Quick marketing guide for your soccer venue

At Playsmatch we deeply believe that your business’ success is our success too. That’s why we want to offer a quick marketing guide for your soccer venue to help improve your day-to-day operations. Beyond maintaining your soccer fields in excellent conditions (something fundamental for users to return), we want to give you some marketing tips that we know will help and you can certainly make the most of.

SEO & SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing more than improving your website’s content to be found easier in search engines like Google. That is, when someone is looking for a soccer field and googles “fields near me”, your page will be so well-optimized that Google will immediately show your page to that user within the first results.

SEO is not an exact science. Improvements can be made and there will always be details to fine-tune. No one really knows when Google makes changes to its algorithm. No one knows exactly how you can display one site above another. However, we do know that some aspects of your website can be improved that Google has revealed over the years. Some of them are:

• Years a website has been active (both the domain and the site) may determine a certain ranking of superiority as long as it is updated and remains active with periodic content. Simply put, a site from 2010 may have higher ranking than another from 2015, as long as it continues to comply with relevant standards and updates.
• Your social media accounts matter. Google knows that a large social media community matters basically because it’s the users who give confidence and a seal of approval to that company/account/brand. Growing a large community of followers helps and more if your social media accounts are linked to your website.
• Keywords must be spread throughout your site (or at least in most of it). Those keywords define the nature of your business and they must be present in your domain and in your description. If you create content, then it will also appear in titles, H1 headers and other places.

If you want to learn more about SEM (or Google’s promoted positioning), here is a short video with a quick explanation of what SEM means and how it can help you growing your business:

(Video by Localsphere Digital Media)

Social media

We can’t stress enough how important is to have an active social media community. Focus on creating an effective strategy for your social networks that shows what you like, what you want to communicate and what you do. Show people playing in your fields, show your facilities, turf, nets, arcades, snack bar, EVERYTHING. But watch out! Don’t talk too much about yourself. Few people follows someone who only talks about himself, unless you’re dealing with a superstar.

What else? Don’t talk about your competitors. It’s not necessary and looks bad. People will not take it well. You may generate controversy and a lot of negative feedback. Focus on speaking more about the nature of your business or the market segment you’re involved in. A good example? Post about soccer, soccer players and trivias. There’s tons of info out there that you can use to create content.

Create different plans. If you’re going to host a game for your customers to watch at your venue (Real Madrid vs Barcelona or Man. United vs Man. City), do some advertising through Instagram or Facebook. Let people know that you offering is more than just a soccer field. You can also try using the “Stories”, to show your customers the awesome environment that you can offer on real-time.

Keep a constant reminder that your users can book online. Show your website on your Facebook and Instagram bios. Remember that your website is there to support you. Promote it, talk about it, show it to the world!

Secret to win some real followers: look for businesses similar to yours (could be direct or an indirect competitor) and follow the people who like the posts that most resemble yours. Soccer content usually likes to people who play soccer and if they play football and are from your locality, you probably find your court attractive to follow and go to play at some point.

Customer service

Customer service is essential in these cases, especially because businesses like yours deal directly with players every day. Making them feel good means: a returning user. A customer who returns to your venue is a happy customer, so you must know how to identify them. Having a database that offers you that information is very helpful.

Aligning your employees with a clear message and making them to embrace your values will help them to better serve your customers. Employees are the face of your business and they’re a vital piece throughout the process. They must have a relationship of trust and respect with those who are going to play. When hiring, make sure to identify their vocation to service and good attitude.

Online booking

Don’t stay in the past. Users are currently used to online transactions. If you’re still relying on pen and paper to manage your scheduling and day to day operations: Stop it. Lots of businesses like yours already switched to online bookings and stopped wasting precious time picking up the phone every 2 minutes. This automatically translates into more free time to focus on improving other aspects of your business. In our experience, we’ve seen some users booking at 6 in the morning, midnight and even 2 in the morning. Are you going to wake up that early for a quick buck? I don’t think so. Set up an online booking system (like us) and receive reservations 24/7.

If you liked this quick guide, support our blog by sharing or commenting and we will surely do a second part.

For more information about our management system and online booking tool visit our website at www.playsmatch.com

Enjoy!