07776 103 785 john@makesportfun.com

Whenever I do any marketing the first thing I do is to write a plan. The old adage holdsPlanning true – fail to plan and you plan to fail. Well, I was once taught that in order to get to where you want to be you only have to do 4 things:

  1. Figure out where you are now
  2. Figure out where you want to be
  3. Figure out how to get there
  4. Do it

And you know what? Marketing’s just the same.

I’m going to make an assumption here, and I’ll admit it’s a biggy. I’m
going to assume that you’ve got a club/ centre/ sport that people would
want to play if only you could market it to them better. If you’ve not
got that then you’re going to need to do some more work. Having made
that assumption . . .

Where are you now?

  • How many people are currently coming to your sports centre/ club/ walking group?
  • What are you really good at?
  • What do you suck at?
  • What opportunities do you have?
  • What could cause you trouble?
  • How much money have you got?
  • Who do you know who could help?
  • What do people think of your club/ centre/ group?
  • How many people know about it?
  • What kind of activities do you have?

Where do you want to be?

Who’s your ideal customer

  • Who are you trying to attract (gender, age, how much money do they have?)

What’s your objective

  • How many people do you want to come to your sports centre?
  • When do you want them to come?
  • How much do you want them to pay you? – if anything?

How are you going to get there?

Key messages

  • What are you going to tell them about your club/ centre/ group/ sport? (hint – it should be that it’s fun, easy and popular to come and play, though the specific words will vary)

Media

  • How are you going to tell them it?

Do it

  • How much time is this going to require?
  • Who’s doing what?
  • Who’s going to make sure people do what they’re supposed to do?
  • How are you going to check that you’re on track to meet your goal?
  • Who’s going to change the plan if you’re not on track?

That’s it. Simple – huh? It is simple, though that doesn’t mean it’s easy.It’s like with many things, it doesn’t take long to master the basics, but to get really good at it can take a bit of work. Luckily you don’t need to be fantastic at marketing, you just need to be good enough to reach your goals.

Well – help is at hand. Make Sport Fun is developing tools for helping with each of these stages, and I’ll give you more detail on that soon.