I’ve just run a marketing workshop for BADMINTON England‘s London and South East regions. I’m a huge fan of BADMINTON England and the great work they’re doing with Back to Badminton and No Strings Badminton. So when Paul Bickerton (London regional manager) got in touch with me I was delighted to be involved. Paul decided to get in touch following a marketing workshop I ran for Jenny Phipps in BADMINTON England’s South West region. Together we planned out what would be most useful to cover in the workshop.

The topics we decided on were:

• Brief explanation of the Sport England segmentation
• The 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• How I would market the Badders in the City programme
• More detail for how I would use each suggested tactic, and how they could do that themselves
• Know stage
• Facebook and 4 ways to use it to promote your courses
• Twitter and a way to use that to promote your courses
• Google Ads
• How to get more referrals from your existing participants and from partners
• Leaflets and how to make them more effective
• Partners
• Email shot
• Why Groupon might not be worth bothering with
• Link stage
• How to improve the conversion rate of the landing page
• How to best follow up with interested people
• Improve registration system
• SMS reminders
• How to track all your contacts

I planned out the workshop over the next couple of weeks. I used parts of previous workshops that I’ve run for other workshops round the country, and then I tweaked it all to match exactly with their needs.

The workshop was a success and we had tons of input and ideas from everyone in the group. There were 11 people from BADMINTON England at the session which is a great size for a workshop.Today’s workshop is obviously just the beginning and the hard work to improve their marketing starts now. I’m hoping to work with the London region some more and help them implement some of the ideas from today’s session.

“John delivered exactly the session that we were hoping for, and pitched it at just the right level.
The most useful part of the training was that John had related it directly to our work by analysing
and integrating one of our key projects into the session, using it as a case study and making
suggestions for improvement. It’s also important to ask plenty of questions in the workshop, as that really helps draw on John’s experience and knowledge.”

 Paul Bickerton, Regional Manager – London, BADMINTON England

In 2009 there was a London-wide activity marketing campaign called Go London focussed on the over 50s. NHS Greenwich wanted to make the most of this opportunity to get as many over 50s active as possible.

The SPAH (the Sport, Physical Activity and Health group – their local CSPAN) had analysed the Sport England segmentation and had identified their priority over-50 segments as being Brenda, Terry and Elsie & Arnold.

They decided to run an activity marketing campaign for people aged 50+ in Greenwich – with a focus on Brenda, Terry and Elsie & Arnold. They had the following objectives:

• Build database of people who want to get active
• Deliver behaviour change materials to people who want to get active
• Connect people with local activity providers
• Build a database of at least 10 taster sessions/ month that people could access for free
• Give information about these taster sessions to the database of people who wanted to get active

They hired us to run this campaign. We ran it using the 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign – Know, Like, Try and Repeat.

We recently held a conference call for Make Sport Fun clients and contacts in which we explained how we ran this campaign, why it was so successful and what we learnt from it. You can now access the recording of that call for free at www.makesportfun.com/resources/go-london-greenwich/.