Nothing offers a better tool for building your sports tournament than boosting your online presence. People turn to the Internet to search for information in droves. Making it easier to find your tournament can drum up good word-of-mouth. This will boost athlete participation, increase sponsorships from vendors and keep your tournament running strong from one year to the next.
PlayDriven suggests including these three key elements in your promotional toolbox to guarantee high visibility online:
Dedicated tournament website
Giving your tournament its own URL will boost your chances of turning up high in search-engine results for keywords related to your tournament. Having your own website lets you strengthen brand recognition for your tournament. You can have an unfiltered channel for providing news and information about the tournament. It costs about $10 per year to purchase your own domain, but the investment pays off. Purchase all domains related to your tournament name to prevent confusion. You don’t want people to stumble across similar URLs that have nothing to do with your event.
Active social media accounts
You can’t afford to ignore social media channels in promoting your tournament. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and other such sites offer a perfect avenue for reaching thousands of people at once. These platforms let you build free pages you can connect to your website. Social media accounts make it much easier for you to keep in touch with past participants, building a mailing list, facilitating tournament registration and creating buzz about your tournament.
Multimedia offerings
Pictures truly are worth a thousand words when it comes to marketing your tournament. Make taking photos of players and teams a priority. Parents will love it because it offers a photographic record of things their children accomplished. Sports offer a visual feast, and photos are the best way to capture dramatic plays and stunning finishes. Photos help market an event by bringing it to life. Your website and social media accounts should be peppered with all sorts of photos from past tournaments. Get parents to sign photo releases before you use any of those photos to prevent any legal complications.
Check out more tips for organizing and running your tournament on the PlayDriven website. Our goal is to offer your tournament the resources necessary to succeed.