CRM in Sport
The market for sports events and challenges is booming, both in the UK and overseas. Everywhere you look people seem to be signing up do something amazing - whether it’s a 10km trail run, a triathlon or even an ultra-marathon. Socials are full of medal-posing photos. The opportunities are huge, and best of all, you don’t need to be an elite athlete to get involved!
Of course, the opportunities aren’t limited to participants. There are a wide range of event companies, along with other lifestyle and sports businesses which support participants on their journey to the start (and finish) line, including event management companies, international sports tour agents, sports nutrition companies, training plan providers and coaches. The list goes on.
From a marketing perspective, there is huge opportunity.
Building an effective customer journey
Perhaps you’re a sports event management company working with sports event participants and athletes. Even before sign-up, you can help provide clear information to answer the questions or concerns your prospective customers might have, helping those potential customers to continue to move along your sales funnel.
By answering questions and easing any concerns, you are removing friction from the sales process, helping to convert enquiries into new business. This is a great time to build trust with your audience and set yourselves apart from the competition, demonstrating your knowledge and your customer care.
Customer engagement
Armed with the right CRM and Marketing tools, you can then guide your customer along the journey to the event start date, with useful tips, an event-day countdown, and provide information on things they might want to consider and plan for along the way. You can also keep them enthused through the training period. Importantly, you can congratulate them on an event well done!
It doesn’t stop there. Post event, you can keep engaged, you might like to ask for feedback and take the opportunity to share other event information and customer success stories, to whet their appetite for other similar (or more ambitious) future events they could be interested in.
Adding value to your customer’s journey
It’s easy to see how these kind of participant events, provide the perfect opportunity for businesses to add value to every stage of their customer’s journey. So, if you’re in the sports event industry, but are missing some or any of the above, how do you improve?
Firstly, you need to clearly understand your customer’s journey, from initial awareness, right through to post-purchase. How can you engage with your customer, add value and delight them throughout their buying process, and at every touch point?
Secondly, you need the power of a CRM and marketing system, which can help you to automate elements of this process, moving your prospective clients effortlessly along your pipeline, converting more to new business and growing your business. Effective sales processes, don’t necessarily need huge additional cost of headcount. System automation and even the power of AI, can help ease the workload, freeing up time for your team to focus on client engagement.
Isn’t brand building alone enough?
It’s not enough to simply build brand awareness through social media campaigns and content marketing. Too often, businesses invest heavily in lead generation without giving enough thought to what happens to these leads once they are ‘interested’ in your product or service and enter your sales funnel.
Once you’ve generated new business leads you need to consider your sales strategies, to ensure they convert to new business – increasing all important sales and income. To do this, your new business leads need to continue to move through the sales process / pipeline.
Targeted customer communications
It’s here that email marketing can really come into play. With targeted customer communications, you can make sure your customer feels both important and well-served. Think carefully about what information they might need at each stage in their journey and how you can help provide this. This not only helps the customer, it also helps build trust and customer loyalty.
Find out more…
To find out how a clear customer journey and effective comms plan, combined with an intuitive CRM and Marketing system, could help you to efficiently scale your business - get in touch. We would love to hear from you!
*HubZest is a Customer Journey specialist. We work with our clients to understand the current state of your customer’s journey, and recommend changes to add momentum to the sales process, and remove friction. HubZest is also a HubSpot Solutions Provider firm, helping clients through the HubSpot onboarding process and working with them to develop a successful customer journey.