As our local sports season is coming to an end I am trying to figure a way to motivate customers and sales people to participate in High School sports. We carry football, basketball (boys and girls) and Hockey (again boys and girls).
Currently we offer a sportscaster club, which is budget billed over 12 months, each sponsor receives 2 :30 second commercials during the day of a game and a minimum of 2 :10 second sponsor mentions during the actual broadcast. Also each sponsor is given a sponsorship of a local sports report each week of the year (on a rotating basis). We decided to use the sportscaster approach to deal with the problem of very high billing during basketball season, when we started we had around 23 sponsors, now we have around 10. As you can imagine I'm not very pleased with the decrease.
I have a totally female sales staff and am looking for ideas to get the sports sales up. I believe that High School sports is one of the things that makes a small market station truly local. We have a quality play-by-play team and present a good product.
Any ideas?
Woody Woodward
Do you sell your pregame, halftime and postgame show? We also sell a scoreboard sponsor.. so everytime the score is mentioned the client is mentioned.(Example: 40-54 on your xyz business scoreboard) This has been very successful for us.
We also have regular spots outside of the game included in our sports "package". For Example... our sports package consists of 15-25-:30 second commercials to air during each month on days of clients choice... and 2 commercials per game that we carry. The Pregame, halftime,postgame and scoreboard sponsorships are higher priced than the regular sponsorship. We price each sport seperatly or they can buy "the works". I attached our "package" to help you out a little bit.
Good Luck!
Woody,
This package has worked well for me in the past. It may be helpful for ideas. Please let me know if you need some more info, as I have several other packages I came up with and found success with in the past with local sports. ~Best wishes
Thank you Jessica,
Yes we do have pre half and post sponsors and a client who donates a $1 for every point scored during football to the booster club. I like some of your ideas and will let the staff see what you do.
Have a great day.
Thank you for your ideas. One question I have is do you allow and commercials other than what you have listed on your sheet? In other words can a business purchase a commercial to air during the broadcast?
Thanks again.
Woody,
I did a quick search of the forum and found these discussions on selling high school sports:
Promotion for Fundraising for High School Sports Teams
How to Approach Sponsors for a Sports Radio Talk Show
Hope you find some ideas or information you can use!
~ Rebecca
High school sports is our main bread and butter..our small community is known for state championships and EXPECT US to carry their games..we only have one football team, but 4 basketball, baseball and softball teams..so we do round robin during those..we sell sponsorships with packages and like others mentioned, we sell pregame, halftime, kickoffs and touchdowns..i could talk all day about the importance of sports in a small market..it's what pulls everyone together and i have people who will not advertise on anything but sports.
