Tag Archives: Soccer tournaments

Selling a soccer tournament during a pandemic

Selling a soccer tournament during a pandemic

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How do you sell a soccer tournament during a pandemic? The short answer is; you don’t.

Instead, you pivot to marketing your event for next year. Everyone is now on the same level playing field, all of your competitors have the same market conditions under which to attract teams. Nobody has any particular advantage, points don’t matter, especially if everyone was required to cancel last year.

Teams have short memories. They will remember their experience from last year, but their experience from two years ago will be a foggy memory, if they remember you at all. When they don’t even have a memory of last year, you have a marketing problem.

Or an opportunity. The choice is yours.

Think first year
First year events are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they don’t have a history to point to. Research shows the number one reason a team or club applies to your soccer tournament event is they had a good experience the last time. But you don’t have this. You had to skip a year.

The good thing, though, is you don’t have to live with your history. You can change things about your event that maybe you’ve been wanting to do for a while, but your history has been holding you back. Do it now!

You also have the experience first year soccer tournament events lack. Leverage your experience by becoming your own mentor you would have liked for your first-year running a tournament.

Think smaller
Soccer tournaments for next year will be smaller. Teams will not be attending as many events, so they will be pickier about who they choose. This doesn’t mean giving discounts or running giveaways or contests, but it does mean you will need to think about things you have done or marketing messages based on size and scale. You may also not have volume discounts with vendors and providers you enjoyed in the past.

If you are a large, sprawling event, think about if that is a good strategy for your event going forward. Ask yourself, “is the size of my soccer tournament event the reason teams apply?” It well may be, in that case, you will need to market to the reality of a smaller event next year, with the promise of a larger one as we move past this pandemic.

Think local
Many teams will be restricting travel for next year, maybe even the year after. Because the United States does not have a consistent pandemic response for every state, each state has developed their own rules, some backed by laws and executive orders, others by the US Soccer associations sanctioning policies and most with the combination of all of the above. Because it is confusing for teams, many clubs are simply mandating their teams play in local events through next year.

If you were always a soccer tournament event for local teams, you have an advantage. You know how to do this and you should be leveraging hard. You also have a problem with other tournaments who may have relied on out-of-state teams now marketing to local teams. Get in there first; don’t assume local teams are loyal. Again, teams have short memories and some don’t remember you.

Our advice:
This coronavirus pandemic has turned the soccer world on its head, most affecting the viability of your soccer tournament event. Training has begun, league play will follow if it hasn’t already but tournament events will be the last soccer format to get up and running, taking several years to become robust again. If you relied on your tournament to raise much-needed funds for your club, you need to get tournaments healthy again.

Hire a marketing firm to assess your event, position you within the tournament and soccer space and execute your marketing strategy well, including developing out your social media, other traditional media and email marketing. Now is not the time to bargain-hunt; you need someone who understands the soccer tournament landscape and has a proven marketing record.

Make sure your website is current and spot on updated with everything. No marketing program is going to work if you are not operationally ready and buttoned up. Make sure you are ready to take applications for your soccer tournament and have a clear cancellation policy in place. This year came up fast and took everyone by surprise; next year can be planned. A lack of a clear direction for next year will be read by teams as a disorganized event they will avoid. Don’t give them a reason to pass you up.

That’s pretty much it. Think first-year, think smaller, think local.

And wash your hands, wear a mask, keep your distance and stay safe so we can all get through this together. We’d hate to lose even one soccer player, their fans and supporters to this pandemic.

TourneyCentral at the 2018 United Soccer Coaches (NSCAA) Convention

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TourneyCentral will be at the 2018 United Soccer Coaches (NSCAA) Convention, in booth 618. Stop by and say hi…and grab some free stuff, like a game starting coin that spins.

Our booth is being run by the folks at Premier Athletic Advertising so while you are looking for hosting software to power your tournament, take a look at their services for tournaments as well as their calendar of events for your teams.

See everyone in Philly.

Favorite Places: (list might grow)
Tony Luke’s (cheesesteak… don’t do Pats or Genos… break the cycle)
Jim Steaks (second best, but only by a tiny sliver..within walking distance)
Sarcone’s Bakery
Anthony’s Italian Coffee House
Bank and Bourbon

Contact us:
If you saw us at Booth 618 or heard about us through the convention grapevine and are interested in TourneyCentral for your soccer tournament, drop us a line.

Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners

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Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners is a quick, easy way to build value for your advertisers and sponsors. While your TourneyCentral Advertiser Module and Google Analytics will give you aggregate traffic, you may want to track individual ads or links more closely. This is where URL shorteners really shine.

Let’s take a look at how to do it using the popular shortening service, bitly.com.

  1. Sign up for an account at bitly.com. I like using the @tourneycentral twitter account because I hate setting up one more user name/password account. Obviously, to log in with twitter, you need to have a twitter account. Use your soccer tournament account, not your personal handle so that your link history is part of the tournament record.
  2. Edit your profile, including an email address. Verify the address.Open your TourneyCentral Admin and navigate to the Advertising Module. Click to the first DEALS listing and copy the web address.
  3. Create your first shortened link by clicking on the orange button at the top.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  4. Paste the actual advertiser link in the Long URL box and Create. Copy the shortener URL into the Advertiser record in your TourneyCentral Admin and update.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  5. Over at bitly.com, eit your shortened link to include a DEALS tag and title to make building reports easier.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  6. Repeat for as many links as you want to track

Now, when advertisers or sponsors want to know how their DEALS placement did or when you need to go back for a renewal ad for next year, you’ll have data.

URL shorteners are also useful when advertisers or housing services give you URLs that are long, unwieldy or complicated with non-alphanumerics. When you run them through a URL shortener, it cleans them up smartly.

Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners; it’s a tool that every Advertising Director should have in their tournament toolbox.

Why your tournament website should be smaller

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Most websites have way too many pages! A website today is not the sum total of everything your tournament is online — a very different way of looking at websites from even a few years ago. The rise of social media is why your tournament website should be smaller.

The website needs to give the who what where when why and be the authoritative voice for the your tournament; also, for operationally critical data (sponsors, applications, schedules. The other media stuff needs to live on the outposts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, Snapchat etc with the website simply validating the authen- ticity of the content. The outposts are where people live now, wanting your tournament to meld into the rest of their lives, not the other way around.

Your online schedule is a hook for media where you can hang photos, videos, profiles, blog posts, etc. A schedules immediately gives your media context, i.e., who, where, when, why. Use that organic context to your advantage. The absolute hardest part of shifting to social media channels is convincing folks to let go of about 90% of the website pages. You just don’t need them!

Your tournament is now mobile and real time. Your participants, their fans and your supporting commu- nity is not waiting until they get home to look up scores, searching for photos, etc. They are doing that in real time as they experience your event.

Social is mobile
Because social = mobile, you should be staying on the mobile apps as much as possible, even signing up for accounts using them. For some — like Instagram and Snapchat — there is no web site; everything is done through the app.

Social media channels priority
Running a tournament is all about making the best choice for what works for you. While it would be great to be everywhere on every social media channel, it’s probably not possible.

Here is the list of social media channels in the order of priority that I think you should be working. In a year, this list may change but going into the 2016 tournament season, these are it.

  1. Facebook
  2. Twitter
  3. Instagram
  4. Snapchat
  5. Periscope
  6. Vine
  7. YouTube
  8. GooglePlus

Our advice: At minimum, the modern tournament should be fluent in the top four channels to be visible. How much you want to work each channel depends on the manpower you can direct into each. Some of the content to these channels can be automated, like scores and news updates.

Important: Implement the social media tools in order and completely. For example, don’t try using Vine or Periscope if you haven’t yet set up a Twitter account. It will frustrate and scatter you.

Don’t get so hung up on the volume of people using specific social media channels. It doesn’t matter if one billion people are using Facebook if only your guest teams and local community are willing to connect to your tournament there.

Focus on building your networks where it makes most sense to you. It is better to do fewer channels more deeply than to be everywhere but anemic and unfocused.

Broadcast and interact like everyone in the world is watching you. If you are doing it well, local print and television will ask if they can use your content. If you are doing it exceptionally well, national media will.

There are also other channels that you can explore like Tumblr, Reddit, YouNow, YikYak, FourSquare, Digg, WeChat, etc. But these eight provide a strong core of social media for your soccer tournament. Keep in mind that each channel requires more time and effort to maintain and you should only start with more if you are committed to keeping up these accounts.

Excerpted from The Game Through Glass: Playing your youth sports tournament on social media

Soccer tournament social media jobs training program

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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.

Social Media for Soccer Tournaments

Social media examples for soccer tournaments

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Readers of the touchline are quite familiar with our advocacy of using social media for soccer tournaments. I love the electric energy that comes with our events pushing the social media envelope, and @NASABuckeyeCup and @StrawberrySoccr are killing it!

Buckeye Cup
Along with updating scores on twitter as they were updated on the website, the Buckeye Cup also promoted their vendors on site. Take a minute to scroll through their twitter timeline, but the coolest thing I woke up to on Sunday morning was a pancake vendor. A pancake vendor!


The Buckeye Cup also linked its twitter account to its Facebook page so updates to twitter were also posted there, giving participants a choice on how to follow the real-time action.

Strawberry Soccer Invitational
I have to admit, when I first saw this technique, I was very impressed at the ingenuity. The hack was so clever that I had to go poking around to see how Dave pulled this off. We’ll probably even build in support for the javascript so it doesn’t have to load for each post.

When the Strawberry posts a Facebook post, they grab the code to share it and post as a news story on their front page. That way, they can share the photos and post in many venues and they cycle in and out based on the dates of the news story.

Here is what a sample looks like on the front page. You can check out the entire front page on the Strawberry Soccer website.

strawberryfacebook

These are just some social media examples for soccer tournaments that we hope will spark your imagination. We can’t wait to be surprised by what else you will do with your event.

Using Instagram for soccer tournaments

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A picture is worth a thousand words. That statement is at the core of what Instagram is. Instagram is one of the quickest ways to share a photo or moment across multiple social media platforms.

It’s easy too. For the most part you take a picture, add a caption, then share.

this guide will step your through using Instagram for soccer tournaments. Currently Instagram can only be setup through your mobile device, which is ok because you use your photo to upload photos into your profile.

Step one: Download Instagram to your phone from either iTunes or Android store

Step two:InsagramSignUp Here is where you have a choice. You have the option of signing up with your tournament’s Facebook page, or with email. (I suggest using a tournament gmail.com that you have set up instead of clicking the sign up with Facebook button. It is easier to know where your gmail is reaching out to and how things are connected instead of using a secondary social media tool to connect to a third-party app.)

Step three: Enter a user name and password. I would suggest using the same handle as your Twitter account to keep a sense of continuity throughout your social media presence. (If you chose sign up with Facebook account, this is where you will enter you Facebook user name and password.) When you press next, it will ask for your full name and mobile number, both of which are optional. These might make sense for a single person wanting all of their friends to find them according to their phone number, but it really doesn’t make sense for a tournament.

Step four:instagram02 Editing your profile. This is a standard short profile. I suggest using the same content from your Twitter profile for Instagram. Once you have finished your profile, you are almost ready for some awesome Instagramming.

Last step: Here is where Instagram becomes important. It can post to your Twitter and Facebook automatically. In your Settings > Share Settings you will find the ability to link to Facebook and Twitter. Just click on each and it directs you to a page that will ask you to connect the two services. Click ok and every time you take an image, you will be able to click on which services you would like to share the image with. The image also saves to your mobile device.

Instagram is really that simple. There are a few key things to remember about sharing photos on Instagram:
Always use a caption to describe what is happening. You aren’t there to be “artsy”, you are there to build content and experience about your tournament.

Hashtags are important. They are the easiest way for people searching topics to find your photos. #soccer #soccertournament and #yourtournamentname are always good hashtags. If you are featuring your sponsor, you may want to use #sponsorname as well. Try to limit the number of #hashtags to two.

You can have more than one person in the organization signed into to your account at a time, but remember the internet moves very quickly. Always know that you can trust the people connected to your social media accounts. Make sure they verify the accounts they are connected to before sharing content.

What to photograph
Moments. Any moment can make a great photograph. A coach thinking about the next play. A player eating pizza at your registration. A volunteer helping a coach. A referee assignor assigning games. Your scheduler updating scores.

When choosing what the photograph, try to capture the spirit of your event. Showing people having fun doing the most mundane things can give your event a sense of whimsy. Or, if your event is more competitive, show the struggle of putting together the perfect schedule, the perfect event.

Don’t forget your sponsors. If you have sponsors at the field, make sure you take lots of photos with their logo shown in the background. Encourage your guest or host teams to photograph themselves at the sponsors place of business. It may be a small gesture, but your eagerness to capture them in your official “record” of photos could mean the difference between a “yes” or a “no” for a sponsorship next year.

Be creative and have fun with photos. But also have a policy and release for kids, especially those under 13. Know the laws and err on the side of caution*.

*This is not legal advice. You should consult your legal counsel.

Hope Foundation for Greater Dayton

Partnering with a nonprofit at your soccer tournament

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Partnering with a non-profit organization is a great way to connect with your community. However it can get challenging.

When working with a non-profit, know what will truly help their cause. Listen carefully, as most will not assert themselves aggressively. For example, collecting canned goods for a food pantry might seem to be helpful, but finding transportation and distribution for the goods could become more of a hassle (and more costly!) than a cash donation to the organization. Most non-profit organizations could use donations more efficiently than the tangible items that are donated at the fields.

While it is up to you to determine how best to partner with a non-profit, once you have crafted a relationship, TourneyCentral has a lot of tools to help you push your message out. (An example of these features can be seen on the MASC tournament site. They partnered with the Butler County Special Olympics for their 2014 event. Check out what the MASC is doing!)

Our advice:
1. Use DEALS. You can add to five non-profit, community-based organizations like Special Olympics, parks dept, museums, etc., that do not involve ad placement or in-kind donations free of charge. They would appear under the DEALS and in the sponsors just as your paid placement woudld. You can rank them so that they always appear at the top of the list.

This includes as much content as they want to provide, including a deal, link to their donation page, a flyer (downloadable pdf), a video, twitter, and facebook.

2. Include news stories on the front page. Our latest software update allows you to make one story sticky, i.e., always appear at the top. The news story can include photos and a video as well.

3. Use the broadcast tool to send out a special email to the teams that only include the charity..this can be a rich HTML email (we can help with that…)

4. Use your twitter, facebook, vine, Instagram and Google Plus accounts. Promote, promote, promote. Be generous.(Start here if you are new to social media.)

Regardless of how your program shapes up, do something cool enough for us to write about (like the MASC) and keep us in the loop. We love bragging about our TourneyCentral soccer tournament events.

Advice on this article offered by Scott Sliver. Scott Sliver (Sly-ver) is Executive Director of The Hope Foundation of Greater Dayton. On twitter, he is @hope4dayton or @scottsliver and by email scott@hope4dayton.com.

Soccer tournaments 365/24/7

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Last week, we added the first 2013 event to our soccer tournament calendar, the Cincinnati West Soccer Fest to be held May 4 – May 5, 2013. The next season has already begun.

Then it occurs to us that with the Internet running 365 days a year, seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day, the tournament season never really ends. You are barely done hosting a spectacular weekend of games, fun and memories when the teams are already asking, “when is your tournament going to be held for next year?”

Are you ready for that?

In this always on world we’ve created, someone is always watching you, even in the off season. They want to be a part of your event and that is a good thing, even though it seems like a lot of pressure at first blush. It is always easier to maintain momentum than getting caught in a constant start-stop-start-stop routine.

Our advice: Act as if your event is always happening, even though you think nobody is watching or cares. Google never sleeps so anything you put out there on the Internet about your soccer tournament will get picked up and added to the index and library you’ve already created.

Your website is always getting traffic. Sure, during the tournament weekend it is going crazy with traffic to the scores, standings and DEALS but if your event needs 250 teams, that is only 250 or so visits within a forty to fifty week period your application is open. Why not keep the front door unlocked all year round if there is no downside?

Assign a small group of people to work on next year. This only needs to be 2-3 people. Their role is to watch what works or doesn’t work well for this year and be ready to turn over suggestions to the tournament committee immediately after the current year concludes. Often, the tournament committee is so exhausted after the weekend that — while they mean to get started on next year’s event quickly — they never get to it. Then, it is later in the year and panic ensues. A dedicated forward team doesn’t suffer that exhaustion.

Lastly, make a commitment early for next year. Get your sanctioning forms completed, lock down the venue and the dates, sign the hotel contracts, get yourself on the calendar and turn your web site over to next year. Make it real as soon as you can. It is an advantage.

Using Google Plus for your soccer tournament

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GooglePlus for Soccer Tournaments

The latest player in the suite of tools known as social media is Google Plus, or more commonly seen as G+ in buttons. While it can’t boast anywhere near the number of users Facebook and Twitter have, it has one advantage the others don’t — Google Search. However, it is growing fast.

Most Internet users start off a web session on google.com, whether or not they know the direct web address of the site they are looking for. Many simply type in keywords like “soccer tournaments in Ohio” or “soccer tournament software.” If these keywords are in your G+ posts, you have a greater chance of being found at or near the top of a search result.

Getting started is easy, but you need a Google Account. If you have a Gmail account, you are already there. Simply go to http://plus.google.com and set a profile for yourself.

Once you have a profile, you can then set up a Page for the soccer tournament. Underneath your name, you will see a page symbol. Click on that to “Manage your pages.” Create your soccer tournament page, upload your logo and start sharing. Be sure to add one more person as an administrator and secure the login/password as part of your tournament assets so that it can be seamlessly transferred to a new tournament director if need be later on.

The instructions for Google+ are sorta “discover as you go” but a good book to read is Google+ for Business by Chris Brogan.

Our Advice: Set up a Google Plus page for your soccer tournament. Repost your front page news, scores, sponsor offers and photos to your page. Don’t worry so much about interacting on your page as a social media channel just yet; that will probably come next year.

Be sure to include keywords in your post and photo captions as these keywords are pushed directly into the Google search engine. The sooner you start, the better head start you will have on all the other soccer tournaments who will discover and set up on Google Plus next year. Be first.

All TourneyCentral events support Google+ In your Admin>Web Site Maintenance Module>Variables you can add your G+ page to the social media sites on the left sidebar along with Twitter and Facebook. (See TheGameOfSoccer.com for a sample)

The TourneyCentral G+ page is here. We post photos, blog posts (including this one) as well as interesting photos fans may share.

This is part of a series on Social Media for Soccer Tournaments. We encourage you to read all the articles below.

Trust us. This stuff matters

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If you have spent any time online lately, you’ve probably noticed that there have been some issues of some companies and their privacy agreements. Google has come out with a new policy that combines ALL their properties under one agreement. That means if you have a YouTube account, a G+ page, a Gmail account, a Google Calendar, etc. all of this now is swept under one identity. And if you have multiple accounts, all of those accounts are tied together under you as one user.

More recently, some apps were caught uploading your entire phone book from your iPhone or Android smart phone — without telling you — when you installed their app. They apologize and claim to have removed all users’ data from their servers, but who really knows.

And of course, everyone’s favorite — Facebook — has a long history of deserving our mistrust with their ever-changing privacy policy and moving the settings around so we can’t find and change them easily.

Our Advice: It has taken a long time for people to trust the Internet. As the ability for services to sell services and goods erodes in the wake of alternative free services, there will always be a temptation to monetize customer data to advertisers and sponsors. In fact, you may have already been approached by sponsors asking for your list of teams, players and coaches.

The trust your teams gives you to keep their data away from marketers is not easily gained and can be lost in moments. Once you release data out, it can never be gotten back. Ever. You will be putting those coaches on mailing lists for years to come as the list get sold over and over and over.

At TourneyCentral, we won’t ever rent, sell, lend, lease or otherwise give out email addresses. In fact, every tournament we host agrees to that privacy policy as part of their use agreement.

Trust us. It’s not just something we say to get your business. It’s how we do business.

Behind the scenes. Content for social media

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Jim Long @newmediajim

That is my social media buddy Jim Long in the photo above. As a cameraman for NBC news in Washington DC who covers the White House, he has got to have one of the coolest jobs in the world. He also goes on press junkets all over the world covering the First Lady, Hillary Clinton and others.

And he is very active on social media.

One of the things I love about Jim is all the “behind the scenes” photos he shares on Twitter and Google+. One of his recent photo galleries can be found here. Almost every morning, he “greets” me by posting a photo of the sunrise over the White House or a Foursquare check-in at his favorite coffee place or just a quip about life in general. It almost always makes me smile and makes me feel like I am standing right there with him.
Continue reading →

Our TourneyCentral video

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Grandma and grandpa want to see their grandson Billy play in his first away soccer tournament. How will they find the right field and times Billy plays?

Fortunately, Billy's coach applied to a TourneyCentral soccer tournament so finding all this information was easy.
Billy's grandma went to the website, clicked on Schedules, found Billy's team name and got his schedule in seconds.

Our second video.. released July 30, 2012

Marcy has just been named her club's soccer tournament director. She searches for the best solution to help her manage all the tasks that go along with hosting a soccer tournament.