Marketing your business

Dave Emkey | September 14, 2020

Tennis is a safe sport to play during this pandemic. New players are trying it out. Parks and facilities are busy. And tennis products are shipping and arriving with zero consistency. It’s a crazy time right now! 

 

But it’s also a great time to step up your marketing efforts for your business and for this sport.

 

It’s virtually impossible to be an approved internet dealer with almost all brands; that space is filled with the big dealers and that probably won’t change anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have your own website or social media handle driving customers to your business. 

No one is stopping you from having an online presence. You can easily become a resource for your customers, post updates on product you have available in your shop and generate content that makes your customer base want to keep coming back.

 

Big internet dealers are focused on a broad customer base. Essentially, they want to serve the entire country. That’s not you. That’s not your business. You need to focus on your market, whether that is hyper local or regional. So, how do you go about this?

 

There are a lot of different ways and resources to get this done. One idea is to use your website as a blog site. Post about new products you have in the shop and use some geotargeting tools and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your local market. Combine that effort with your social media effort, and now you’re hitting your customers, in your market, focused on your product at all angles.

 

This will most likely take a lot of trial and error to get this right, but you need to be thinking about this now and putting this into practice. 

 

Think of this as what you have to do when practicing to play a big tournament: It may be frustrating, and you may feel mentally exhausted at times, but if you keep pushing and grinding, you’ll eventually get that short ball in the middle of the court—and it all becomes worthwhile. 

 

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Dave Emkey is a longtime business development executive in the tennis industry.
 

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