Part of Marco Photo's business model is to also serve customers as a portrait studio. We photograph and produce picture packages, programs, marketing, and yearbooks for schools and leagues all over Ohio.
One of the interesting things that cropped up as we began to develop our sports league business concerned the question of developing valid sports leads. Schools are easy. Either subscribe to a data service or purchase your statewide directory and - boom - you've got everything you need to get started.
Sports leagues have been a lot more challenging. We think that has a lot to do with how leagues are organized. By and large, they are associations staffed by volunteers that have no central mailing address or location to visit. They are very, very fluid in terms of who to contact, when to contact, & where to contact. This left us with a problem to solve and I thought it might be helpful for us to share how we solved the problem.
In a nutshell, we love Google.
What we've found is that the internet has become the central location for youth sports organizations. Most have their own web sites, which will often list coaches, boards of directors, schedules, etc. For example, one search on "youth soccer in arkansas" took us here, one click later we were here, and one click later we were here. Check out all the valuable data that is there for the taking. It takes a lot of effort and manual work, but the content of these sites can be entered into spreadsheets or e-mail applications like Outlook. Once the work is done, the marketing and sales efforts can begin. Now, of course we have to be mindful of SPAM laws and smart about what we do with the data, but there is a lot of it there to work with when the effort is expended to get it off of the internet and into a database.
Jay
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