One of the biggest challenges marketing operators in any world face is the division between creative work and operational tasks. For most this is the fun stuff versus the boring stuff.

When we review marketing operations at youth soccer programs, it becomes abundantly obvious that this also applies there.

This is where club directors can get confused when it comes to analyzing the performance of their Marketing Director. Creative work is more visible and provides quicker dopamine hits. Operational marketing is the opposite, slow burning, under the surface.

The Fun Stuff vs the Boring Stuff

Here’s some examples where there divide becomes evident but, first, the big one.

Sure, a lot of marketing do is about developing brand trust and authority. Not everything is a quick hit. Ultimately, the form-fill out on your website should be your department’s bread and butter. It’s what all this mentioned below is leading towards.

What are your numbers day over day, week over week, year over year? Are you tracking who goes to sessions, who signs up? Is everyone being added to the database? Are you checking in after a few weeks to establish if the coach did actually reach out?

If we’re not living and dying by our leads, then we’re in the wrong game. Rugby, perhaps?

It’s exciting to build a new site for your program. Even more exciting to launch it. It’s harder to continually review the content and update it. To add the dates and times for the winter indoor clinic or the field maps and waivers for your tournament. To double and triple check dates, times, registration links. To review google analytics and search console. To delete pages that are out of date or updating them if search traffic is high.

It’s not a challenge to get a good website up and running if you got time or cash or both. It takes work to ensure it continues to be engine that drives your program.

We’re going to verge into old man yells at cloud territory here. This is not a suggestion that programs should not post on social media. Indeed for a few programs ( maybe more than a few) they can deliver all their marketing from Instagram and DMs. But these do tend to be quite niche.

Search still has an important place, ai will too. Establishing credibility through up to date content on your homepage that showcases your club’s success either with teams or individuals cannot be underestimated when it comes to parents surfing the web late at night, looking to find a new club for little Lionel.

But posting news stories is an effort. Coming up with ideas can be tricky. Luckily, YSM is here to help:

25 Blog Post Ideas
Youth Soccer Blog Post Template

When YSM makes it big and we’re furnishing our downtown office space, one of the first slogans that will adorn the walls, will be ‘Does this need to be a graphic?’

Now in a post-AI world, perhaps the time necessary to come up with that ‘flyer’ for the U8 clinic is not as long as it used to be but in the old world at least, spending time to create something that’s only ever going to live online and immediately screams to it’s audience that it is an advert, might suffice with a great action shot a U8 parent took last week.

Building a neat and tidy digital library takes some work. It’s essentially just developing a system to caption pictures so that when you need to find that U8 kid quickly you can. Or that you can share the different versions of your logo quickly with suppliers and sponsors.

Anything that can save time can be applied to other opportunities.

I love newsletters. They still remain one of the best ways to inform your current membership of everything that’s happening at the club. Parents who’ve just joined the club are learning about seniors announcing their college commitments for example. It’s a great way to build community.

Where things tend to go wrong though is when we don’t maintain our email list. I recently worked with a club to consolidate and tidy up their database. They had a huge database but it didn’t matter whether you were a parent of a 7-year old who had participated in a camp that summer or an out-of-state club who had signed up for the tournament next May. You were still receiving information about upcoming tryouts. We also had a large amount of sign-ups on the club’s lead form, not added to the database.

So instead of blasting everything out, we can target specific populations and ensure that they are receiving the relevant content by establishing key criteria in our database e.g. birth year, gender, city, existing or non-existing player.

Unless you’re some kind of excel nerd (puts hand up) then you will find contact maintenance boring. Your ‘numbers’ may take a hit but hopefully those ‘engaged’ will increase.

I’ve done this. Spent all my time on excel or google sheets making a real nice spreadsheet. Two weeks down the line, I’m still using my email inbox as my defacto to do list. My deadlines are slipping. The intended October 1st launch of my winter clinics with a 6 week series of content is now going to become a post-Thanksgiving blast to everyone in the database (see above).

Marketing Director’s are often one-man bands provided with little day-to-day direction and support. It can also be a thankless task grabbing information from the coaches and directors.

Developing a weekly calendar that serves your upcoming content and your future planning and maintaining it will not only help you. If you get club leaders involved in the big picture to sketch out key dates, it can form a weekly structure to your upwards reporting and ensure they recognize all the work that is being done and can perhaps ease the bottlenecks that are forming.

Under the surface

I am not trying to take the fun out of everything. Building and creating, what we now describe as ‘content’ is what makes this such an enjoyable job. But we have to recognize that in order for these creative efforts to have the biggest impact, to ensure we can provide value to the organization, some of the boring stuff needs to get done too. The best youth soccer marketing teams do both.

If some of these issues seem familiar, drop us a note. We’d love to chat about how we can assist your club.

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