We’ll be at the 2016 NSCAA in Baltimore, Booth #208
Stop by to say hi and pick up your commemorative coin. The double-wide booth is being hosting by Premier Athletic Advertising which is your complete soccer tournament solution, from managing your entire event through building community relationships in your local area. They also rely on the software TourneyCentral hosts to provide a seamless, quality experience for your guest teams.
We’ll also be featuring the authoritative book on using social media for your soccer tournament, The Game Through Glass.
Free coin, free snapchat sticker, great book at a reduced price. We’ll see you in Baltimore!
How many times have we witnessed a coach who hung on too long, a director who never let go, a staff that did not groom the next generation to take a tournament into the next generation?
Why do we do this? Why do we do the things we do? To ensure our own legacy or ensure that our accomplishments are a solid stepping stone for the next generation to move the sport of soccer forward? Why are you producing your soccer tournament?
Today, TourneyCentral joined Medium as a publishing platform. We’re mostly there to see how publishing on the platform can affect Google results and increase engagement. We’ll be following up with another post to outline some “Best Practices” for your soccer tournament.
For strong tournament branding, resist the urge to copy others
The most frustrating request we hear regarding tournament branding is something that goes like, “I was just as such and such tournament and they did this really cool thing. Can we do that?” While the answer is almost alway, “Sure, we can do that for you,” my first question is, “Why do you want to be like everyone else?”
Google is currently running TV spots for its phones with the song “It’s a marshmallow world in the winter” as the jingle. Last year, Target used the same song to feature its holiday season.
Whenever I hear the song, I think Target and my head gets confused as I try to remember the product that Google is now advertising and it just doesn’t look like a Target ad. Then I get irritated because it wasn’t what I had been conditioned to expect through a previous, well-placed campaign.
I get it; Google saw the Target spots and thought, “Wow, that’s pretty catchy. Our OS update is called Marshmallow (though nobody know that or cares.) We should do that for our product.” It was a great set of ads for Target, well-produced, that pulled folks into a fantasy holiday season they need in order to suspend reality long enough to want to go shopping. “Come to Target where we have created this alternate universe of contentment and warm hugs in a cold world.”
Nothing kills creative like a forced repeat. Creativity is a spark of timing and vision, not just copying someone else’s great idea.
Our advice: Don’t copy other tournaments’ marketing or branding. Just because it worked for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Paradoxically, the better the first tournament was at their tournament branding, the more YOUR marketing will remind teams of them, not you. Resist the urge to copy others.
If you offer teams a different experience they can get no place else, why would you want to copy someone else? Learn from their marketing, but be true to your tournament brand.
The core skills that every information-age worker needs today to compete in the modern ecomomy are; photography, videography, writing and social media.
Playing soccer on a team in a competitive league gives young people critical skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. A smart tournament can also give young adults an opportunity to hone critical job-market skills by opening up their social media accounts to them to “practice” skills they will need when they search for a job.
Because there are many different channels within social media, the opportunity to bring on many people to manage different channels is almost infinite. Of course, like any good team, you will need a coach to coordinate, monitor and guide your media team.
Social media has a ton of potential to add to your tournament brand but it is deceptively a lot of work. It is intense and fast-paced but you have the potential to give someone one heckuva resume reel!
If you do it right, your tournament can be a competitive social media jobs training program where the best media minds can not only learn new skills but give back a deep, rich online space for your tournament event.
