Archery. Because targets. Get it?

If you’ve done any research into marketing, you’re familiar with the term target market. The first thing you’ll read on any blog or website is that you need to know your audience. The strategist Sun Tzu wrote: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”, and for over 2,000 years marketing professionals have latched onto that quote to make themselves seem well read and a bit edgy. It’s also true. If anyone ever tells you their business idea is great “for everyone”, they will fail. You need to know who your market is, what they want, and what your own brand is so that you can properly match the two.

Here I’ll talk about a few things. This includes choosing a detailed target market, using it to inform your campaigns, and the risks of overdoing it. I’ll mostly use what I’ve done in the past to inform this. This is long. It’s intended for people who manage advertising campaigns and marketing for leagues, but who don’t necessarily have professional experience or business training.

Picking Your Target

There are 7.8 billion people on this planet. You can try to advertise to all of them, but odds are you won’t get a lot of good results and you’ll lose a lot of money. Do you have a friend who you think would like roller derby? That’s one person. If you focus all of your marketing efforts on her, she’ll probably come to a game, but that’s not going to hit your quotas. To be effective you need to pick your targets carefully enough to not waste resources, but broad enough to appeal to the community as a whole.

So how do you get started? WFTDA released some demographics studies a while back, which can give you some insight (also, we need a new one of these). Looking around the room at your games can also give you some information. Notice that it’s not just a question of who’s interested, but who will buy. We call that a ‘conversion’- a prospect becomes a customer (or skater, or NSO, or whatever you’re doing). Who that might be is unique to each league, so you’ll have to do some trial and error and proper research to figure it out.

You’ll also notice that what WFTDA gave us, and what Facebook asks us, is about demographics. What movie they saw, where they work, how old they are, stuff like that. Your targeting is all done in demographics, but that’s not really what’s happening. Your league fills a need. Maybe it’s a competitive sports environment, a stress reliever, social outlet or a love of puns. Being a 26 year old special education instructor doesn’t make a person sign up for roller derby, but a lot of them do. They have a tendency to be active, to want a stress outlet and to find a social circle that isn’t work related. Which you can help with. Understanding the theory, rather than just the demographics, can help you broaden your reach later on and craft better promotions.

So, think about who you want doing whatever it is you want them to do. The same rules apply for anything — getting fans, recruiting skaters and volunteers, so forth. Who are they? What do they want? How do you fit with that?

Once you start figuring this out, you may find a few patterns. The first is disparity. Often, the top 20% make up a vast majority of sales. Take care of them, keep them happy, and figure out what makes them tick. But don’t get roped into ignoring the rest of your base for their sake, or you’ll lose all of them. You may also find clumps. This is something we see in ages. The previous version of The Derby was popular in the 70’s, and the new version got big in the 2000’s. So we see people who grew up in the 70’s getting excited, and people who saw Whip It as late teenagers joining up. Both are different markets with different needs. You also might not see that; your area could very well have an even spectrum.

Either way, you’ll want to try out some market segmentation.

Market segmentation is identifying multiple target markets for the same product. Each gets their own ads, promotions and marketing channels. In the case of clumped demographics these are obvious. In the case of a spectrum it’s still necessary. If you try to reach the entire fanbase, you’ll find that you have a lot of useless reach with no engagement. So you need to pick multiple points as your targets, and spread from there.

My Examples

Last year, our Roller Derby Boot Camp resulted in a doubling of the league. Our skate rink was overwhelmed with new recruits. This was the result of a year and a half of study, followed by a Facebook ad campaign. We also post our events all over the internet, partner with local radio stations and place professionally printed graphics in high traffic areas. But Facebook was by far the most effective channel, and it gets most of my effort.

Each ad set had three components. The ad manager allows you to create a hierarchy of demographics, so that you can narrow your market very far. This way I can define a market by numerous properties, even exclusions if we want them. You can go pretty deep on this. They all started the same way: Women, aged 18–55, within 35 miles of Rohnert Park (our rink). We’re an all gender league, but we mostly get women so I can’t justify paid ads outside of that.

Fitness Basic. This ad emphasizes the workout element of the sport. Welcoming, for people looking to get into shape.

a. Physical: Fitness, gyms, soccer, sports, healthy eating, hiking and backpacking, etc.

b. Cultural: Alt, metal, tattoos, LGBT, healthcare, special education, Whip It (film), etc.

c. Financial: Higher education, income above a certain point, (exclude those who haven’t graduated high school). Fitness Competitive. Welcome to your new gym video ad. Intense.

a. Extreme sports, gyms, weight lifting, etc.

b. Cultural: Same.

c. Financial: Same. Social. Welcoming and encouraging.

a. Fitness/Other: Same fitness, include careers, mothers, family, things like that.

b. Cultural: Same, but added broader activities categories.

c. Financial: Same.

All of these included the movie Whip It somewhere. All lists included roller derby, since I just wanted a pass for people who had engaged with that. Simple but easy to overlook. Notice that I wanted to emphasize the competitive element, because that’s who I wanted to recruit, but that the three added together becomes fairly broad. Also notice a few odd things, like backpacking. I had noticed that it seems to be a common hobby among players, and reasoned that backpackers are up for a challenge and like finding new and unusual things (I’m one of them). Careers and other less obvious properties came from identifying correlations within our existing membership. Finance was to deal with retention issues. I have no bias here, I wouldn’t have made the cut for most of my life. But we were having problems with retention, and needed to know people could invest in the gear and put in the time.

There were other ad sets mixed in, but they didn’t work out. I know that because I did some low budget A/B testing, where you vary a couple of things and see where the engagement comes from. If you aren’t getting much engagement you’re wasting time, effort or both, so those should get cut out.

These also have varying levels of focus. The competitive fitness one is very specific, the social one is broad. Occasionally I threw in boosted posts with an extremely broad ‘general’ market. A couple of dollars is worth it to make sure you aren’t leaving too many people out. It’s important not to over target. A marketing professor once told me about businesses creating a single imaginary customer they target. It’s a neat exercise, but puts you at risk of overfitting what you think your audience is.

If you overfit you might create a narrow market on your own. You’ll recruit from a certain very small subset, then verify your own correctness when you find out that most of your attendees come from this group. Worse, you may then start trying to appeal more specifically to that group, narrowing it even further. Then you have no market. So don’t do that.

Other Channels, Follow Through

The above campaigns got us a lot of engagement. Engagement doesn’t get people in the door. Getting to that point takes a lot of work. It includes being active and responsive. Welcome messages, respond quickly. Post regularly in your event and out. Reply to comments. Stay engaged. That kind of activity is where a strong marketing team with solid communication will help you.

I’m talking about Facebook ads, but that isn’t your only channel. I chose not to invest cash much into other methods for this, but we’ve paid for Farmer’s Market booths and things like that before. Google Adwords is also somewhat useful, though I haven’t seen much click through on that. You need to make sure that your event or message makes it to every local calendar you can, local news outlets, things like that. Engage the press. Send out email campaigns. Do whatever you can to get the word out there, and to the right people. Each channel deserves its own article, so we won’t go into that here.

Cost/Benefit and ROI

In a cost/benefit analysis you determine, as the name implies, how much benefit you get for a given cost. Cost isn’t in dollars alone, it’s also in opportunity. Sending an outreach team to a local event with fliers means you can’t send them to something else, and you can’t assign them to other events for fear of burnout. You also have real cost in terms of the fliers themselves. If that local event happens to be a men’s rights rally, odds are you won’t get a lot of traction for women’s roller derby. If it’s a National Women’s Day event, you have better luck. And there’s plenty of space in between those extremes.

Earlier I said that we plaster the internet with our events. That’s not entirely true. There are maybe three local sites I ignore. Their interface was convoluted and hard to use, and took too much time for very little impact. So the cost is not worth the benefit. You can’t take every single idea and run with it or you’ll get burnout. Some things might be off brand and actually detrimental. So, before moving forward on anything, quickly consider if it’s worth the effort in your mind.

Turns out you can type anything into Google Images with ‘meme’ after it and get good results.

Iterative Marketing Or: How The Market Chooses You

We’re talking about you picking a target market, which is great. But what if you do the work, figure out who you want, and none of them bite? That’s where you need to do some introspection. Even if what you are doing works, you still need to constantly go back and forth between marketing for new fans/skaters/etc and adjusting to market needs. If people in your league, and outside, want a competitive challenge your coaching team needs to provide it. If they want something to brag about, you need to give them recognition on social media.

Marketing isn’t just aggressive sales. Marketing is more like matchmaking. You aren’t trying to convince someone they want your product; you believe they already do, they just don’t know it. You want to make your product what they want, and let them know about the opportunity. Everything in your league has to fit together, and it has to be on brand. If you try selling this as a tight knit family to help stay at home moms rediscover their social selves, you have to make sure they feel welcome walking in the door.

Always be engaged with your existing customers/skaters/etc. Ask your officials what you can do better. Survey your skaters every so often. Keep people happy, respect them and make sure they come back. It’s always better to retain a repeat customer than to find a new one.

I added this section entirely to use this image.

tl;dr: Target your marketing on demographics that are big enough to get you reach, but small enough that you’re confident it’ll work. Segment the markets to get multiple groups. Keep your fans/skaters/whoever happy.