Print flyers & banners to recruit for your team
Let's make your team grow!
Recruiting for club sports teams is hard work. The turnover is high, the competition is fierce, and the dues and such that athletes need to pay mean that even when your roster seems full you are only ever a few injuries / defections / retirements away from needing to call that old reliable guy who never makes practice to pull out his cleats on game day just to throw a side together.
Obviously this is a super stressful situation best met head on with a solid recruiting strategy. Some teams will spend thousands of dollars on TV advertising or put their name on those giant electronic billboards that are now ubiquitous around the country. These methods are decent, but I have found you can actually get better results for far less cost by printing banners, flyers or posters with your team name and logo emblazoned across them along with your contact information.
Why are banners the best starter solution for attracting players?
Banner for rugby team.
Banners are deceptively simple, but they will be one of the most useful recruiting tools you have in your arsenal. They are super cheap to make and can range from highly detailed to very simplistic based on your budget and needs. The greatest advantage of a banner is its portability. It is so easy to take a banner to any event that your team attends and as soon as it is rolled out you have a high level of visibility.
Banners are also an excellent way to incorporate your sponsors into your recruiting plan. As you can see from this photo the Tempe Rugby Club has included their sponsor on this particular banner. Many clubs struggle with attaining sponsorship and something as simple as this where you can promise a potential suitor that they will be exposed to the public at all the events you attend gives them some tangible reward for the money they give you.
Combining recruiting and sponsorship like this makes having a banner (or two) virtually a must have for any community sports club.
Flyers are another great way to find new players for your team
If you are recruiting new players for your sports team, print simple flyers to help you get the word out easily and affordably. For instance, we were looking for goalies for our club soccer team. We printed 1,000 flyers with our team logo and a ‘GOALIE WANTED’ headline. We left them at soccer stores, sports stores and sports bars and within 48 hours we had several prospects.
How do window stickers allow you to reach potential players?
Sticker of a club badge.
Window stickers are ideal because they are cheap and they are mobile. One of the biggest problems with the aforementioned billboard is that it is static. If a potential recruit never drives down that particular road, then they will never see the sign. A car window sticker on the other hand has no such limitations. Plus you can point literally thousands of them for the same coast as a month on a billboard. These are ideal to give out at recruiting events as getting stickers on 1,000 cars will greatly increase the chances that your next great recruit stumbles across your team.
What other mobile form of advertising is worthwhile?
Car magnets basically fill the same role as the window sticker with a few differences. I have found it is easier to sell someone on a magnet because they are not literally affixing something to their car like they would be as a sticker. For someone who likes to keep their car pristine and/or someone who is driving a company car this is a very important distinction. Magnets also give you the ability to switch the promotional carousel-item between vehicles, important for some who drives multiple cars or someone who runs through a lot of cars for their job. The magnets also tend to be more professional looking than a window sticker does, especially if you get one for each side of the car and if they are designed in a businesslike style.
Is it even worth using posters in this century?
Poster of a rugby match.
Posters are a classic recruiting tool, but to this day they still work. In many ways they actually work better today because you can use a combination of printed posters and posters used through your social media channels to bring players to your team from all different walks of life.
Some would say that social media only is the way to go here, but the problem with that strategy is that social media is just so huge that items can get lost in the shuffle. I have friends with upwards of 5,000 friends on Facebook for example, so their news feed is so cluttered that plenty of posts that their friends throw up are never seen. What is the point in creating a cool poster if your intended market has no idea that it is out there?
Printing a poster like this is a great example of how it should be done. Again we have a nod to a sponsor that will be getting high visibility, while the addition of a schedule gives potential recruits (and fans) an idea of when games will be played. Hanging this poster in the right target areas (gyms, colleges, etc) will see immediate return on your investment in the form of new players.
Is there any cheap way to get your name out there in a way recruits can help spread the word?
Promo items: sunglasses with logo or badge.
It is important to have at least one sports promotional carousel-item within the club that can be given away from free at events and pulls people back to the team. We have used sunglasses in the past that cost less than a buck per pair to make and that have our website address on the side. This is where you can get creative and figure out something that will work in your community to get people out to play. We went with sunglasses because of the number of summer days here in the Great Plains and because of how many people will see the sunglasses on those days. Something that would be used outside the house was important for our recruitment goals.
These are just a few ways that you could use printed materials to help increase awareness of your sports club. From banners to car magnets, posters to sports promotional items, an online printer like Color Copies USA can help you promote your team and sponsors. Really there is no limit to what you can do here, but these ways will certainly increase your membership will saving you money in the long run against more splashy (and often more ineffective) ways of advertising.
