio, TV, billboards, etc.
Our basketball camp for now is completely built on grassroots marketing. While we use traditional mechanisms like radio to promote the camp we don’t have a budget and anything we receive is “in kind” donations and we aren’t charged.
How much do you need to do?
It depends on a variety of factors. Some of which are what your goals are, how many sign ups are you targeting, has anyone heard of your event, is it a national or local event, etc.
For us our marketing plan looks like this:
- Email marketing campaign out to the Nova Village database
- Additional email sent out to my database of coaches in the ArchDiocese of Central Ohio.
- Social media posts via Marketing Fun With Mike, Nova Village, and sometimes our sponsors will throw in some love on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
- Paper flyers at the venue.
- Sign up page and banner graphics on NovaVillageBasketball.com.
- Radio PSA’s from local radio stations that I have partnerships and relationships with to promote to the community.
- Asking our friends and family to spread the word!
- Press release distribution to local media outlets and basketball centers.
That’s it! Then we rinse and repeat this strategy depending on how many people have signed up. But if we utilize all of these resources each of the first three years after a week to two weeks we have reached full capacity.
What if your marketing is not working?
There’s a number of reasons this could be the case. It might be the wrong target, you might not be fully telling the story, you might have unreasonable expectations, you might need to just keep at the hustle of it, or perhaps people aren’t interested in it.
If you are running into this reach out and I’ll see if I can offer some thoughts and advice. Email Mike@MarketingFunWithMike.com.
What’s next to continue building?
Phase Seven we will outline the day of the event and get ready for the actual camp!
I hope this THINKTANK phase was beneficial to you and helped remind you of a very important step in creating an event. Marketing your event is vital to its success and I hope this gives you a blueprint to understand some of the factors you’ll need to be working on.
Looking to implement more passion and purpose into your digital marketing lead generation or have questions about building ideas like my basketball camp from the ground up?? I’d love to hear from you, email mike@MarketingFunWithMike.com and sign up to my Bi Monthly Vlog HERE!
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Spread Good Vibes, Demand the Best from Yourself, Carpe Diem
Mike