Promoting our Sport

[cliff]

Does anyone have any promotion ideas?

E.g. how to get videos of fast paced badminton games onto movie theatres around the country. Imagine waiting to watch a movie and seeing footage of fast action badminton on the big screen. Or getting links to badminton videos onto other websites.

Or any other promotion thoughts? Anything that may help get more people of any age or level giving it a go.

[steve]

Hi Cliff, great to see this message board up and running, nice one!

> "getting links to badminton videos onto other websites"

Thinking along the lines of viral marketing (see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing) here? Word of mouth combined with the web can be a great promotional tool.

Coming up with something that is both entertaining (so that people pass it on of their own accord) and that paints the sport in a good light, without trying too hard and having it backfire, would be the challenge!

Doing a badminton version of a popular amusing advert could be an option - anyone got any ideas?

Once you've had the idea, creating the video clip (e.g. with a digital camera / phone) and sticking it on the web isn't that difficult. E.g. see badmintonotago.org.nz/video/index.html (apologies if these take a while to download - I've never tried on dial-up, let me know if you try and have problems... they're not the best quality and I haven't got around to trying with faster paced games)

Then it's just a case of emailing a few friends, office mates, etc the link and hoping it gathers momentum from there... maybe )

Marketting campaign cost? Pretty much $0 !!!

[popsicle]

The biggest influx of new players to our club was around the time of this year's Commonwealth Games where Badminton got a fair amount of TV coverage. Everyone who knew I played Badminton would come up to me and say things along the lines of "Wow, Badminton is so fast isn't it?". They had NEVER seen it before. So TV coverage definitely helps.

I think Badminton could really take off here if it's promoted enough. A Sports/Recreation class at my school for instance would always choose to play such typical sports as Basketball and Touch earlier in the year. But after being introduced to Badminton, 90% of the class plays it each and every period!

[cliff]

Hey thank you. Good to get some new ideas - great stuff. I'm developing a small promotions group to look into ways in which we can improve our profile and maintain the momentum from the games and the results and hard work from our top players overseas and in NZ.

Any more ideas welcome e.g. from branding to promotion to just getting more people down to club night :-)

[simon]

A way to get video footage of badminton on the internet and into the homes of millions across the globe is to use the youtube website. www.youtube.com.

The key here though is to make it standout from the masses of videos on the site. If done well could be an effect promotional tool and at no cost apart from the cost of producing the video.

[popsicle]

With all the talk of videos...

I notice on Google Video some countries have uploaded a whole heap of videos for their Junior Tournaments. Perhaps during some of the bigger tournaments here (or any tournament really - regional opens, north/south island champs etc.), someone could record some of the matches and upload it to Google Video or Youtube. It would be pretty cool to see some of the people I know on the net, and I could show some of my sceptic friends just what Badminton is all about. I'm sure they'd be far more interested to see a match a bit closer to home .

I think it'd be great to have something like this. You could also post links to the videos (hosted on Youtube or Google Video) on our main site. After all it wouldn't take that much effort. Simply someone would bring along their camcorder, set it up to record a few matches, bring it home and upload it to the net! I'm getting excited just thinking about it ;D.

Trust me, if you want to get people excited about the sport, videos are definitely the way to go. No amount of words or photos can possibly have the same effect as a good video.