Building a brand..

It has been 3 to 4 weeks since I published the website and tickets have gone on sale. So far tickets are slow; which I am not too concerned about at this stage as there is a good few weeks before the event date. After a session with my mentor as well as research, I realised that I had to ‘build the live sport talks’ brand to attract ticket sales. Naturally I believe in the product and know others will to, but how will people know if it isn’t marketed correctly?

Stage one – Getting British Swimming on board with the event

Our first talker is former Olympian swimmer Joanne Jackson. Joanne, who is now retired and has a wealth of experience from competing at the age of 17 as well as competing at London 2012. Let’s not forget the world record she held too!

I decided to contact British swimming to see if they could run a story on the event with Joanne on their website as well as on their various social media outlets. We decided that we would run a competition for 5 free tickets for their followers. Their media person, who is very helpful forecasted some tweets and Facebook posts to encourage people to retweet and like etc. to get the word out there. It was great to see such god feedback, with people genuinely showing an interest in the event. So we have a few more posts scheduled in until the event in September!

Stage two – Working with a charity

Another regular practice for organising events is pairing up with a charity. So the plan is, the charity helps promote the event via their website and social media and in exchange have an opportunity to fundraise at the event or acts as good PR for them to be supporting this type of event. Joanne Jackson is an ambassador for the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust, so I decided it would be a good idea to contact them.  Like British Swimming, they were also very helpful and are keen to work with live sport talks, which was great news. We are scheduled to appear on their website next week, which is very exciting!

We have also had another opportunity to work with ‘Delete Blood Cancer’ for the first set of events.

Stage three – More social media presence

Social media is a great tool to use to build brand awareness. Gaining new followers is a long and hard process. It can be quite disheartening when you spend time posting and sharing, to all 25 followers, with the majority of them being suspect accounts. So I was encouraged to follow more accounts, who I feel would be interested in the events. This included swimming clubs and well known athletes. I did the same on the Facebook, adding more friends and sharing the page to encourage likers and engagement. I found that increasing my activity on social media, naturally the account will get more followers which it has.

So that’s it for this blog post. If you are also starting a business, I hope that you find these posts useful. 

Check out the other posts too if you haven’t already. Finally also check out our website www.livesporttalks.com and let me know what you think!