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MOTORSPORTS MARKETING ON THE WEB
By Tim Kellebrew, OTR Promotions

It may not happen to you this season, and it may not happen at all (for a while). Of course, if you’re proactive—then you’ll want to offer a team site to a company that is new to the Internet. Sooner or later your sponsor is going to be very interested in HOW you can use the web to augment his or her business, reach markets, and gain exposure to new customers. Immediately following this question will be scores of others. While you don’t want to mislead your sponsor by talking in terms you don’t understand or comprehend—it is important to know at least some of the basics. You want to know enough to tell your sponsor how you can foot the bill for Internet promotions that tie in your race team to sponsor’s product or service.

Trust me, if you don’t, someone else will. If fact, if you don’t get this whole thing of marketing down in a way that’s meaningful to your sponsor—your sponsor could be on somebody else’s hauler next season. So hire it done if you have to—get some consultants to help you. Making your sponsor happy is going to be important as to whether or not they renew or go with your team over all the others in the first place. 

If your sponsor doesn’t ask you about hit counts or impressions, someone in their marketing department will be very interested. Eventually, they’ll get around to asking you about this if you have a team website. On the Internet, you can address your sponsor’s exposure concerns in two ways:

1) Maximizing your sponsor’s web presence by getting them wide exposure in a variety of places on the ‘net through a variety of means, and…

2) to build up traffic to your website so that surfers and race fans stop in (by the droves) to visit the site and get exposed to the sponsor’s banners, logos, and links.

In both cases, the sponsor will be interested in how much exposure they are getting. Obviously, the more exposure you get—the happier the sponsor will be. So that you know what is being referred to in terms of traffic to your website—there are various things you may hear from a sponsor or their marketing people. Therefore, depending upon the philosophy of the current time, the sophistication of the sponsor’s marketing team, or the sponsor is looking for—you may hear terms like ‘hit-count’, ‘impressions’, or even ‘page views’ being tossed about. When sponsors want to know how often certain pages are loaded at your site, they are talking about ‘impressions’. When sponsors want to know how many times files are loaded at your site, they are talking about ‘hits’. It is entirely possible that one visitor may generate many hits on a single page—because of the different files such as images and text that make up the page as it is loading. Hits therefore are not always the best indicator to unique visitors to the site.

Still, one can make a good guess about visitors to the site or more exact determinations can be made as to not only the number of visitors, but possibly how many of these visitors are unique visitors as opposed to repeat visitors and what part of the country they ae from. It may surprise you to know that you can find out all of this and even more information that will help you please your sponsor. You can find this out in one of two ways—by web analysis software like Web Trends or by opening your site’s access logs. If you are being hosted by a hosting service or you maintain your site through an Internet service provider (ISP) you will be able to get to unique access logs that contain this information. You can ask your web provider about this or visit the tech area of your site.

Now, having defined these terms and finding out you might want to be able to measure traffic patterns at your site—you need to know what to do with the information.

NOTE: You should probably only VOLUNTEER this information if it is impressive, as strategies for voluntarily disclosing this information will likely only work if first of all you have an existing website that gets a great deal of traffic. A good strategy then is to offer the information if the impressions are huge (say a count of over 100,000 impressions a month) or ONLY if you can offer a plan to show how the traffic count can be increased. Also, it might be enough to show that the existing traffic is part of a very selective group that your sponsor wants to reach (e.g. male skewed demographics).

After saying all of this, unless you are very fortunate you should know that the truth of the matter is that most motorsports teams home pages do not usually get high traffic patterns unless your team participates in a major racing series, has a celebrity driver, points leader or ‘something else’ that attracts race fans to the site. Because of possible low traffic patterns, we recommend that most sites take down its hit counter—if the site has one—as why make a negative impression? (Excuse the pun).  The bottom line is that team website can play into a sponsor’s web strategy by selling the sponsor on what they’re going to do to increase traffic, AND how the site is going to reach target race fans—a presumed niche market for your sponsor’s product or service.

Consequently, part of the ‘something else’ that your site might use to increase hits, impressions or page views might be giveaways, promos or content that brings traffic to the website. Also, if your sponsor already has a website, you can suggest that by working in consort with them and their web people—a collaborative racing theme site can become part of their existing site or even a special site dedicated to that purpose, for example: www.sponsoracing.com could be built. A major selling feature could be telling them that you have included a professional site such as this in your sponsorship pitch.

Whether an existing site or new site constructed for this sponsor and your team—being able to show traffic patterns, demographics, and a great content are essential components in your strategy to attract a sponsor by your team website. It may seem more like a marketing task than a racing task—but it’s important this day and age, if you want to tie in a sponsor. If you sell them because you can offer something really unique that will bring more traffic to their site or your site with their name on it, then you can appear to have that special something that some of your counterparts haven’t taken the time to understand.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tim Kellebrew is the owner of Kellebrew Consulting, a writing, editing, and content authorship firm.  He has worked with sports marketing firms, racing teams, computer software companies, medical health delivery organizations, and doctors on their research projects.  He writes books, proposals, and marketing pitch letters for hire.  He edits correspondence, books, research projects, theses, dissertations, and other materials.  He has authored numerous columns, articles, and other projects.   You can contact Tim by email at timk56@hotmail.com.

This article is used with permission and courtesy of ‘Ernie Saxton’s Motorsports Sponsorship Marketing News’, 1448 Hollywood Avenue, Langhorne, PA 19047. Phone: 215-752-7797, Fax: 215-752-1518 or on the web at www.saxtonsponsormarket.com. A one year subscription is $79.95. 
 
 

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