The Netpreneur Blog

Now this strategy won’t work for every website, but I think that starting a football tipping competition could work wonders for some online businesses.

I thought it was appropriate to raise this as a possibility, given that the AFL and NRL football season is not too far away…and I was prompted to do so by an email this week from FootyTips.com.au - here’s the text:

The Footy season is almost here – use footy tipping as a powerful marketing tool

Drive traffic to your website and build client relationships in a fun interactive way, with your own branded footy tipping competition.

The footy season is almost here – and now is the time to start planning your footy tipping marketing solution to promote your products and/or services.

How can footy tipping help your business?

• Drive regular traffic to your website
• Provides opportunities to promote your products
• Establish and build an email database
• Interact and build strong client relationships

Now, you can administer your own tipping competition manually, if you wish.  But, in my book,  that’s far too onerous.  It’s best to use an existing online tipping system, like FootyTips.com.au.

FootyTips.com.au offers branded solutions from around $6,000, but if you’re a small business that can’t afford this amount, you can simply set up an unbranded competition on the FootyTips.com.au website for free. 

So, who would benefit from a football tipping competition?  Localised and community websites, distinctly Australian websites, and sites that sell products to a demographic that aligns or overlaps with a football demographic (eg sports books, beer mugs)

A printing house, The Printing Hub,  here in Adelaide runs a footy tipping comp each year.  The face of their business is Brownlow Medallist and ex-Hawthorn player John Platten, so they create a good deal of interest in their tipping comp by having him involved.  As a customer, I receive a short, weekly email from John with information about the tipping comp – who’s leading the charge, who tipped poorly, etc. – a good little marketing strategy that keeps The Printing Hub at top of mind.

Some tips for your tipping comp:

• Don’t leave it too late – you need to be recruiting people now for your tipping comp.  One or two weeks before the season starts is not enough lead time to recruit a decent pool of tippers.
• Offer a worthwhile prize – a $1000 prize will attract lots of new prospects to your website as word of mouth spreads.
• Consider offering weekly prizes as this gives you a reason to keep in contact with the tippers throughout the season, and an excuse to send out a regular email newsletter.  It also encourages those who do poorly in the first few rounds of the football season to continue tipping each week, because they still have a chance of winning something.  Offering a prize for last place will also help.
• Actively promote your competition on your website’s home page, in email newsletters and via social networking websites.
• Make sure that you put some metrics in place  so that you can get some idea of the value of the competition to your business – eg. measure the clickthroughs from the footy tipping site to your own site using a unique URL.  Be aware that there are many ‘compers’ out there who join hundreds of competitions and rarely transact with the host business.  If you use the unbranded version of FootyTips.com.au, then you will attract these people, as it is possible to enter multiple tipping competitions simultaneously via the FootyTips.com.au website.

Happy tipping!