At MyClubPro we provide websites to hundreds of football clubs large and small all over the UK. Over the past decade the game of football we all love has changed quite radically off the pitch. We have attended and presented at a number of County FA workshops and one that stood out for us was Hampshire FA’s “Marketing & PR” workshop. The clubs in attendance came away with some great ideas as well as an excellent understanding of marketing basics.
The marketing of a grass roots football club can be a very daunting task for club officials, the majority of which are of course volunteers. The average grass roots club is run and marketed like a business due to the vast number of offline and particularly online requirements of the “modern game”. Just like a business you have competitors, but rather than competing for sales you are competing for players, volunteers and sponsorship.
Marketing your club online does not have to be a minefield, if you stick to the basics you’ll raise your profile locally, interact with the community, build a brand for people to get behind and present your club as professional & serious about the game.
Assuming you have a strong club brand (Badge, Fonts, Colour Scheme, Design Style) when it comes to your club online, the offline rules still apply, you need to ensure your brand is maintained. There is a huge selection of social media platforms that you can utilise to showcase your football club online, but the end game should always be to drive traffic through your website making it the centre of all information and a resource that keeps visitors returning time and again. Your website should adhere to the following for optimal user experience:
– Clean, uncluttered design
– On its own domain name i.e. www.yourclubname.co.uk
– Easy to use
– All information readily available within 2 clicks
– Fully Responsive (the website layout should adapt to the device it’s being accessed on for optimal viewing experience)
– On page options to easily share on social media
– Not Cluttered with 3rd party adverts that detract from what is most important, your club. It simply does not portray a serious image if the first content a visitor sees above your website is an advert for a betting website for example
Our product MyClubPro provides all of the above and a whole lot more . . .
Your website is your online shop window for potential new players, volunteers and sponsorship. Think about the last time you were looking for a product to purchase online, how many websites did you instantly disregard just because of the way they looked? You have just a few seconds to impress a new visitor enough to keep them on your website and delve beyond your homepage.
Of course it’s not just new visitors you need to keep happy, your existing members are going to account for the majority of traffic so you need to ensure the most important information is readily available at their fingertips; fixtures, news, events, match reports, club documents etc. An up to date website can vastly reduce the need for lots of emails and phone calls as your members get used to the website as a first port of call for the latest information.
Website content can be time consuming to maintain but it’s what keeps visitors engaged with you online. Choose a website provider like ourselves that allow you to split the workload between multiple club officials. 10 users each looking after a different team at the club is better than 1 single administrator which will likely cause a bottleneck of information waiting to be published.
Where possible maintain and publish match reports and player statistics on your website. Media outlets such as local newspapers can and will utilise this information. Pick up the phone and tell them it’s there, match reports featured in local papers or on their websites will only raise your club profile.
Share your content. Every time you add a new event, match report, news article or video to your website, publish it on your social media pages (Facebook and Twitter are the most used within grass roots football). It will drive traffic to your website and you will likely pick up some new followers along the way.
In this article we have covered the basics of marketing your football club online and hopefully given you an insight into best practice. It doesn’t have to be rocket science, get the basics right and any club can achieve an impressive presence and reach across online media.
If you need a new website for your club, get started today at – www.myclubpro.co.uk – and get your first month subscription FREE with voucher code MCP1FREE when you place your order.
