The Wild West Showdown is an annual sporting event that takes place in Bremerton, Washington. Roller derby leagues from all over the country come to take part in a round robin tournament that helps increase (or decrease) their international ranking through WFTDA.
The tournament is a fundraiser for the host league, Slaughter County Roller Vixens, and has a very lmited marketing budet. With the available resources I was given I created a marketing plan targeted at the local and derby community.
Locally, posters were put up within Kitsap county and neighboring regions. A street team was used to ensure that local businesses and promotion boards had these posters up. We also made a special effort to get our posters onto the WSDOT ferries. This "grassroots" promotion worked in coordination with a series of press releases to promote awareness within the community.
Our online campaign was targeted at engaging the local derby community. There are a lot of roller derby leagues in the Pacific Northwest and we wanted to draw in as many skaters and fans as possible to create excitement for the event. We did this by using our Facebook page to post important FAQ's, share information about attending teams, and promote other derby events.
One of our biggest methods of gaining awareness and buiding a community was to create these quick teasers for the Wild West Showdown. We were lucky enough to have a local production company volunteer some time into creating these great promos.
We also used this method of engagement on our facebook page where we featured each team coming to the tournament and got their fans involved.
Results:
We saw Facebook fans increase from 1,000 at the end of 2012 (when we started the campaign) to over 2,000 by March 1, 2013. We also saw that our reach get a huge spike as each post reached at least 200 views.
Local newspapers used our press releases to create events on their online calendars, as well as republishing the stories in the entirety. The Kitsap Sun also reached out to us to do a feature on the league and what to expect from the Wild West Showdown.
