The Importance of a Clear Promotional Strategy

Did your last promotional effort work? That can be a difficult question to answer if you haven’t set a clear strategic objective from the start. Different objectives require different ways to measure success. For example, getting a lot more people to come to a game may or may not indicate an effective promotion, depending on what you were trying to accomplish. Here are the most common objectives and some ways to measure the relevant metrics to gauge success.

Expand Your Fanbase

If you are trying to grow your fan base, your ultimate goal is to attract people who have never attended a game before. In this case, just getting more of your established fans to come to a game is not a success. To measure the incremental impact, you’d want a way to identify new fans. If you have a CRM system in place, you can simply check if attendees are new to your database. If you don’t have that, other identifiers may be used to approximate measures. Email addresses or credit card numbers could also be used to check if they have been used for previous team purchases. However, people often have multiple credit cards and email addresses, so it wouldn’t be a perfect measure, but it would allow for some general comparisons of effectiveness.

Build Loyalty

Just like a restaurant, sometimes your objective is not to attract someone for the first time but to cultivate your regular customers. The simplest measure of loyalty is a repeat purchase. Tracking a repeat customer is the flip side of tracking a new customer. That means you can use the same data mentioned above but examine it for the opposite effect. If the customer is already in the database or is using a previously recognized email address or credit card number, you can make a reasonable assumption that it represents the same customer. Using this data, you can estimate how many fans at a given event were repeat customers.

Increase Average Spend

Another viable strategy is to drive higher average spending. In this case, you don’t care as much about whether the fan is new or a repeat customer but whether they spent more money than they otherwise would have without the promotion. This is particularly difficult if you don’t have a CRM system, as it makes it harder to gauge the average spend. There are two broad approaches you can take. One is to look at the aggregate effect. This means you could look at total revenue for the event (including tickets and concessions) and divide that by the total attendance. Then you could compare that to your average for the year or, if you wanted to be a little more sophisticated, compare it to a basket of similar nights without a promotion (e.g., same day of the week, same attendance, etc.). This aggregate approach does not give you individual information, such as how many people used the promotion or which demographics used it the most.

Generate Brand Awareness

There are times when the goal of a promotion isn’t to generate short-term attendance or revenue but to build awareness and raise the team’s profile. This is especially true for emerging sports teams outside the “Big Four.” A promotion can be designed to bring attention and media coverage to a team doing something unusual, fun, or otherwise noteworthy. This is in the vein of “Dress Like Your Favorite Superhero Night,” where the total number of participants may be small, but the photos and videos of a few dozen costumed fans can generate disproportionate positive interest. A good way to measure the additional attention generated by a promotion is to use a social listening tool to track mentions of your team. With social listening in place, you can establish your team’s baseline level of activity and compare how much a promotion boosted mentions, conversations, and impressions of your team.

Conclusion

Two critical elements in promotion planning are setting clear objectives and measuring your results. By doing this consistently over time, you can build a database of information on how each type of promotion performed against its given objective. This will enable you to identify common characteristics of what works best for a given objective and determine which approaches drive the most impact for your target audience over time.

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