A best laid plan is the best tool to use in managing a booster club. This absolutely extends to your marketing plan strategy. By knowing what promotional avenues to use that cater to your target audience, your club can grow its revenue, support and overall visibility! However, despite the desire to reach as broad of a market possible, in the majority of cases, it is better to instead focus efforts on creating a booster club local marketing plan instead.
What is Booster Club Marketing?
Marketing in general is the promoting and awareness of products and services conducted by a business or organization. Booster club marketing refers to marketing for the interests of a booster club organization.
Booster clubs will market events such as fundraisers to help raise funds for their club and other activities for example.
Booster Club Local Marketing Plan vs Broad Marketing Plan
Generally in marketing the goal is to cast a wide net to reach many people by focusing on large avenues. However contrary to popular belief, to have a greater impact, a club may want to focus on local booster club marketing rather than broad marketing.
Broad marketing refers to marketing channels that reach a broad, or larger audience. Think of this through websites, social media, and other forms of marketing that put a message in front a large amount of eyes.
Local marketing refers to marketing that is concentrated in one local and smaller area. So instead of a social media blog that can be seen from anywhere around the world online, it is a post in the local newspaper in your own city.
Implementing a booster club local marketing plan is a great way to plan a local marketing strategy for your club that brings many benefits.
Benefits of Your Booster Club Local Marketing Plan
One of the biggest benefits for local promotions is that it allows your local audience to see and respond to your advertisement. For example, let’s say your club advertised a bake sale and posted it on your social media account. Although the event is seen and on notice for many people, you run the risk of a good number of those viewers not being local and unable to attend and participate despite their interest. Versus you putting an ad for your bake sale on flyers around town, where all who see and are interested can attend.
Another benefit of your booster club local marketing plan is that local marketing is lower cost. This is due to the fact that you are focusing on a narrow, limited set of people. Plus when you are marketing your booster club locally, in many instances media outlets or even stores displaying your posters will do that simply out of a sense of duty to the local community!
Local Marketing Avenues
There are many different avenues to promote locally that you can work into your booster club local marketing plan. Just a few examples of these include:
- Local newspapers and magazines
- Flyers
- Billboards around town
- Form local partnerships with business (Such as putting up a sign that promotes your club in their window)
- Radio ads through your local stations
- Putting up posters in specific locations around town
- Handing out fliers at community events like farmers markets
- Collaborating with local businesses
- Collaborating with local media outlets
- Working with local community websites
There is no set of rules dictating which avenues to use, but make sure that you have proper communication with your booster club management on what are the best local avenues for marketing your booster club. In your booster club local marketing plan you should go over the pro’s and cons of the various marketing avenues and pick the best suited ones for your club.
Creating A Booster Club Local Marketing Plan
There are two main objectives in creating a local booster club marketing plan. First, is by selecting an avenue that your club wants to use to show your advertisement. Secondly, is to develop the advertisement itself to match the marketing channel.
Select a marketing avenue
In selecting a marketing avenue, you will need to choose marketing solution that best markets your club and its fundraising or service. For example if your club is doing a local bake sale in a neighborhood, a great avenue is to put up flyers in the neighborhood where the fundraiser will take place. While it is not a bad idea to put flyers elsewhere around town, you will want to put more to emphasis to the closes people to you the fundraiser.
Develop marketing materials
You will want to develop the actual marketing materials (ie. images/artwork, marketing copy, storyline etc.) for your booster club event or service. Make sure that it is designed well and appeals to your local audience. Once again, one of the benefits of local promotions is that it allows you to work with an audience that you should know well. Be sure to speak to them in your marketing.
Should I Use Social Media for Booster Club Local Marketing?
There is nothing wrong with using social media for local community marketing. However, it should not be your biggest focus or avenue. One reasons is because it can cast you too broad. It is much easier to hone in and reach folks in your community through more direct methods and avenues of local marketing like the many ones listed above.
Planning Around Marketing Opportunities
A key aspect in a booster club local marketing plan is to develop strategies that will strengthen your marketing. Two things that can allow you to really thrive is to be direct and know your audience.
Be direct: Tell those around you about your club and what you represent. People love stories, and they also love to help those around them. Don’t be afraid to really sell your organization and that impact you have made, or are trying to have in your local community.
Know Your Audience: Know what part of town you are in and who exactly you are talking to. Just because you are doing local promotions doesn’t mean that you will always easily come across to your audience.
Your Club Can’t Progress Without a Plan
Marketing and promotions is a key component of booster club management. If you don’t have a proper plan to manage your community marketing your club will suffer. With a booster club local marketing plan you can have a strategy for local promotions that reaches those around you and helps to persuade them to contribute to your club.
