Did you start reading our ultimate marketing guide and stop? Way too much info?
Or perhaps you got some of the concepts but there’s just so many different things to do that you don’t know where to start?
When it comes to marketing, the best results are generated through consistent efforts. Especially with online marketing where there can be lots of voices crowding out your message. One of the best things you can do is to create a regular habit so that people can see your content regularly. One marketing theory is that a customer requires a certain number of “touchpoints” – or to put it more simply, they have to see your marketing several times before they will buy from you. The number can vary by industry and by marketing channel, but the more often people see your marketing, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Start Small
Often we think of marketing as selling, but selling is just a part of marketing. When it comes to marketing your rugby club, some of your content will be to sell, but it will also involve:
- Informing
- Educating
- Entertaining
- Engaging
A common theory is the “Rule of Thirds” – that around ⅓ of your content promoting and selling your product, around ⅓ interacting with your followers and around ⅓ of your content should be “content curation” which in a lot of industries means content that will inform or educate. For rugby clubs, it’s easier to think of “content curation” as things like posting your scores and photos from games – content that will be interesting to your followers but not directly selling to them.
These ratios are just a guide, so don’t worry if you’re not following them exactly. As a rugby club, your brand is generally a lot more “engagement based” than other businesses – so you can get away with posting more information and/or entertainment content.
Some ideas to start small:
- Fixture announcement graphic
- Weekly or monthly newsletter
- Match Report each fixture
- Player Profiles
- Post-training photos
There might be other things that you can think of that fit your club better – when trying to build a habit, I always think it’s best to do something that interests you and excites you – it’ll hopefully help keep the motivation up.
Don’t Overcomplicate Things
When trying to create a habit, we don’t want to add too many things. For example – if you’re doing a fixture announcement graphic, you can create yourself a template and swap the details around. We recommend using Canva if you don’t have any design experience – we wrote a guide here about creating graphics.
By focusing on a small task, we increase our chances of creating the habit. The regularity also gives our audience a chance to expect it – for example, if your monthly newsletter is entertaining and informative, people will look forward to receiving it!
The best content to start you off would be a piece of content that is generally interesting to your followers but also something that you can add a call-to-action to. A call-to-action is something you would like the reader to do to bring them closer to being a customer. Using our above examples, some calls to action might be:
| Content Type | Example Call to Action |
| Fixture announcement graphic | “Come down and watch, admission free!” (or a link to buy tickets if you sell tickets) |
| Weekly or monthly newsletter | Could be anything that’s related to content in the newsletter (Join the club, buy tickets to an event etc) |
| Match Report each fixture | “Come to watch our next game on dd/mm vs opposition” |
| Player Profiles | “Sponsor this player” |
| Post-training photos | “Come join the team – training on Thursdays at 7” |
The idea is that the content type you pick and the call-to-action attached to it all help serve your goals – so if you’re trying to recruit players, you might pick a content type that is around the enjoyment of training and playing. If you’re trying to boost 1st XV attendance, you might post information around the fixtures.
Keep on doing it!
On average, it takes over two months for something to become a habit. That means that you’ll have to keep going before it becomes ingrained.
It sounds like this is a lot of effort, but actually, once you’ve got it set up (e.g. graphic templates etc) then it’s actually easier to keep it going – you have a piece of content that you can produce every week/month/fixture that you don’t have to think about. This means you never get “writer’s block” trying to come up with content – you just produce the piece of content you know you need to produce.
For example, for one of my clubs, I do a two-weekly newsletter which is sent out on a Monday evening (except for once when my computer packed in for a few days!). Having a regular schedule means that I don’t have to worry about what content to make – it’s part of my regular schedule so I just have to compose and send out.
What Next?
Once you get to the stage where it’s a habit, a simple way to expand is simply to start a second habit, while maintaining the first. The benefit with this is that you can start to repurpose content. So let’s say I started writing a match report for each fixture and now that’s a regular part of my content. Let’s say I want to start a newsletter next but I’m not sure what to put in it. I can start by adding the match reports to the newsletter and then I don’t need much extra content for a first newsletter.