As I was watching my Cleveland Browns play on MNF, it inspired me to share how football-themed special promotions can get your business over the goal line as well! Football season is officially upon us. Whether you’re someone who’s not really interested in football, or you find yourself in a half dozen fantasy football leagues with DraftKings as your home screen, chances are you’ve noticed that America’s most popular sport has once again started sneaking into your daily life.
For companies that are looking to kick-start their fourth quarter sales, taking advantage of this football “fever” with a pigskin-themed promotion is a great way to help solidify relationships and grow mindshare while also generating some incremental business.
We know that, on average, wholesale customers will buy regularly from roughly 3-5 distributors. Their purchase decisions are often based on things like sales relationships, credit availability, product lines, or preferred value-added services. But with all these things being more or less equal, you might find yourself scratching your head trying to come up with a differentiator that will raise your brand above the rest.
Especially during the end-of-summer lag, as you start to get into the fourth quarter of trying to reach quotas and/or burn through year-end budgets, you could turn to a fun, special promotion designed to capitalize on the seasonal pop-culture phenomenon of football. Keep in mind that the objective of promotions isn’t about rewarding loyalty, it’s about capturing share of mind, maintaining engagement and stimulating visibility among your audience so that they prefer to do business with you. Mindshare, after all, should ultimately lead to market share.
But is football the right theme for you? This is just a hunch, but I’m going to guess that almost every customer has a favorite football team, whether college or pro. In our experience, football has been as good a theme as any for engaging with a broad swath of your contractor audience.
For example, we’ve been running our NFL Pick 6 Challenge to help distributors and manufacturers maintain mindshare. This special promotion is designed to be an interactive “pick ‘em” game that enables customers to engage with your brand for 17 straight weeks and have fun while doing it. What’s more, it enables you to gather information about your customers while providing additional opportunities to promote not just your brand but your products and services.
Beyond the fact that it harnesses existing interests, the beauty of this type of promotion is that it can be simplified or expanded to fit any budget or business objective. With the NFL Pick 6 Challenge, for example, clients can customize the platforms and even create multiple platforms to fit different regions.
Little wrinkles can be added like weighting riskier underdog picks to make them more valuable. Bonus points can be offered for ancillary activities like interacting with your brand—which can be done through the uniquely designed promotional portal. And of course, weekly and season-long leaderboards keep participants up-to-date on their standing and let them know how close they are to achieving your carefully-selected prizes.
Conclusion
Whether or not you’re one of the 180-million people who watch football at one point or another during the season, there’s no reason you can’t take advantage of the sport’s growing popularity and make it work for your business. With a special promotion that’s designed around a football theme, you can provide your customers with a unique outlet to get their competitive juices flowing while simultaneously promoting your brand.
A Hail Mary? Hardly. Consider this the perfect play for your fourth quarter.
Looking for a spike in your fourth-quarter sales? Book a meeting with us to learn how you can use of a sports-themed promo to capture the mindshare of your target audience.
