Permission marketing at work in minor league sports

Imagine you’ve invited your boss over to your house for a casual dinner. The event has been on your social calendar for several weeks, giving you plenty of time to plan and prepare a great meal. 

After exchanging greetings, your boss surveys the spread and asks, “Could you throw together a salad?”

Regretting you hadn’t thought about it sooner, you run through a quick list of possibilities in your mind: the fridge sits empty and there’s not enough time (or money) to hit the local grocer. Suddenly feeling not-so-prepared you resign yourself to the fact that the idea of a dinner salad – despite how yummy it sounds – will have to be shelved for a later date.

Now, what if you had a beautiful garden in the backyard ripe with fresh lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and cucumbers? What if you had planted those seeds several months earlier, tended to and grown everything you needed for just such an occasion?

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The Kelly Cup Playoffs begin this week. As we had hoped, the Idaho Steelheads secured the Brabham Cup, a trophy awarded to the team with the most regular season wins; packaged with home-ice advantage and a first round playoff bye.

The playoffs always present a very interesting marketing challenge. Each round is a best-of-seven series leaving three “if necessary” games. The possibility exists (multiple times actually) of winning a game seven on a Wednesday night and advancing to the next round of the tournament beginning at home the following Friday; leaving two days to spread the word, to tell the story, to make a salad!

During last week’s Monday mourning (not a typo) meeting, our staff had a flash-idea that we felt could help jump start sales and increase interest in our playoff on-sale date. The meat and potatoes of our marketing plan had been set in motion weeks ago but the consensus amongst the group was that we had stumbled onto an idea that had real potential to help!

The idea part of the equation, the right combination of price points, discounts and value added, is usually the easiest part. Most often the difference between a successful promotion and a failed one lies in the execution. How are you going to tell the story to enough of the RIGHT people?

If you’re a doer, an implementer, last-minute ideas – no matter how good you think they are – put your back squarely up against the wall. There’s no time or money for radio buys, print ads and/or television production. 

Imagine you have a nice ripe garden in your backyard (or back pocket)? A growing database of opt-in fans, an online audience of frequent web visitors and an active RSS feed broadcasting content into the social media world.

If you don’t already have one, you can’t grow one overnight (or in a week… or even in a month). If you are actively growing, when you’re asked to make a salad, in the words of my favorite 4-year-old, “It’s easy peasy!”

Left to right: Mike Pearce (ECHL Representative), Eric Trapp (President), Derek Laxdal (Head Coach), Marty Flichel (Team Captain)

Results: Our on-sale, one day ticket sales for the playoff opener on April 16th, crushed anything we’d done for past playoff on-sales (like 13x’s the revenue from the same day last season). While I contribute a good chunk of the success to our e-newsletter, our website and our social media fans, friends and followers; I also want to extend a huge “thank you” to our friends at the Idaho Statesman and Citadel for helping tell the story and spread the word on such short notice.

Coming Next Week: I’ll share some specifics on how we grew our Steelheads opt-in database this past season and highlight a few of the results we generated using it.