What is the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to running a successful sports business? THE FANS! It is vital to any franchise in any professional league to engage with its fans and make them feel part of the team. The more involved fans are in the marketing process, the more they will purchase tickets, apparel, and promote the team. This ties in with the inbound methodology and getting customers from the attract stage to the delight stage. If you can nurture a fan relationship from their first game to becoming a promoter of your team/business, you are winning the marketing battle.
Attract
The first step in the inbound methodology is the Attract phase. This is when you are pushing out blog articles, emails, and social content to prospective fans to get them to their first game. Most teams will primarily use social media to share this content. For example, the Detroit Red Wings are in the middle of constructing a new state-of-the-art arena. There are weekly blog posts and videos showing and describing the progress of the project. This could attract people that may not have been interested in the Red Wings before, but follow development in the city of Detroit and the residents who are excited about the growth in the city.
Convert
If you look to the bottom of the page of these articles you will see a Call-To-Action (CTA) directing people to either subscribe to the news and information updates or to direct them back to the Red Wings site for season ticket information or game promotions. This stage of inbound marketing is all about converting a new, interested contact into a potential buyer. Directing them to the team site to get more information about the teams values and history is a great way to get a contact to become a fan and in turn purchase their first game ticket. Below are a few examples of CTAs that can be used to move people further into the buyer’s journey.
Close
When it comes time to make the sale to your new contact, the most common practice and proven method is by using email workflows to push offers and pricing info to prospective buyers. It is important to gather the correct information in the convert stage to know how to present the offer. For example, I’m not going to send the same offer to a family that wants 4 tickets in the upper bowl that has a specific budget and to an executive buying 4 tickets for his business in the lower bowl that has no specific budget. You need to cater the experience and the offer to each specific buyer.
Delight
What does it mean to delight your customers? Make the entire sales experience fun and easy for them to get through and follow up with your customers about their experience. Inbound marketing best practices have made it clear that email workflows and social monitoring are the best way to continue to engage with current customers. The Red Wings marketing team does a great job with social monitoring and engaging with fans. Twitter and Facebook are the most widely used social platforms for fan engagement primarily because they are so conversational and can lead to fans reaching out first.
As you can see from these examples, inbound marketing is a vital part of business for many franchises. The importance of nurturing a contact through the entire buyer’s process is essential to earning more customers or fans in this case. To get a better idea of how inbound marketing can help your business, chat with one of our many inbound marketing specialists at Revenue River Marketing.
