I once heard an old newspaper advertising salesman say, “We’re not in the business of selling ad impressions; we’re in the business of selling belly buttons.” What he meant by that was that it didn’t matter how many people saw or read the ads; it only mattered how many physical customers the ad brought to the merchant buying the ads.
Belly buttons = real people, in real life, living, breathing and buying.
In our always online world, we tend to forget that soccer tournament website visitors, unique pages views and hits mean absolutely nothing to sponsors and advertisers unless there is some action that follows. That action is almost always a trip to the store, restaurant or shop, followed by a purchase. Nothing else really matters.
Our Advice: Don’t just take sponsorship/advertising orders and artwork for your soccer tournament. Help the advertiser collect belly buttons as well. In the TourneyCentral advertising module, there are opportunities to “sell” the goods and services of your sponsors and advertisers through uploaded brochures and coupons, expanded deal copy and video. In addition, any listing can be linked to a Twitter or Facebook account to further push the belly buttons to the advertiser.
When you hook up your soccer tournament twitter account to your website in the Web Site Maint. Module, any news that you post on your front page will automatically be sent to anyone following you. You can also plug the goods and services of your DEALS sponsors and advertisers with every email you send out to your teams.
While you may not want to overdo the selling to the teams, going the extra mile and letting sponsors and advertisers know you are doing it will help sell more ads in the future.
So quit selling ads and eyeballs and start selling belly buttons. It makes the game a lot more profitable and a whole lot sexier.