Nottingham City Centre Promotion 2010

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What you need

The team gathered at the crack of dawn, well about 10:00 (No one is going to be shopping earlier than that anyway) gathered our promotional stuff and were off. The team for the start of the day was Dave (Manager of the Park Squash Club), thingy and thingy (Who both worked at the club), Suse (My girl friend), Chris (My little brother) and myself. We had 2 mini squash walls, a couple of racketball rackets, 2 balls and a big board with posters on.

The Mini Walls

The scheme behind the strategy

Our racketball strategy was not to attract people who already play squash or another sport but rather the people who might go to the gym or feel that they really should have exercise but never get round to it. We felt that keen sports people would be unlikely to leave their sport for a new one (It doesn’t matter what a tennis coach says to me I’m not leaving my squash and racketball). Therefore we targeted the people who go to the gym but never play sport, or the people who would like to find a sport but just don’t know how.
The main posters and leaflets contained a hamster running round a wheal and then the words, “don’t go to the gym try the new and exciting sport of racketball”. We were then directing them to the beginners coaching courses and to come down the following Friday for a racketball open evening and exhibition.

The first hour did not go well

After setting up the mini walls (which is really easy) it was time to find some people that might want to hit and to get some signed up to the free trial. I personally thought giving away a month’s free trial to the best squash club in the country was going to be one of the easiest things ever.
It wasn’t, most people once you approached them with a clip board did not let you even get a word out before they either quickly walked away or quickly said “no thank you”. After about an hour making this approach and failing miserably it was time for a rethink.
We could have been giving out £50.00 notes and they still would have walked away.

Rethinking the plan

The new plan

What we needed was people standing around that we could talk to. Most people have very little free time or interest in sport. What we needed was the ones that loved sport and could spare us at least a few seconds so we could explain exactly what we were trying to do. We came up with 2 plans.
The first was that if no one was around the walls we would entice them in. Eddie Charlton had now turned up and when no one was around for us to talk to he would play my brother in an exhibition in the hope of drawing a crowd.
We would also target the kids, they were always interested in the bouncy ball and wall and wanted to have a go and while they were playing it would be easy to chat to the parents about racketball and the club.

Success

This worked really well. Eddie and Chris had some great rallies which quickly got the kids and adults interested. The mini squash walls actually work much better for racketball where the ball can bounce off further, we were even developing rules for competitive play. This allowed me the time to get my pitch out for both racketball and the squash club which by the end of the day was becoming well practiced and really starting to work.
In the end we got 50 people signed up for the free trial and as Dave tells me roughly 1 in 10 of those tends to sign up as a member that’s £2500 that we might have just made the club. It’s a start.

What we think could have gone better

It would have been a good idea to have more than 2 balls, although we didn’t run out, one chap did manage to smack a ball onto McDonalds (one more moron like him and the day would have been all over).
We needed some posters and leaflets about the squash club not just racketball. What I think we found really hard was to get across the facilities and exclusivity of the Park Squash Club to the people we were chatting to. It looked like we were just another group of people coming into the city centre to promote our business.
It was really hard to find a poster wall that the wind won’t blow down and is still big enough for people to see, I am still working on a solution to this one.

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I hope this article will spur some of you on to give promoting racketball a go. Please let us know of your promotional stories and any tips which you may have at info@uk-racketball.com