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Arthur is a great friend of mine. He’s played rugby since he was young. He’s 27, 6 foot tall, well built and loves to drink. The ideal club rugby player.

Arthur grew up playing rugby in Kenya (side note: Kenyans love rugby – if you to go the international 7s match then the Kenyans make up half the audience – who knew?).

When he was 18 he went to university in the States. Again he played rugby – this time for the University team.

Later he moved to London to work as an investment banker (so ladies – he’s tall, very dark, handsome and rich too). Of course, when he came to London he wanted to play rugby here too. But where to play? I pointed him to the Go Play Rugby website, a sports marketing website where there’s a list of clubs. Did he go to one of these clubs? No. Why not? He didn’t know anyone there.

Who would want to go to a club where they didn’t know anyone. Where’s the fun in that?

Eventually he made friends with a guy at work who played rugby. So he went with him to play at that club. Now I don’t know if you’ve been to London, but it turns out it’s really big. Arthur lives in North West London. The club was in South London – 1 1/2 hours travel.

So – what have we learnt? Arthur wants to play rugby badly enough to travel for 1 1/2 hours. Each way. But not enough to turn up when he doesn’t know anyone. And eventually he gave up on that – 3 hours travelling to go to rugby practice is a real pain in the backside.

Now. Is Arthur a retiring young man? Does he suffer from chronic shyness? Is he afraid of strangers? No, no and no. He’s as outgoing, charming and affable a bloke as you could hope to meet. This is just how normal people feel about joining sports clubs.

And what’s so frustrating is that on GoPlayRugby.com he’d filled in the form so someone would contact him. But no-one ever did.

This is why our sports marketing addresses this barrier. People receive personalised communication about places where they can play. They then receive a phone call to find them the ideal club, group or class. We then let the club know that they’ll be coming. This introduction process means that 70% of people we talk to go to that club. This is what works. You can do it too.

To get him to join a club needed someone to get in touch with Arthur and welcome him down. It wouldn’t have taken a lot. An email, a letter, a phone call or a text. Anything from a local club saying “this is when we train, come and join us” would have been enough.

And what kind of story doesn’t have a happy ending. Arthur is now playing rugby at a local club in Chalk Farm.

This is important because there are lots of people searching for where to do sport, fitness or activity. As an example of how much of an impact ranking high in Google can have on your marketing let’s look at Aerobics.

165,000 people search for the term aerobics in the UK each month. 49,500 search for aerobics classes and 6,600 search for aerobics course. However if you go to Google and search for aerobics NW3 2QX then the nearest result which comes up is over 20 minutes walk away. I happen to know of 4 places offering aerobics within that distance which aren’t up there.

Google knows that NW3 2QX is a postcode, so they show results on a map which are near to that postcode.

So there are lots of people searching for aerobics (and various other activities which you might offer) on Google, but they’re not finding good results. Luckily it’s simple to add your listing to Google Places and show up when people are searching.

These are people who are already at the link stage of the 4 stages of activity marketing campaigns. They want to do activity, but they don’t know where to go. You know where they can go, but you’re not appearing top on Google, so they’re not finding you.

If you’ve got the right information on your website, then why can’t Google find you? As clever as the search engines are, they’re still only as good at reading as a young child. They need to be spoon fed some of the information.

To help you with this there’s an introduction to Search Engine Optimisation in the Make Sport Fun book, which you can buy for £9.90 from www.makesportfun.com/book.

Last week I completed a 2-month project by running a marketing workshop at the Us Girls conference.

Us Girls is a Sport England funded initiative that aims to get 30,000 young women living in disadvantaged areas more active, by providing them with opportunities to play sport within their local communities.

The project will run from 2011 – 2014 and 64 organisations will focus on over 50 specific areas of high disadvantage spread throughout England. The work is focusing on the market segment, defined by Sport England as ‘Leanne’, aged 18-25 and emerging Leannes who are aged 16-18yrs.

Paul Jarvis from StreetGames put Karen Keohane and myself in touch to help with the marketing of Us Girls. We met up and discussed what was needed to help the Us Girls coordinators to market their schemes more effectively.

I put forward a few options for different budgets, and Karen decided to go with a bespoke marketing book, showing exactly how to run your marketing, and a workshop at the Us Girls conference.

The book was 170 pages of clear, step-by-step instructions on exactly how to run the marketing to attract Leannes to your project. It also included 11 case studies of projects that had been successful in marketing to Leannes around the country.

The workshop went well, with lots of discussion and ideas from around the room. It got an average feedback score of 8.2 from everyone who attended. Hopefully the book will be useful to everyone involved in the Us Girls project over the next three years.

“It was great working with Make Sport Fun as I had every confidence that they would deliver what they said they would and they did – with a bit more!”

Karen Keohane, National Manager Active Women, StreetGames

When I was at secondary school it was rugby, hockey or cricket. And that was fine. I was ok.

Then when I was 14 my mate Tim McLeish and I found out that if you joined the cross-country team that you only had to to train for half an hour. We were sold.

And then something funny happened. Even though we’d only joined so that we didn’t have to train for so long we actually started enjoying it. Turns out I was good at running, and everybody likes doing things they’re good at. We started winning prizes. Our school was split into houses, and our house only had one trophy when I started school. And that trophy was from the janitors for the most broken windows. When I left they’d had to buy a new trophy cabinet.

Since then I’ve played a series of individual sports, but I still suck at football.

How is this helpful? A lot of people don’t want to “play sport” or “do activity”. They want to play football, or rugby, or go running, or lift weights, or something else completely. When you’re running your marketing you need to find out what someone wants to do so you can promote that activity to them.

If you want a copy of the form we use for data collection at events, or when we run a direct mail campaign, then email me (john@makesportfun.com) and ask me for a copy.

I knew Chris Gregory at Bucks Sport from his days at Leisure Connection, so he got in touch with me to run this marketing workshop. Chris asked me to cover a few topics in the workshop as a taster for the group:

• Top 10 ways to increase participation
• 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• How I’d run the marketing for Reactivate Bucks
• What journalists learn about writing introductory sentences

I pulled those different elements together from our existing workshops and edited them down to the most important elements from each to fit them into a 1-hour workshop.

The workshop went well, with huge amounts of discussion on some of the points. I got some great ideas back from people in the workshop as well as hopefully them getting some good ones from me. Our average feedback rating from everyone who attended was 9.1 out of 10.

“Make Sport Fun worked with us to strengthen and support the marketing strategy we have developed for the Reactivate Bucks programme. By making our partners aware of the Make Sport Fun tools and how they aligned with the Reactivate campaign we have been able to demonstrate its value to our partners. The practice examples they have collated from projects across the country bring the ideas to life and will enable our partners to better market Sport and Physical Activity programmes to the residents of Buckinghamshire.”

 Chris Gregory, Physical Activity Manager, Bucks Sport

The report presents headline findings for the main culture and sport estimates along with updates on data to support the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Big Society objectives.

This release reports findings for adults only. The next update for child data will be presented in summer 2012.

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“Thank you for a great day, i found it very useful and took away with me lots of inspiration”
Loren, Bedfordshire.

“One of the best conferences i have ever been to (including USA conferences)”
- Deborah, Norfolk.

Nick Clarke from Active Norfolk was organising the conference, and he got in touch to ask if I’d deliver the Top 10 ways to increase participation workshop twice – once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I was obviously delighted to be involved with such a great conference.

This workshop is based on dozens of research reports, dozens of case studies of effective activity marketing campaigns and millions of pounds of research data. In it I covered:

• What millions of pounds of research have found to be the top 10 ways to increase participation
• The 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• How www.promotingactivity.com can help you plan and run your activity marketing

It was a shorter version of the full workshop, as we only had an hour instead of the normal 2 hours.

Feedback was positive, with 80% of people gave it a satisfied or very satisfied rating.

“The workshop delivered offered a selection of ideas and projects that work in those hard to reach areas, feedback from the workshop has been great.”

Nick Clarke, Physical Activity and Health Improvement Coordinator, Active Norfolk

If you’re interested in setting up this workshop for a conference or any other marketing training then please visit the training page on our website, call me on 020 3239 8824 or email me at john@makesportfun.com.

I explained that we’ve developed our email marketing tool to be much simpler to use than others so that there’s no learning curve for it. She decided to go ahead with making the switch. We then worked together to agree a brief on what she wanted her email marketing template to look like, what parts should be editable and what parts should be fixed.

Once that was agreed we created a first draft design. This was based on the existing design on their new website and on their branding guidelines. We didn’t manage to hit the nail on the head with the first draft of the design, so we discussed what the problems were, made some changes, and kept doing that until Lexi was happy with the design. We then built the design, uploaded it to our email marketing tool and tested it in all major email systems (e.g. Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to make sure it looked the same in all those systems. I then helped Lexi to link the correct email marketing lists in the email marketing tool with the sign up form on their website.

“Make Sport Fun listened to our needs and worked with us until we got it right!”

Alexia Fergus, NHS Greenwich

If you send an email newsletter or are thinking about it then get in touch to find out how our email marketing tool can make your life easier and your email newsletters more beautiful.