 A full disclaimer, if you purchase through the webinar, that helps support our channel here. And I only partner with people that are legit, right? I have a lot of fuel that reach out to me all of the time that has to be on our YouTube channel. And when I talked with Christie, I knew from the very beginning, she knows her stuff, she is the real deal. She's already helped a lot of other trainers in basketball start and grow their own three on three leagues. So sit back, watch this video. And again, if you wanna learn more, go click on the description under the video to take a deeper dive. That's it and enjoy the video. Marketing your three on three league is our topic for today. And it's so exciting to see more and more opportunities for kids to be playing in small sided sporting events with fewer kids on the court or on the field. I've been running three on three basketball leagues in Minnesota for over 25 years. We have about 14,000 kids participate in our 30 plus leagues that we run every year. I've run 350 three on three basketball leagues. And I'm gonna share with you some of the marketing strategies that we use to help you grow your three on three league. And the most important one I'm gonna save for last. So make sure you stay till the end to get the most important marketing strategy. So the first thing we'll talk about are some of the obvious things that you can do for marketing. So email. Now growing your email list is so important. Put a lot of effort into this because being able to send emails out to your subscribers whenever you want to and planning them and scheduling them is super powerful. I think it's the best thing you can do for marketing. So you might wanna include a pop up on your website where new visitors can join your newsletter. Just be continually thinking of ways that you can get more emails onto your subscriber list. Another thing that's working really well for us is Facebook ads to get new subscribers to our email list. So we're probably paying about five or $6 to secure a new email on our list by using Facebook ads. So that's a really good tool too. Once you get a good ad figured out. We do use a lot of social media to market our leagues. We create flyers. The best thing that you can do with flyers is get them distributed to kids at basketball camps. So find a coach or something that's running a basketball camp and see if they can handle flyers at their camps. You can post them in facilities where your sports being played. You can leave them at tournaments where your events are, you know, your sports being played. So that's how you can use flyers. Yard signs, we like to put these up near facilities where we know basketball tournaments are happening or basketball camps are happening. Just put them by the parking lot and then just put them out for the day when you know there's a basketball event going on. So with email, we have a list of emails that we send out to our subscribers. So once we open a registration for a league, what we do is we have a series of emails. So the first thing we'll do is we'll let our subscribers know that registration is open for this new league. Then maybe every two weeks we just send out another reminder and then as we get closer to that deadline of registration, they're gonna get a few more reminders that the registration deadline is approaching. What you wanna do is just make sure that people are hearing about your three on three league multiple times and also in multiple ways. So maybe they get a couple emails, maybe they see it on social media, maybe they hear some people talking about it and then they see a yard sign. The more different ways that they can be hearing about your three on three league, the more likely it is that they're gonna sign up. And once you have someone sign up for a league, for us, there's a 90% chance that they're gonna play in subsequent leagues after that. So it's just so important to get them into that first league. Okay, let's talk about another way that you can market. And that is with t-shirts. So you might be thinking that you wanna provide your league participants with jerseys or uniforms of some kind. And I'm gonna recommend that you give them t-shirts. One, it's probably the most inexpensive way that you can provide uniforms as a t-shirt. Two, kids aren't gonna wear jerseys and uniforms anywhere other than to their league games. So if you give them a cheap t-shirt, they're gonna wear these t-shirts to school, they're gonna wear them to practices, to camps, they're gonna wear them out in public where other people are gonna see them. And this is marketing for you. So just make sure that on that t-shirt, nice and big you have displayed your company name or your league name or something. So those t-shirts are doing a great job of marketing for you. Okay, third thing you can do for marketing and this works awesome, find a co-promoter who can help you market. So a co-promoter to us is a person or a group that might want to be fundraising, earn some money by helping promote your three on three league. So you're gonna wanna set up an agreement with them that spells this all out, but probably who are you looking for? Maybe you have like a varsity team nearby that needs to fundraise, okay? And they've got a good database of people who might be interested in your three on three league. So a varsity program might be great. Maybe there's a local youth association that needs to fundraise. So we have a lot of community-based basketball programs in Minnesota and we partner with a lot of them. We make an agreement and we spell it all out. We say we want three emails. We even tell them, here's the content of the email to send out. These are the social media posts we'd like you to make. We'd like you to distribute flyers at a camp or at your tournament. We'd like to be able to put yard signs out when you have a tournament at your facility, whatever, spell it all out. And then what are they gonna get in return for doing that promotion for you? We do this with almost all of our leagues. It works beautifully, so co-promoters. Okay, and now for the most important one. And this isn't anything super sexy or anything, you guys. This is just, I guess, good business. And this is word of mouth. This is the best marketing strategy you can do, so you wanna have a really good product. If your product stinks, it doesn't matter if your social media advertising's good. Okay, your product has to wow your participants so that they're gonna go out into the community, they're gonna talk to other people that play that sport and other families and just say how great their experience was. And that is how you are going to just really, really grow what you're doing. So my advice would be this. When you run that first league, it's don't focus on the profit that you're gonna make. Don't focus on the money. And know that's tempting to do. But just forget about the money for that first league. Focus on how good of an event you can make and how happy you can make everybody with what you're putting out there for them to participate in. So that's gonna have the biggest impact on what happens to you in the future. Okay, if you put out a mediocre event, no amount of social media is gonna make up for that. Okay, cause people are gonna go out and say, yeah, don't sign up for that. It doesn't matter what other marketing you do. So start small, something that you can manage, manage it really well. I would advise you to be the site director of your event because nobody's gonna care about it more than you. I want you to go to your event and I want you to be just really taking it all in. I want you to anticipate any problem or issue that might be happening. I want you to deal with anything, especially if you can stop issues before they happen. If somebody does complain, you wanna do everything in your power to turn that around. So for example, if we get an email where somebody's complaining about the reffing at one of our three on three leagues, what am I gonna do about that? Okay, it's really tempting just to ignore the email, but that's not what we do. So I will respond to any complaints that we get. I will apologize, first of all. I will make sure that they know that I listened to them. So I might rephrase, well, I hear that you're saying X, Y, Z happened and we need to fix that. And I tell them, I assure them that we're gonna do something about this. We're gonna address it. So I might tell them, you know what? We're going to give this feedback to the official. Let them know how the participants were feeling about how they were, their reffing job. Maybe they need more training. Maybe they need to be monitored a little bit. We need to just at least check it out and see if this is a legitimate complaint. Happy customers are more important than anything that you can do. Okay, so what could we do above and beyond to turn that person's negative feedback around? What we might do is make sure that we have one of our very best officials reffing that team's games that week and we're gonna make sure that they leave happy and now they're gonna be a promoter of our three on three league and not someone that's going out and complaining and telling people don't sign up for this league because the reffing's bad. So do everything you can to make sure that you're sending all the players, all the parents, all your staff out into the community talking highly about what you're doing. And if you work really, really hard to put out a really good product like that, the money will come, the money will come. So don't focus on the money right now, focus on putting out a great event and you're gonna reap the rewards for that for sure. I would love to share more with you and teach you more about what we're doing with three on three basketball leagues. In the description below, there's a link and you can sign up for my free training. I'm gonna cover in detail the seven steps that you're gonna wanna follow if you want to launch and run and profit from a three on three sports league. So click that link below, get your seat saved and I can't wait to see you at the training.