by Kristin Swartzlander | May 28, 2015 | Media and Public Relations, Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Racing Social Media, Racing Sponsorship
Over the next two weeks, I want to explore a topic that’s always hot when it comes to marketing and almost never talked about when it comes to racing: engagement. First, let’s talk about how to define engagement and why you should care. Generally, engagement is: emotional involvement or commitment. In our social media and online marketing, engagement means likes, comments, shares, and other actions like subscribes, purchases and referrals. At the race track, engagement is generally less quantifiable. It starts when a fan or driver enters the speedway and, for example, gets built by: Forming relationships with other fans, drivers and track staff, Cheering for their favorite driver, Attending an autograph session, Bringing a friend or family member, Buying apparel and souvenirs, and Sharing their experience on social media, bringing the concept full circle. As you might notice above, social media engagement feeds the at-the-track actions and at-the-track engagement can feed social media. If that doesn’t give you enough of a reason to care about engagement, here’s the what it boils down to: The more engaged your audience is, the more consistently committed they are to you and your brand. So, what does that mean to you? For drivers, engaged fans might mean more apparel sales, more cheers from the grandstands, more fan votes in contests, more sponsorship opportunities and better performance for your current marketing partners. For tracks, engaged fans might mean more consistent, higher attendance numbers, more apparel and souvenir sales, more sales of signature concession items, a higher propensity to share their experience at the track, more sponsorship opportunities and better performance for your current...
by Kristin Swartzlander | May 22, 2015 | Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Racing Sponsorship
Ever heard the phrase, ‘ideas are worthless without execution’? With the hands-on nature of racing, at the track and in the garage it’s very clear that an idea isn’t worth anything if we don’t do something with it. When it comes to sponsorship marketing, though, we often forget that ideas aren’t enough. We think that we can just pitch a bunch of ideas to a sponsor and we’ll execute whichever campaign they pick. Or, worse yet, we don’t give them any ideas and want them to ‘just tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll do that.’ There is a level of trust that has to be built with marketing partners, whether they’re new and you’re pitching them on an initial partnership or existing sponsors. The problem for sponsorship sellers is: anyone can come up with ideas. Even great ones. The problem for potential sponsors? Not everyone can, or will, execute them. But that’s not a problem for those of us who show up. For those who can and will execute. So how do you differentiate between your property – team, track, business – and the other idea-makers? You show, not just tell. How, you ask? Start by pitching ideas that are within, or only slightly above, your current marketing level. And then show them what you’ve already done and have in place that proves you’re up to the task. For example, my husband, Carl Bowser, was recently featured in a television commercial for his marketing partner, Turner’s Premium Iced Tea. This was his first television commercial. So why did they trust that the idea would work in real life?...
by Kristin Swartzlander | May 14, 2015 | Mindset, Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Racing Sponsorship
For most of us in racing, time is a limited resource. We don’t lack ability, smarts or awareness. It’s time that stops us from doing anything more than getting our day-to-day tasks done. It’s time that stops us from being proactive about marketing, interacting on social media, and pitching new partnerships. That’s why much of what I write focuses on two things: doing things better and making them easier. (Here’s a popular post on making it easy for others to help you sell yourself and tell your story.) As a person who owns a home, runs a business and is elbows-deep in a race team, I make a lot of buying decisions. And I have a few criteria that I weigh when I decide where to buy what I need: connection, convenience and cost. Last week, when I needed contacts I had to decide whether to order from a) my eye doctor or b) an online retailer. Here’s how I weighed my buying decision: Connection: I love my eye doctor, and I’d like to support her. I have no connection with an online retailer. Cost: My contacts cost between 40 and 50% less when I buy them online. Convenience: When I order from my eye doctor, I have to pick up the phone during their limited hours and explain to them what I want to order. They usually don’t know how long they’ll take. I wait for a phone call to say they’ve arrived. When I get the phone call, I have to find a time within their limited office hours to pick them up. They call every single...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Apr 30, 2015 | Media and Public Relations, Mindset, Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Racing Social Media, Racing Sponsorship
When you’re trying to do something great, whether that’s run a race team or build a business, you have to commit. That’s not news. Most of us in racing know all about commitment. You can’t just build a team or buy a race track and try it for a few weeks. You have to commit, up front, with time, sweat and money. We don’t have a problem with commitment when it comes to the racing part of the business. One of the biggest mistakes I see in racing, though, is a lack of commitment to marketing. To building an audience. We build racing properties then try our hands at a few press releases, tweets, advertisements or another method for getting the word out. We stick with it for a few weeks, maybe a few months, and when the opportunities don’t come knocking, we quit. It happens all the time. Racing is a demanding sport, no matter what side of it you’re on. It’s easy to imagine that you’re wasting time building that audience, and decide to put that time and effort into the actual racing. But if I gave up after a year of blogging, I would have missed some big opportunities. Huge ones. Some of which you know about, like the Dirt Classic, and some of which you don’t. At least not yet. And most, if not all, of them came from my writing. But do you know how long I wrote to no audience before that happened? A really, really long time. For over a year, I spent hours – sometimes over multiple days – crafting a blog post to...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Apr 23, 2015 | Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Thoughts and Rants
When I worked in the NFL, one of my primary responsibilities was to create out-of-the-box opportunities for fans to connect with the team and players. Mostly, this was through media and community relations opportunities. For example, one of Vernon Davis’ interests is fashion. So I worked to secure pieces in high-end fashion magazines for Davis to show off his style. It might seem frivolous – does an NFL player really need more PR? Especially that of the fashion world? Maybe not. But, how many fashion magazine readers get exposed to the NFL every day? Probably not many. It was an opportunity to reach a potential new fan in a place they’re already putting their attention. Getting new fans for any sport or cause often requires thinking outside the box. But it doesn’t have to be hard. It does require some thought, research and ingenuity. Because you have to reach people where they’re already spending their time, attention and money. Getting to the point…last week I wrote an article that got a lot of (mostly) positive response. As excited as I am about the future of racing, there are some places in the country where tracks and drivers are struggling. In my opinion, it’s not the racing itself that needs fixed to solve that problem. We have a great product. It’s the marketing that’s not working. And I said I’d give you a few ways that you can help grow the sport through grassroots marketing. [Note: Grassroots marketing is a free or low-cost strategy that starts from the ground up. It often utilizes unconventional or nontraditional methods in order to get...
by Kristin Swartzlander | Apr 16, 2015 | Mindset, Motorsports Marketing for Tracks, Teams and Businesses, Thoughts and Rants
Me? I have never been more excited about the future of racing. And a lot of that has to do with people like you, who are working to improve the sport we love. But in many areas, the sport is suffering. Car counts are down. The purses are the lowest in the country. And ticket prices keep going up. And how many discussions have you overheard, or been a part of, in which someone suggests changes to the actual racing program in order to fix the problem? The stands would be more full each week if we: Add another division. Get rid of heat races. Change the number of laps. Do qualifying instead of pill draws. Make the racing more exciting in fill-in-the-blank way. People today – (P.S. I love that phrase. What else could we be? Time travel!) – want shiny and new. They can’t pay attention as long as they used to. We have to give them a reason to put their phones down. Etcetera. That’s the consensus, if you ask many. But here’s my opinion: the racing itself does not need to be fixed. It’s the marketing that hasn’t evolved as fast as the fans have. Every day, I talk to people who are involved in racing. Whether they are a group of fans at a mall show or clients on our regular conference calls, I’m exposed to a wide variety of people in racing. People are no less passionate about racing today than they were back in the good ol’ days of big purses and packed stands. There are just less of us than before....
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