Well all know the benefits of marathon and triathlon running when it comes to your health. Increased stamina and fitness levels lead to a reduced risk of heart-attacks and strokes so it does help you to live a longer and more healthy life.
What’s not so well known is that taking part in marathons and triathlons is also an excellent way of marketing and advertising your company. The potential reach that you can get from sporting events is huge so, even if you’re looking to market your company, it’s definitely worth taking part in different sporting events.
Take, for example, watching a football match – at every game you attend around the globe you’ll see advertising boards, players and fans wearing shirts with sponsors emblazoned across the from and even, in some cases, you’ll be visiting a stadium which is sponsored by a company who paid for the advertising space (St James Park / Sports Direct Arena – we’re looking at you!). While this is large scale advertising, there’s still plenty that you can do to increase brand recognition and also generate additional revenue for your company by attending or even hosting an even – no matter what sport that is and no matter what your marketing budget might be.
So, here I’m going to talk about the potential that is there for the taking from using printing solutions for sporting events and also using sports T shirt printing and personalised clothing to help boost your own company’s marketing and promotion.
Hosting your own sporting event:
Let’s say that you’re hosting your own sporting event and you’re looking to use this as a way of generating extra income for your company but you’re struggling to think of ways which you can do this. The easiest method is charging money for entry spaces and this could, potentially, raise plenty of income depending on how much you’re charging to take part in the event. But this carries the risk of putting off potential runners as they may not attend if they’re having to pay high fees to run.
An excellent way of generating money is by selling your own event merchandise which not only brings in extra revenue, but it also brings in extra clients by utilising the advertising space that is on the merchandise. One of our clients – Mark from BeachFit, BCN – explains this perfect when he says:
“Selling event day merchandise has become an integral part of our marketing and sales strategy. Not only do the sales generate a new revenue stream, but having my clients running around in, and using, branded items is great ‘free’ advertising”
So, what is meant here? Well, BeachFit, BCN is a new fitness revolution that is sweeping across the streets of Barcelona and it’s an excellent way of getting people fit, burn fat and generally create a happier lifestyle for their clients. They also sell their own merchandise on the side and this merchandise ranges from BeachFit T Shirts to branded sports bottles and this is all within the aim of generating extra income.
When their customers go jogging in their spare time or with their friends, they’ll use the BeachFit branded merchandise and their jogging partners will then be able to see the branded merch and ask where they got it or ask who the company on the front of the merchandise is. Then this helps to spread your company name through word of mouth advertising and this helps to increase the sign up rate to their sessions – so it’s increasing sales AND customers.
Running in someone else’s event:
The other way to look at using sporting events to your benefit is if you’re running in an event which is being hosted by someone else and use this as a way of marketing your own company or raising awareness of your message. We’ve all seen runners turn up on race day with numbers pinned to their running shirts and occasionally you’ll also spot a personalised t shirt at the event which highlights the name of the charity, person or organisation which the runner is running on behalf of.
This immediately turns the running top into valuable advertising space which allows you to show off whatever you want – the name of the charity, organisation, band, friend’s name – to everyone taking part or supporting people at the event.
Now, let’s take a look at another one of our clients, New Forest Marathon. They recently held an event and they came to us for 5,000 printed running shirts to give away to everyone who took part in the event. By giving away the tops (which were all printed with the New Forest Marathon logo and contact details) they had 5,000 people running around Hampshire’s New Forest advertising their name and their brand. It also means that each of those 5,000 people took their T Shirts home, showed friends and family, posed for photos and will use them again in the future – thus increasing the popularity of the event and encouraging more people to sign up and take part in the event next year.
This has helped them to increase the number of people who know about the brand and has helped their event grow year on year through retention as people remember the name of the event and also through word-of-mouth advertising.
These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of printing solutions for sporting events and also sports T-Shirt printing, but there are plenty more reasons why merchandise is perfect for you.
If you’re thinking of hosting an event and you want to know how merchandise can help you to generate more money and increase the number of sign ups to the event in the future, contact our expert team now and we can help make your next sporting event a success before, during and after the event has taken place.
