Today on the merch is a dirt podcast episode number 23. It's race time. Everything is ready. The course is set, the markers are up, and the permit is approved. Now you need to tell the world. So how do you talk to your customers? Do you break out your communication strategy and start implementing your plan? Or do you break out the shotgun and hit every channel from here to Facebook with your race announcement? That didn't sound good.
Thank you for joining me for the Merchant Center Podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, your professional recognier and race business coach, and I'm here to make the art and science behind building and promoting and directing off road races simple and understandable. Along with me is my fictional cohost that everyone loves to hate Mister Murphy, He's the guy who always likes to wreck your races. And then we get to learn from him. So we learn how not to do what he tries to do to us.
To the anti Murphy. Murphy proof it. Get the Murphy out of your shoes. Try not to step in any Murphy. Yeah. It's kinda like that. Mister Murphy, it's all those things in above. If you're new to the merchandiser podcast, welcome aboard. My goal is to teach you how to build better races. Will hopefully impact 1 person's life. If you can act impact just 1, wouldn't that be worth it? I think so. So if you're ready to take your race promotion skills to the next level, then let's get in today's topic.
When you're ready to message the racing world about your race, do you use a strategic approach or a shotgun approach? And when I say shotgun approach, that's just blasting it out there to anybody and everybody who will listen. Or do you pinpoint specifically the channels you know will work that will get people to show up to your race. Now if you said shotgun, you're not alone. The shotgun approach is a common method used among race promoters.
This is where they attack every form of communications all at once, hoping at least 1 of the messages will generate some interest. Often the list will include all sorts of emails, everybody they know.
Websites, links, they'll they'll put in those email. Hey. Come to my website. Come do this. Online registration links. Oh, don't coming to to bike reg or athlete reg or come to active and sign it for my race. Social media posts and Facebook. Hey. Did you hear I haven't erased? Did you know I haven't erased? Hey. Registration closes in 5 minutes.
List of cool sponsors are usually followed by that. Did you know, hey, I got Cliff Bar this time. Hey, I've got I've got the water bottle people. Hey, REI is showing up. You gotta come to this. Maybe flyers start popping up everywhere. Every cork board you see from here to Tim Buck 2 as a flyer on it or even worse, you come off the mountain bike trail, or you come off from a trail run, and there's something stuck to your window in the park parking lot. Yuck.
Especially if it's raining, that's perfect. Scrape that off your window. I can really come to a raise like that, aren't you? You'd be surprised. Yeah. When the smoke clears from your shotgun blast, How do you know it worked? How do you know that putting flyers on windows actually brought people into your race? How do you know that blasting it social media actually produced a customer. How do you know? Do you ask him? When they show up to your race, do you say, how did you find out about us?
Maybe you should. Many race proers will will tell you their preregistration numbers do go up, or that their race registrations improve over last year, But if you look at the data closely, you'll see a spike in registrations around the time of the shock and blast, and then a dramatic drop off afterwards. Many racing rotors experience the shotgun effect where they go out and blast everything they possibly can. They'll get a spike in registration, and the spike is relative.
And then nothing crickets. They'll panic. So what they'll do, they'll do another 1. And with each Consecutive shotgun blasts result in fewer and fewer registrations. So what is happening? Why does the shotgun approach not work? The answer is consistency. It hits a lot of people who are not your customers, and it requires your target customer to see your message and react right then. What if they see your Facebook post in the car? What if they see your email on the way to a meeting?
Can you imagine what racer might think? If they have to spend 10 minutes peeling a wet flyer off the windshield to look at over the car, This has happened. So take note. Communications requires consistency to work. Communications also requires precision targeting. This doesn't sound like a shotgun does it. A shotgun is it. They used to another word for Scott. Sh shotgun is a scatter gun.
Where you blast a bunch of pellets out in a wide burst. The whole point behind a shotgun is to hit something, a moving target. When you're talking about hunting birds, you wanna hit the the bird with a bunch of different pellets because it's got birds bones are hollow, and that knocks a bird right out of the air. That's a perfect use for shotgun. Or fast moving garments. Rabbit's is a perfect use good use for a shotgun. I'm gonna hit something with a scatter.
But where all the other b b's and pellets go that don't hit the target? They just they're wasted energy. That's wasted part of the shell. It goes everywhere. So you're only hoping a couple will hit. That's why you use so many. That seems like a waste. All that effort. For 1 or 2 b b's to actually work. So precision targeting is a much different approach. Precision targeting is going directly after the thing you want. You could almost call this a sniper rifle.
If you want to, maybe even an arrow. An arrow is a precision targeted weapon. So precision targeting communications is a lot like that, where you're actually know what you're going for. What have you found out that only 10% of your target customers found out about your race on Facebook? Would you still use Facebook? To advertise your race, what have you found out that Instagram resulted in a 50% increase in registration? But you use Facebook. Because you've always used Facebook.
Would you change? So you're you're need to consider where your customers actually live? Your customers live on Facebook? They live on Instagram? They live on Twitter? They live on email? Did they live in the parking lots of of parks? Did they live in the quirk board? Did they know about your website? Did they go to registration areas? Where do they go to find your race? Where do your customers find you and find your race?
So you wouldn't use any of those communication channels if they didn't work. But here is the rub, like I talked about the very beginning. How do you know they worked? How do you know that 1 of these particular channels actually resulted in a registration? In any registration. How do you know? So what's the best way of telling the world that your race exists? You're not going to know until you first become for how you communicate with your customers. If you only use Facebook to do your race
and you get so many people to show up, and you asked them, or do you find me? And 80% of them say Facebook and the other 20% say, I thought, like, Jim or Bob or Sue, or Michelle, then you'll know. By using that channel, you get results. But if you use Facebook and nobody showed up to your race, You'll know right then. Facebook doesn't work, but you have to know you have to be able to measure this.
So this requires you to put away the shotgun building tools to help you deliver a message in a systematic and measurable way. And that first tool is called the communication strategy. It's a communication Saturday, or you can call it a communication plan, is a document that expresses the goals and methods for your race person company outreach activities. That's its purpose.
You define what you're gonna use to be consistent because you've done the research and found out where your audience exists online. Or in the real world, or in the radio world or in the TV world. This is how advertisement works all together is you have to know where your audience lives. Its power comes from its capability to include what your company wishes to share to your customers in a consistent way. It defines which of those customers you are trying to reach. That's an important key.
And when do you need to reach them? And that consistent message that you deliver when you do that. So think about that for a minute. Is not only do I have to find my target customer, But then I need to know, when do I talk to my target customer? When is an opportune time to let them know that I am having a race, that a price is going up, that registration's about to close, that I have another race, that I have a whole season of races. When do I talk to them? Do I do I consistent?
Or do I only hit them when I look at my registration numbers and realize, I need a 100 and I have 3. So I totally panicked. Oh my gosh. I need to talk to my customers. Come, boom. There comes a shotgun. So this communication strategy dictates to you. You almost call it a schedule. There is a schedule in it. It's not the the entire thing. And we'll get into that a little bit later about what the communication strategy parts are. But you're talking about precision targeting.
So I'm gonna find my customers online. I'm going to understand what I wanna say to them, and I'm gonna say I'm gonna decide what win I want to say to them, and how I go about doing that consistently. Do I do it every week? Do it every month? Do we every 3 months? Every year? Do I do it when things happen? Is it an event driven? How do I do that? And I'm consistent about it. I do it the same way with every race. I do it the same way every year so that customers become expecting,
especially the ones who become repeat customers, start expecting those messages. And when they don't see those messages come out, they don't see those announcements, They start looking for you. They start wondering, okay. What happened? I do this race every year, and now I haven't heard anything. They start searching for you. And if you aren't consistent with that communication and you have an updated your website, then say you've got a race coming out 2017.
Your website still says 2016. That's all the 26 16 information, and it's March. And that race happens in what? June? And they come looking for you, and they're like, hey. Is that race happening? And as a race director, you're gonna start getting those emails. When you start seeing those emails, you missed the boat. You've missed the communications chance. And this takes practice. This is not something you do overnight. This is not something that you can master
within just a couple weeks. This is something that you can master in a couple years because a consistent communications effort takes time First, you have to develop it. You have to understand it. You have to know its metrics and its measures and how what's working, what's not working. What messages resonate, what messages don't resonate, what creates a customer, what doesn't create a customer, what you know all that in your first 2 or 3 times around this loop because it is a process.
Once you know these things, you can then start applying your thinking cap, your strategic understanding
of what work on doesn't. And you can do cool things like you can try AB test thing. Like, I'm gonna try this message for this half and this message for that half and which 1 actually generates more revenue. Now well, not sure revenue. Customers coming in, that's revenue. Start to get more response. You start to get an understanding of when I talk this way to customers, I get a better response than when I talk that way. You need an example of this? By open registration online, and then I sent an email to 50 of my people on 1 side and a completely different type of email, 50 on the other side. And the list of people on b, I see register, 25% registered from that and and on a and on b, 10% registered. Whatever I said in a, Sounds like that might have worked better. Tone of voice, language,
the way in which I carry myself, maybe that's me the length, maybe it's short, and the other one's long, maybe 1 has a photo, 1 doesn't, you can get really, really granule into this type of this type of thinking. But to fully appreciate how the communication strategy can work. For your race promotion business,
you need to first have 1. So the next segment will get into how you develop about that. But just know that you need to be thinking this way. This is called this is the way you think strategically is you start putting thought into everything you do, you start writing down everything you do, you document everything you do, and then measuring how that works, deciding
what works and what doesn't rather than just do everything. Imagine the energy would spend writing posts on every social media platform out there. When you find out that mountain bikers only watch 1, they're all on Instagram. And you did Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Tumblr and Twitter. I'm repeating myself. But all the social media platforms. You put it out everywhere. You're on LinkedIn. You're looking for mountain bikers everywhere.
Then your research tells you, hey. I asked my audience, I asked my customers and found out that 90% of them use Instagram. Would you continue to do the blast approach if you found that out? Not a chance. So this is why this works. This is how the communication strategy gets you results. That you know work, and that's the key. Today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor, wreckingear.com.
Recognito was created to help you successfully create off road races that changed people's lives. But when a race promoter fails or gets discouraged enough to quit. They never build the event. They could have impacted the 1 person whose life could have been changed by it. They never get to share the joy that comes with providing an experience to someone who didn't know they could do it or even a chance to motivate someone to just living a health care life. I saw so many race brothers disappear from the industry, but I started to ask why. Why are they disappearing?
Why were they going out of business? What are discovered with something astonishing?
Nobody is teaching race partners how to build race promotion businesses that thrive. That's why I created Rick and Ear. I've taken everything I've learned from years of managing races through trial and air, and created a catalog of free lessons, strategies, and tools that work. I provide you with the best lessons learned in event design, race management, and race promotion education, all for free. If you don't know how to grow your racing business or you just need a place to start or you're ready to become successful at promoting offered races, I can show you how. So please visit brickandear.com
today and learn how to build a race that can change a life. Okay. So it's time to build our communication strategy. We need to go through the steps to help you break down the understandable components that you'll use to design the way you're going to talk to your customers. And it comes in 10 parts
or 10 steps. Everybody wanna say it. So let's go through each 1. So you get an understanding of how a communication strategy is formed what goes in it, and then what you can do to add your own spin, your own take on how you become systematic when it comes to communicating with customers. So number 1, know your purpose. The first thing you wanna include in your communication strategy is what you hope to achieve with it. For race promoter, this is not that difficult a statement to create.
Ultimately, you wanna use your communication strategy to engage your customers and get them to register for your races. Seems pretty simple. But you also might wanna engage with your customers, your purpose, might be to find volunteers. You might be engaging with customers to find people to help with medical.
Some emergency response so that might be segmented in different ways to where the purpose of a communication is not specifically to talk to customers for just getting them to come to your race pay for registration. Could be other means. Could be a volunteer list. Could be a way to find sponsors. This is your purpose of that particular part of your communication strategy. 2nd 1, know your place. This is where you outline your race production company does.
Do you promote trail runs, mountain biking, or venture racing? If you do, then what you what are the main things that you do to build those kind of races? Are you into long endurance style events? Or maybe you enjoy those short course races that are designed for spec to be spectators friendly. Write down your strengths
that your race approaching company has in building those kind of races. Then write down your weaknesses you have too. What hasn't worked well with you and what would you like to fix? When you're analyzing your company's current situation, understanding your strength and weaknesses can help you understand your communication priorities, It'll help you focus on your strengths when you're trying to effectively communicate with your customers. It's like, think about volunteers.
Maybe you get volunteers all the time, and volunteers aren't really that big a deal to you. So your strength is definitely communicating and getting volunteers. Maybe it's registrations. Maybe you get plenty of solo and to 2 person teams, but the COVID people just never show up. So stylizing
those strengths of what you do better What are the things that you do that maybe appeal to people? Short spectator events might bring out more spectators. So maybe that's the thing to see the selling point. Maybe adventure racing. Your course design is better than anybody else's. Maybe it's the the after race party you wanna emphasize on. Maybe it's your t shirt design. Who knows?
Those are the kind of things you think about when you're talking about knowing yourself, know your place. Because what are you strong at? And what is the thing that you want to communicate to people that makes you different than other races. Okay. Number 3, knowing your competition. You should probably know something about your competition.
This should mainly focus on what makes you different based on what your competitors are doing. This does not need to be overly involved. Simply identify your competitors, who they are, and know which ones are great, have a greater impact on you over another. Maybe if you're in the trail running, who are your trail running competitors? Who are the people who put on races at different places that maybe do a better job than you? Maybe they have music and you don't. Think about the competitors that
do bigger races versus small races. Maybe your niche is the small race race audience. Versus the big race. You're going after beginners, not the experts. You're going after families. Maybe you wanna throw you wanna throw colors around. Maybe you're into the the color runs. Maybe you're into zombies. Who knows? Do it know your competitors? Do they do that kind of thing? Maybe they don't. Maybe they're straight up old school trail running, and maybe that's the appeal.
So think about who they are and what they do and what makes you different. Number 4. Know your objectives. Your communication strategy should be designed to help you achieve your overall vision. Do you have a vision? What is it? You cannot deliver your objectives if nobody knows what they are. Additionally,
you cannot provide your customers with key messages if you have a new idea of what you want to say to them. So let's think about that. What do you want to say to them? Some examples that could include, think about this. Objective 1, to provide the best experiences for your racers.
Seems pretty that's pretty good effective. Right? What kind of pieces would they have? Well, here's some Something like the operational objective could be to train your staff effectively to deliver a Disney like experience. Everyone smiles, everyone's happy, Everyone's always, you know, having, you know, with the small world. Right? Your communication objective is to ensure that your staff knows that service standards are expected.
That's a communication strategy for something you would do internal. You're talking to your staff. So you want the best experienced racers, your operational objective is to deliver a Disney like experience, your communication objective, is to make sure your staff knows that that's what you want. So those server standards are expected. Maybe that's how you maybe that's how you rate them in your performance evaluations
if you could get to that level. But that's how you judge as a performance is on whether or not they provide the best experience to your racers. That's measurable. You ask your you can ask your customers. Hey, did you get the big experience? No. I don't last your time. Well, then you know that your operational objective and you get met, and maybe it's because you didn't tell your staff, that's what you wanted. There you go. That's communications in a nutshell.
Here's objective number 2, to increase the number of racers attending each of my events. That seems pretty pretty good objective. Right? So what's the operational objective? To build races that will attract a high number of racers?
Maybe you build small races that live in small parks and no one's ever heard of you. That's not gonna track a large number of races. So your operational objective may need to change. Maybe they can change your venue. Maybe it's gonna change. The kind of races you do. Maybe 5 mile trail runs just aren't gonna attract a bunch of people. Maybe you would need bigger races. You would need a gimmick.
Your communication objective is to provide customers with a regular flow of information from preregistration to post registration thank you. Maybe to get the high number of people, you need to start talking to the people you have and asking them to bring friends. Maybe you need to start talking to
the the people who went to your race and telling them thank you. Do you tell them thank you? Do you send out an email afterwards, and thank you. Do you send out an email after where they come to your race and say, hey, if you register today for my race I'm gonna have next year at the same time, I'll give you 20% off. I'll give you 10 bucks off if you register today.
Do you know a lot of 5 k's do that? Are you doing that for your trailer runs? How about a mountain bike race? You ever done that with a mountain bike race? I've never gotten that for a mountain bike race. Thank you. Wow. That would be pretty cool if I gotta thank you. I don't get too many thank yous for mountain bike races. So think about that.
And that would definitely encourage me to attend next year. If you just took the time to say thank you, You'd be surprised how many people go. You know? That was kinda cool. So the purpose of this section is think about what you want your company to look like 3 years from now. Now take some of that time and write down. So this objective is you want your race from which company to achieve. If you want that diss Disney like customer service, that's not gonna happen overnight.
If you wanna start preparing yourself to write emails to customers, preregistration, and postregistration, post race thank you. You these are planning that. You might be able to achieve that in the 1st year, but it's gonna take some time. Well, if you have 1 race, that's easy. What do you have 20? Does he thank you to everybody who came for 20 races? That's all thank you. Are you prepared for that?
Can you fit yourself, write those thank you? So you need to think 3 years out. Give yourself some time to to roll into this type of type of thinking. And write those down. What does he wanna achieve? The end result should be approximately 3 to 5. Realistic objectives can help you measure that you can hopefully measure. K? For example, 30 people show up to your race. So your objective is to increase the number of races attending to your event. So your operational objective
is you wanna build a race that attracts more people. So you're going to take that objective, gonna build a bigger bigger race, big blue venue. So 3 people show up. I want a hundred people show up. We pick a bigger venue, maybe some tougher obstacles, maybe something a little more local to the city or something that will attract more people. Your communication objective for that is you start talking to people who came to those there's 30 people. And ask him to bring a friend. It's that simple.
If they bring a friend, those 3 people, maybe it's 50 next time. That's 20 extra people. They may not seem like a lot. That's 20 extra people who could also bring a friend. And maybe at the end of that, it's 200 people. Or maybe they bring 2 friends or 5 friends or they bring their whole club, you don't know what the power of this can have until you do this. And I can measure that. I live in 30 to 203 years. That's a realistic, measurable result I got from creating a communications objective.
In which I knew operationally and communicationally, what I needed to do to see that impact. That's my experiment. That's my minimal viable product. Is I'm gonna build something and attract people, and I'm gonna talk to those people who came. That's it. Okay. So number 5. Know your stakeholders. And we kind of talked about this a little bit in 1, but know your stakeholders. It should
detail who you believe your target customer to be. This means you should probably know a little bit about your racers by going to where you know they hang out and ask them some questions. Survey is a perfect example of this, but you can ask them informal questions. You can go to races, you go to events, you can go to the the meetups, the trail, the trail local trail run, the venture race, the clinics, the diets, start asking questions.
You need to find out what they like to eat, where they like to shop, what they like to buy, and then go find those businesses and become their partners. And get them to become sponsors. This is probably the hardest thing about doing this. Is sponsors are, yeah, there's always a pit per quo. What can you do for me? A lot of times, passive advertising, putting the logo on a t shirt doesn't do much for business. So it doesn't make that very much in give them the opportunity
to to benefit. We're gonna return on investment for putting their logo in your shirt and giving you a bunch of money. That might give you trade and kind. That might give you product. And if they do see a return, they're measuring this too. If they do see a return, they'll come back. They see people, if you give them coffee, And those people go back to the coffee person and buy more, and then say, hey, I got this from Kyle. You'd be surprised.
A coffee place might go, hey, you know what? That worked out for us. Here's some more. We wanna be wanna continue this relationship. It's a relationship. Right? So 1 way you can help you understand how your customers are internal and external is to map them out. This is the stakeholder thing. So you know all these things about your customers. You're collecting information about your customers. So you include this list. It shows your customers as as that that that shows racers, sponsors,
maybe park managers. Maybe park managers is also someone you wanna communicate to. If you communicate to your racers the same way you communicate to a park manager, No. How about community groups? Public recreationalists. No. There's the clubs, the people who go trail maintenance. People, boy scout groups, girl scout groups, church organizations. What about your staff and your volunteers? Do you communicate to your staff and volunteer the same way you communicate to racers and sponsors?
No. So all those are stakeholders, and this creates a stakeholder map. What's a stakeholder map? That sounds scary. Right? It's just a list of people you communicate with. It can show which of your customers are most important. These could be customers You should be spending most of your effort communicating to. So which ones do you want? To come to your race, and how do you want them to commit your race, and how do you want them to interact with your race?
Each 1 of those groups has a different message you should be creating for them. You're gonna talk to racers, Different thing you talk to sponsors. You're gonna talk to park managers, different thing you talk to your staff. You're gonna talk to community groups, different thing you talk to volunteers. Or maybe not. Depends on what you're asking for. So this is how you start mapping that out to find out, do you have different messages for them, or are these messages similar?
And that's that's just mapping that out. Who are they? And how do you wanna talk to them? Okay. So to get to number 6, knowing what to say. Once you know who your customers are and who you most wanna communicate to, You then need to decide what you wanna say to them. That seems pretty obvious. You need to create relevant messages for each because, you know, customer group. Starting with those who are the highest priority, which also seems kind of obvious. But think about it.
Is a sponsor more important than an eraser? I guess it depends what the sponsor brings to the table. Eraser brings a registration fee. They show up to your race. They become word-of-mouth advertising. They they put your shirt on. They become passive advertising. People ask some questions about their shirt. They become this kind of this this this thing that can create more and more buzz. That's that's pretty important group.
Say, you have a sponsor who wants to stroke you a $1000 check for your race and be the title sponsor and have the race named after them. How many racers equals a $1000? Is that sponsor worth it? Maybe we'll save you $10,000. Maybe they want to control the percentage of the race and give you a whole bunch of staff. Meal for 20% of the profit. I'll give you 20 people. I'll give you tables and chairs and and maybe a truck. Like, wow. I mean, you could really work out these kind of relationships.
Would that be a sponsor you wanna wanna communicate with more than an eraser? Guess we're thinking about that. What's the highest priority? And maybe it's not the highest priority where you only spend most of your time in the highest priority. Maybe you prioritize it. You make sure you're talking to sponsors 6 months before your race, and you're talking to racers 3 months before your race. Maybe you do it that way.
The messages for each customer group should be relevant to who they are. So what are some examples of that? So message for racers. Of course, What do they need to know? Well, do you need to tell them about your race?
Do you need to tell them what it is and where it is? That seems pretty cool. So what are some key messages that would include that? Well, we provide unique endurance events. Well, there you go. I just told them what it is. I I provide endurance events. Maybe more specific. I provide mountain bike racing. So my key message is I provide mountain bike racing, so I'm going to talk using the mountain bike racing terms, things like grind and flow and and obstacles and technical
hills, those kind of things. Right? I'm gonna just say I'm gonna use those kind of words. I'm gonna use 29er and the brand names of Trek and Cannondale. I'm gonna start talking about helmets and gloves. Use all the language that I would use in mountain biking. And what's another key message? We locate the best venues for each race. So where is our race? Well, our race is the best venues for each race.
So come to Fountainhead Regional Park. That's the best. Oh, wow. That's a place. That mountain bike place is the best. Right? Well, part of my key messages, we locate the best venues for each race. Well, if I had a race at a key venue that every mountain biker knew about, That'd be that would fulfill that key message. I would want to tell them that, hey, come to this place. It is awesome. It is the best.
So that's that's your messaging. That's kinda how messaging works. You tell them what they need to know, and the key messages that would go with that. That go to each 1 of those stakeholder groups in a systematic way to where you're consistently giving them your message. Depending on how that group is structured, you don't wanna be sending messages to your twos would be sponsors every week and be overkill. Maybe that sponsor would be like, no. You know what? You're spam.
But racers may need to know or coming with a race day. Hey. 2 weeks out. You have you. Okay. Pre ride coming up. I got a pre run coming up. If there's weather, it's okay. We fix the trail. Hey. Come out for a trail maintenance day. Those are the kind of things. Alright. Number 7, knowing how to say it. You can decide on which communications channel or method you use for each customer's message. Some customers will not use certain channels.
For example, you might not tell your sponsors to go to your website and find out when the race is. Instead, you might include that information in an email or maybe even you create a bulletin or a trifold, that you give them You actually physically go to the sponsor and say, here's my race. Here's my trifle. Look at these pretty pictures. Look at the pacemaker. Here's the map of the race. Here's where your logo will go. Visual things.
Sure. I might go on the website later, but you wanna tell the sponsors, go look at my website to find out about the race. You wanna be a little more personal. That type of messaging you're gonna wanna do in person, maybe with tangible things you leave behind. Same goes with your with your erasers. You may communicate with your erasers, 8 to 10 times before and after a raise via email, where you might only communicate with sponsors 2 or 3 times during the same time, and never send them an email.
Your available resources might also dictate how and when you communicate to your customers You might not have time to write and publish a weekly newsletter, or decide that a blog post shared via social media is more important than an email sent to anyone on your contact list. When you decide on what channel to use, you can then begin to build your communications plan linking customer groups to messages and the channels. And that's a key point.
Because if your messages are different, for each of your customer groups. Then when you get a response back or you get a response to that message, you know exactly which channel they saw it on. This leads us into number 8. Know your dates. It's now time to plan out when you need to be communicating with these customers. It usually involves a table where you establish who receives what messages,
when they receive it, and who and your company will send it. When setting up your table, you should consider certain dates to not send messages.
What does that mean? Well, think about it. You send out a message out on Easter, Christmas, Independence Day, Labor Day, where everyone's on family travel, not so great for communicating with customers. So you might want to consider when the message goes out. Maybe you can consider maybe message going on Tuesday rather than Friday. Why is that? Who checks their email on Friday?
Or maybe you find out that social media is more popular on the weekends. Maybe that's the time to send the communications. The time of day, the the even the hour, I mean, you can get really nitpicky in this kind of thing, but be consistent.
You're gonna send it out on Tuesday, send it out on Tuesday. This is hard to do because life gets in the way when you're making other plans. But if you schedule this out, you find out that you can be consistent on a schedule where you can start using tools to do this for you. Tools like constant contact and Mailchimp. I use Mailchimp. Mailchimp, you can schedule what message go out and win. Well, if you could do that, and you don't even need to do it. You just need to write it.
Same thing on social media. You can use a tool called Meet Edgar. Think it's Meet Edgar edger.com. It's a software as a service, an online app where you put all your social media contact information in there. Instagram, Facebook, social media, like Twitter,
You put all your message in there and it will schedule them. It'll launch them without you having to do it. You don't have to be on your phone or on your pick their tablet or on your desktop all day long. Putting out social media messages. I mean, they're gonna do it for you. People behind the curtains saw that the, you know, the wizards back there. That's how a lot of people do it. They schedule this stuff. That's why you see social media as a pop around that you've seen before
because something like Meet Edgar will go through a whole list and then could recycle that list and randomize it. You can send me social media messages all over the place with some tool like this. Now it's not cheap. It's like 70 bucks a month, but how much is your time worth? You can tell these kind of pieces of software when to send these things out. So you already know what dates are good and what dates are bad. And you already know who you're gonna send what to. This is how you consistently
be sending out information is once you have a strategy, then what you wanna say, and once you know when you wanna say it and your manual processor doing that's when you start doing the tools. Don't do the tools first. Get the process and the strategy in place first. Then use the tool to help automate to help automate this. Get it right first. So what's number 9? Know your success. East messages that goes out can support you in measuring how well you've been communicating
and how effective those communications have been. Example of this could be registrations. That's probably the easiest 1 to know. If your goal was to get 2 hundred racers to per register for your race, You should be able to count how many registrations you have gained since you started sending messages. Well, this nothing like a novel idea. If I have 0 registrations
and no 1 signed up and I give it a week and no 1 signed up in a week and then I launch message number 1, and I watch. Message number 1 results in 20 or sign ups. Great. Message number 2, results in 20 more sign ups. Awesome. Message number 3 results in 20 more sign ups. So that I know through 3 consecutive messages, I have 2020 20 60 total with a communications strategy plan that laid out a message to racers who I have on my list
3 consecutive times. So it took 3 times to get raise 20 racers at the end to sign up. So I have a group of racers assigned to the minute they heard the minute they saw the message. Someone still needed to remind it. Maybe they were in a place they couldn't do it. And then the 3rd group signed up because it took them 2 more times. And then maybe there's a whole group out there who didn't sign up at all.
So the price goes up. You sent a message out saying, hey, guess what? You're gonna wanna because you wanna create that scarcity. Hey, that $20 price? Yeah. It's going away. It's gonna be 30 by midnight. You have 6 hours. You create scarcity. That'll create
some more sign ups. And then the next level. And then the next group. So maybe it's 8 to 10 messages erasers before you finally have your registration closed. And then you come to the reader close to to your registration, send out the message, registration closes in 6 hours, registration closes at midnight. How many registrations do you get when you send those messages out? And then the next time you do this, You do the same structure over again and you measure how it did.
It's really that simple. How well did my 6 hours until close registration email go? Or my post go, they got people to come out and actually register. Did it work? Was it successful? And if it was, then maybe that's a a good way to do it. So another example could be volunteer recruitment. If you had no volunteers prior to communicating your your your communications grant campaign, and after 3 months, You can have 10 that can be measured against the overall need.
You could include other metrics and try to measure, you know, the breadth and depth of of your messages. You could include a digital strategy being employed alongside your company's communication strategy, Looking at only your online presence, think about how many times how many times people visited your website versus how many people click the link to take them to the registration site, and how many of those people to click the link registration turned into a registration?
Think about that. I get a website, 1000 visits a month. Right? K? From those 1000 visits of the I put an event out on the 1st day. Over the month, I have a 1000 visits. So by the end of the month, 1000 visits 31 days. Got it. I have a link registered for my event. That link was clicked 50 times. Have a thousand people, 50 people clicked that link. Okay? Out of those 50 people that clicked that link, 10 registered.
So out of a thousand people or a thousand visits, some of those people some of those visits are not people. They're robots. Right? Well, blah blah blah. But Let's just say they're people for the sake of argument. Of the thousand people that went to that site, 50 people clicked that link, 10 people sent it from a race. That's not a bad conversion. Maybe we make the numbers really easy. 1000 people, 100 people clicked the link, 10 people became registered.
So 1 out of every 100 per people clicked that link. So that link, everyone, every hundred people, someone clicks that link. And out of everyone who clicks that link, so every every 10, I get a registration. That's not bad.
But if I have a 1000 visitors and I have no 1 clicking that link, I know so I just learned something that I didn't know. Maybe someone maybe you can't see the link. Maybe it was too small. Maybe it's in the wrong spot. Maybe it shows up on Chrome, but it doesn't show up on Firefox. But you got all the web analytics you could put in there. You'll find out why they're not clicking that link. Maybe the registration site is down. Maybe it's the wrong link. So you can start learning these things. You can start having that digital strategy from when you start telling people, hey. The link is active. Registration's open.
You start finding out how many people are going that direction. You can start measuring. I sent an email that their registration was open. And suddenly, I went from 10 people visiting their website to a 1000. That message had an impact. Sending that message out caused traffic to flow. And that flow causes a button where you press in some register.
That's how it works. It's just tracking that, and then the next time you do it, tracking that, and the next time you do it, tracking that and finding out if you have any trends. If something you do in a causes an event, b, which creates an outcome c, you can you can start creating formula that you know
If I if I send a message off 3 months before my race starts, and I can get a hundred people. But if I do it 2 months before my race starts, I get 50 people I do a 1 month before my race starts to get 10 people. I know that I should probably send my race registration email out the wet 3 months before my race. I learned that the best time to do that is 3 months out. Or you'll learn that sending it out a, b, and c, these are 3121, get you the most amounts or most responses for your registration
versus what? If you think about this, that sounds hard, Kyle. This is it sounds like this analytic stuff sounds like very complex. How the heck am I gonna get my head around all this? Well, think about it this way. What are you doing right now? If the answer is nothing or winging it or
shotgun. Right? Boom. I sent a bunch of stuff out, and maybe it's something happens. I see some numbers come up. And boom, I did shotgun again, and then nothing happens. And boom, when it's shotgun again, a whole bunch happens. Boom when it's shotgunning in and nothing happens. What worked? What didn't work? What message worked? What did the paragraph versus the sentence work? What did the photo versus the not photo work?
How many people did you send to your website? How many people did you send to the registration website? Do you know? Do you know how many people liked your post? Think about that just on the Facebook terms. 300 people like my post. 1 person registered. Say success? How do you know? Maybe it is. Maybe that's the maybe that's the conversion rate. Maybe after 300 likes, you get 1 registration. Or how many people follow that link? How many people
thought that the message was so long. They just blasted past it. How many people like your race? They hit like? They don't ever register. They don't ever show up. Do you know? Did you check your race registration after the race for who showed up to the how many people like that post? Which names actually showed up to your race. You don't have to call them out, but think about the number exchange.
300 people like my race. I got lots of friends on Facebook. Right? 2 people showed up in my race that were on that likes. Maybe Facebook's not a place to go for racers. Maybe I should be doing Instagram. Maybe I should be doing Twitter. Maybe I should doing something else. That's the kind of thing you start to learn. That's how you know you succeeded.
So long before your race registration is even available, you could be communicating with potential customers, engage with you on your website and social media. You could be communicating something about to happen, hasn't even happened yet, preparing them for it to happen. This is how certain races There's a race around here in Virginia called the Baker's dozen. Happens every year, 12 hour race. It's 1 of those races you do, but, you know, how many loops you can do in 12 hours.
Held on, I believe, it's held on the private land, which makes it exclusive. So you can't go pre ride or ride there every day. So it's a once a once a year kind of event. Things sells out in 29 minutes, 500 race registrations. Why is that? Because everyone knows it's coming. Everyone knows it's exclusive, and they're letting everybody know it's coming, and they're letting everybody know it's exclusive. And when it happens, it's everyone trying to get in their before it closes. To become a thing.
To become a cultural event within the mountain biking racing community of Virginia. The bakers doesn't. If you wanna get into that race, you need to be Johnny on spot. That is the kind of communications that is successful. They can measure that success. Now if they don't get brake frustration drops off, they don't communicate with anybody, and the ratio ratio doesn't sell out in 29 minutes, sell out in 3 weeks.
Maybe they go, what do we change? What do we do wrong? What we do different. What changed the community? I start understanding those trends. Those trends start to work for me. Alright? So number 10, know your strategy. The final communication strategy should be used as a tool to reach out and attract riders or racers to your race. This is not something that is set in stone, and each message is really a tiny experimental to itself. When you think about experiment,
Yeah. This is not this is not this is a this is a recipe. I'm quoting 1 of my 1 of my favorite podcasts on podcasting, Dave Jackson. Talking about, this is a recipe. It's not set in stone. You can change this because customer groups might respond to your selected channel in unexpected ways. Your message for a specific channel
fails to create the desired result, you may need to shift to another channel. Change your messaging or reevaluate that customer group altogether. Maybe they don't like email. Maybe they like social media. You find that your communication strategy is constantly changed. Is it constantly changing document.
We're not everything's gonna work. Some of your messages are gonna fail. Some of your communications channels are gonna fail. Some of your experiments are gonna fail. Some of your AB testing is gonna come back with 0 results. Some of these things are gonna create new registrations. Some of these things are going to just be noise, and spam, and people very ignore it. However, without it, your messaging is inconsistent. Your delivery might be late or nonexistent. You may even end up
ignoring entire customer groups without even knowing it. You think about this. How many of you out there ask your volunteers like the day before your race? Is that a way to is that a good way to do it? Well, if you have it scheduled out, you have a strategy for that. You don't have to worry about doing that last minute. Because without your communication strategy, all you'll have is a shotgun, not the precision targeting tool.
And the shotgun is just as good as a shotgun is. Short range, scatter everywhere, and not very effective if you want to pinpoint things. That that's how it works. How the communication strategy works, and that's how it can work for your business. It's not something you can do overnight? You need to work yourself on it. Build some objective. Build some of those operational communications objectives, build some messaging, find your stakeholders. Know your success criteria.
Know how you'll know. Think about it. Think it through. How will you know someone got the message? You're gonna ask them. Where did you hear me from? Where did you find You've probably seen this a lot everywhere before. How did you find out about me? And that's how you build a communication strategy. And now for some final thoughts on what comes next. Effective communications, is the cornerstone of a of a successful race promotion business.
If you are able to communicate with your customers, your customers will communicate back to you. Hopefully, showing up for your races. Next, you need to find out what channels work best for which customer groups When you have a clear understanding of what that is, you can start experimenting with your message, and you just start experimenting with content and deciding what information produces the best results. Like I said before, this is a recipe. Once you figure out the right combination,
of how many times you talk to somebody to get them rich register, how many times you talk to a sponsor to get them to become a sponsor, how many times you need to ask somebody to be a volunteer, and what you need to say in order to convince them to do those things. Want you to find all that stuff out? Want you to experiment enough to know what those pieces are and you do this consistently? You do this every single race you do and every single year you do these races, you'll become better than 90% of the other companies out there.
And now you know, In our next episode, I've got some interviews lined up. And these are coming from race promoters. We're actually doing this business. We're gonna hear from them on how they approach planning and putting races together. A lot like the the Michelle Fushei interview we did with a venture addict's racing. We got a couple more lined up, and I think you're really gonna enjoy them as we start to dissect how
individual race promoters come at this. And even some of the people who are leading the industry in trends and analysis of how Some of these races are put together and how race promoters can use this information, use this data to build better races. I've also got a another podcast kind of snuck out there, and it's called get lost racing. And it's at getlossracing.com. Or you can go to wreckingear.com slash podcast
and get to the get lost racing. There's only a couple episodes out there and the intent of get lost racing was to define what is off road endurance racing sports. So get lost racing is a short little or like 10 minute little bites.
Where just talk about 1 discipline. Kinda what the gear takes to to get into the race, what the race that are the the the event or or even the sport he's even like. How do you get into racing? And what are the kind of things you need to know? Short, sweet, to the point, and I've been going through a couple of maybe the first 1 is trail running. So if you get a chance, go to getlossracing.com
and check that out. And listen to a couple episodes. They're really, like I said, like, 10 minutes long. Really short, kind of just a just a little, like, little taste of of sport. So if you have a friend, who's like, what the heck is trail running? What the heck is of inter racing? Yeah. Point over there. When I have 1 of those episodes out, you can just say, hey. Listen to this for 10 minutes. It'll be like, oh my gosh. I totally understand what that is now. Sort of test out like my daughter now.
Oh my gosh. Like racing is so cool. The next episode of the merch store podcast is a mystery, but I'm sure you'll you'll enjoy it, so please tune in. Thank you so much for listening to the Mercador podcast. I would love to hear from you. So if you have a question, please reach out to me on Twitter at Mercador
and I will answer it on the podcast. So if you have a question, go to at versusadura on Twitter. Let me know what you think, and let me know, what would you like me to to talk about? And I will right here on the podcast, I will read your question and throw it out there. So If you haven't already, please go to versus hurt.com and subscribe to this podcast, and I'll see you on the next episode at The Merchants of Your podcast. Until then, go build better races. Stay here.