The best ways to promote your upcoming sports tournament

Hosting a sports tournament, be it on an intra-school or national level, is no easy feat. But what’s even more challenging is hooking peoples’ interest and getting them to attend it. In this blog, you’ll learn the best tried and tested marketing strategies to make your sports tournament the new buzz in town.

Promoting a sports tournament requires a solid plan and the right marketing mix. There’s always the looming fear of what if people don’t buy tickets to the tournament. The primary purpose of your marketing, therefore, is to minimize this risk. So, that leaves you with the question of what you can do to promote your upcoming sports tournament in a way that it becomes the new buzzword in town. Here’s what you need to do.

First impressions count

Anything you want to sell must give off a good first impression — something that catches the audience’s attention. In your case, it’s how you name your sports tournament. Is it just going to be the boring old “Inter-school Baseball Tournament 2022” or something catchy like “Baseball Wars 2022?” 

Come up with an interesting name that catches someone’s attention immediately. Once you’ve done that, we recommend putting up sports posters on high-traffic areas near the venue and across town to make sure people see it. You can also put them up on social media groups and pages. Designing a flyer isn’t difficult — all you need is an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall and create a poster in a few clicks.

Email marketing can do wonders for you

Most marketers think email marketing has grown obsolete, but that’s far from true. If used right, email marketing can be all the difference between an empty venue and a fully packed one. Again, first impressions count, which is why you must come up with a catchy subject line for your email. You wouldn’t open a random email in your inbox if it didn’t look legitimate and convincing, would you?

Next, keep your emails concise and avoid blocks of text at all costs. Instead, use visuals and images as they would better retain the reader’s attention. We suggest using PosterMyWall’s email templates — they have the right mix of text and visuals, and you can easily craft the perfect email using its online customization tool. If it’s the first time you’re running an email campaign, PosterMyWall can handle everything itself. All you need to do is upload a subscriber list and finalize the perfect email.

Join the right social media platforms

Before you dive into harnessing the power of social media, it’s essential to figure out which platforms are right for you to advertise on. We recommend Facebook and Instagram because they’re the top most widely-used platforms today. You can join multiple sports-related groups on Facebook and post the sports tournament flyer you made earlier. Make sure to insert a catchy caption and a URL where people can buy tickets online.

Instagram is a more showy place where you have to pay more attention to details and filters and advertise through high-quality photos and stunning drone shots. You can post photos of each time or a schedule chart that outlines all the teams’ upcoming matches. At last, don’t forget to use hashtags because they’re the most effective way for people to find your post on Instagram.

Run paid ads to accelerate your viewership

You may consider running paid social media ads in the weeks leading up to the sports tournament. Social media ads are a cost-effective way to accelerate your promotion. The best thing about them is that they’re targeted because social media knows the preferences and interests of each user. So, it will display your ad to users who are most likely to attend the tournament. 

While paid ads cost money, they’re much more affordable than conventional marketing methods like TV or newspaper advertisements. Plus, they offer a great deal of flexibility. For instance, you can target people who live in a particular city or near the venue or people who are into the same sports you’re hosting a tournament for.

Influencer marketing has become mainstream

With the rise of social media, influencer marketing has become one of the easiest ways to promote products and events. Influencers are social media artists with a large following. They’re considered experts in their fields, and their fans take their word as the ultimate truth. Therefore, if you can get a social media influencer to work with you and promote your sports tournament, you may easily get loads of guests buying your tournament tickets.

However, picking the ideal influencer can be challenging. You need to do a lot of research and choose someone you know will be enthusiastic about the event and can also energize their fans! Making the right choice is worth the extra time. Therefore it’s acceptable if this takes some time. To avoid partnering up with the wrong influencer, make sure to arrange well in advance of the tournament date.

Ticket discounts are the way to go

Discounted tickets will undoubtedly boost tournament ticket sales. Why? Because by doing this, you can attract spectators who would like to attend the tournament but are unwilling to fork over the extra $20 or $50. In other words, if you reduce your ticket price by a certain amount, they would absolutely attend!

When offering discounts, though, exercise caution. Offer them afterward rather than at first. Selling to customers that don’t mind paying the initial ticket price will help you increase your profits. We recommend doing the first round of sales at the original price and adding discounts incrementally to maximize profits.

A few parting thoughts

After working with several institutions hosting sports tournaments around the globe, we’ve learned that the above-mentioned strategies almost always work for them. However, these just constitute a basic framework or a skeletal structure of what your marketing campaign should look like. You’ll have to fill out the nitty gritty details through experimentation because every sports tournament has a different set of dynamics to deal with.