Forget this idea that marketing and promoting a sport needs massive budgets or the right school tie, because it doesn't. At it's heart, it's pretty damn simple:
Step 1 - Identify and segment the audiences that you want to target.
Step 2 - Find out everything you can about those audiences.
Step 3 - Create something that those audiences want to buy (contrary to popular belief, this isn't about trying to get people to buy something that they don't want to).
Step 4 - Tell those audiences about it and make it easy for them to buy it.
Step 5 - Keep them coming.

Unfortunately, most clubs seem to struggle with step one, which is the easiest bit, never mind steps 2-5. I honestly believe that if you asked the 12 Super League clubs which audiences they were targeting, at least half wouldn't have a clue.

I know people think I bang on about this sort of thing, but it really isn't that difficult or expensive to do at the sort of scale we're talking about here. When you have club chairmen on record as saying that his club struggles to sell hospitality, yet doesn't even have a page on his own club website about their hospitality products, it's an insight into the level of competence or effort that we're dealing with here.

The RFL has made a big thing about tapping into "the event market" and how modern sports fans expect things like fan parks, yet our idea of a "fan park" is having that prick from Rugby AM shouting at people from the back of a trailor. That's not appealing to anyone who currently does buy into the sport, let alone people who we're trying to attract from outside our bubble.

It just seems that, instead of even attempting to do something proactive and effective, too many clubs are simply relying on dads and grandads to drag along the next generation of fans. That's not sustainable and if we weren't talking about sporting clubs, we'd probably be in agreement that any business that relies on that for their next generation of customers deserves to die.

Don't disagree with this but some clubs are stuck with having to make the best of a bad job. For example, how can those clubs with decrepit stadia aim for a wealthy clientele? I don't think they can address Step 3 for that particular share of the market. Yet if they aim their sights lower, they're trying to tap into a sector that is increasingly squeezed in financial terms. So, in practical terms, what do you suggest they might do?

Good morning grumpy. I did not say that it was easy. Also any fool can see the disparity between our case and the example given. A perfect wave is a rare event and we missed one when we went to summer rugby and money was avaliable. As for us today we need a plan. It would help if we had a clear vision starting with simple ideas like having a functioning reserve set up or equivalent and binding improved standards for stadia. Remember that the modern NRL came out of a bloody civil war based around new media. The winners caused wholesale change but were backed up by a comprehensive media empire which allowed the changes to work. That boat has sailed but there will be new opportunities. Your answer would seem to be more of what is failing us now.
I am not suggesting that I can say what will work but I can say what is not working. We have falling gates and a lower media profile. Every time I log in to this site I get adverts for Rugby Union. Where are the ads for The World Club Challenge? Where do we show that we have any idea how modern media works. Our BBC page does not change for days at a time so eventually we get relegated our of the list of banner headline sports for mobile media and our profile goes down again. Amongst all of the teams in SL we cannot centralize information to produce a daily changing story that promotes the game, especially when transfers deals are being done, rather than leaving it to the elves at the BBC. Over the last two weeks the BBC has carried four rugby league stories, they were Scott Moore, Price, Drinkwater and contract extensions at Wigan. We should be bombarding the public with information. None of this is expensive or innovative but it seems beyond us.

We have two clubs out of the 12 that you could say play in "decepit" stadia, yet crowds and profile are falling across the board. Wigan had their first sub-10k crowd for many years last season, and Huddersfield still have to give their season tickets away for peanuts.

Bootham Crescent is hardly Wembley, yet York seem to have had little trouble generating interest in what they are doing at a managable scale.

A new venue certainly helps, but it's an excuse that only goes so far.

We're hardly talking football wealthy are we? RL wealthy is actually local businessmen, large corporations with a local presence or a sponsor looking for somewhere to entertain his/her mates and clients on a weekend - I did it myself at Wakey for a couple of years, and I am not Roman Abramovich.

And as an aside - despite the eccentricity of Belle Vue, the hospitality bit is well run, very well equipped, and always rammed - so it is certainly possible. What the club does struggle with however, is paying fans through the gates - and that is most likely negatively impacted by the state of the ground, together with a number of years of mediocre results.

That said, I'm broadly with BR on this - most clubs run their PR & Marketing like amateur hour; they could and should do a much better job, rather than blame the RFL for all their woes. Where we differ, is that I think the RFL could do a much more by way of providing campaigns, expertise and materials that clubs could use for their own purposes.

I'll repeat the question you omitted to answer: what, in practical terms, can those two clubs do? Broaden it to other clubs if you wish and use York as an example by all means. I know nothing of marketing techniques, so a post containing solutions as well as the underpinning theory would be of interest.

I was thinking in terms of run-of-the-mill supporters rather than corporate. I referred to decrepit grounds merely because your results & Cas's have actually been more than respectable recently so I'd assumed - maybe wrongly - that the grounds were a factor in limiting crowds. I'm in agreement with both yourself & Bramley on your take on the clubs' responsibilities and while the RFL could probably do more it would take the inevitable kicking were it perceived to be marketing one club more favourably than a near neighbour.

I've said before that I don't think the RFL should market clubs - it should market the game and the competition in an identifiable, consistent way, and provide clubs with the material and training to jump on the back of that and do their own marketing in consistently branded way; a bit like they did with the Extraordinary Rugby campaign, which I maintain was good and played to the strengths of the sport - the freakishly tough athletes who play it. They could also do more in terms of supporting individual players to become celebrities - and exploit the high profile supporters of the game - including many football players and pundits who operate on their own bloody broadcast partner.

Local marketing is very much a club responsibility - and whilst some clubs are obviously good at it, some are just dreadful; a bit of central funding for the purpose, together with a professional network to share successes and upskill those lower achieving clubs, would work wonders. But it needs some coordination from the centre - which seems unlikely.

Each club will have their own challenges, but in essence you go through that five step process.

I'd go about understanding the audiences that the clubs currently attract, the ones that they don't and, of those, the ones that I reasonably could attract.

I'd understand what those audiences are looking for in return for their leisure dollar, what their idea of a good evening out / family day out involves, and I'd invest my efforts in catering to that - whether that's facilities, experience or whatever. We previously had Bull/CougarMania and for all the stick that Toronto get about being a glorified beer festival, they've found an aspect of the matchday experience that seems to work.

I'd find the right marketing media to reach these people with those messages. Digital media makes it incredibly easy to target very specific segements of an audience, and that's something we can utilise without a massive budget or the right connections or school tie.

I'd be getting the sport, club and players in the media more often. We have so many stories that this sport can tell and yet, all we ever hear about is bickering amongst the CEOs, Chairmen and gobe pundits. Let's start telling the stories of the real characters. I'd be pumping out content, talking to the media and making it easier for journalists to run those stories - we have to do their job for them in many respects, because that way they're more likely to do our job for us. Brian Carney has spoken quite candidly about how hard it is for Sky, our biggest media partner and customer, to get anything out of the clubs once the central funding cheque had cleared - that's a complete failure of media communications and it has to change. There needs to be better dialogue with the media and if Sky want access to our players, we should be granting it with no questions asked.

I'd utilise tactics like CRM and marketing automation to reignite interest and keep audiences engaged. Clubs should have a wealth of data about their current supporters and those supporters who might have lapsed. Those clubs should know which of the former they could possibly upsell and they should have some understanding about how they can encourage some of their lapsed supporters to come back. Whether that is tactical offers (rather than blanket promotions like cheap season tickets that just give discounts to people who would have paid full price), or some other incentive - they need to be proactive on those audience segments.

But above all, there needs to be a clear USP. This is, admittedly, were it does need some centralised thinking but let's not forget that the clubs are now running the show. We used to call ourselves "a family sport", but that was basically just code for "we don't have a hooligan problem". In 2018, how many professional sports have a hooligan problem? The only one that did has largely cleaned up its act, whilst we are probably offering less and less what a 'family' expects from a day out at £20 a head.

We claim to be a fast, powerful sport, but we're hardly alone in that either. At the moment, this sport just doesn't stand out for anything, and it makes us less relevant by the day. I've used this analogy before, but the sport is being run by the commitee of a working men's club who can't understand why the function room is dead apart from Doris and her mates waiting for bingo, while the expensive cocktail bars in town are packed full of cool, good looking people paying £15 for a drink.

All of these are tools that the clubs largely have at their disposal today. My view is that they just aren't using them effectively. It seems that clubs are more than happy to pay to put some posters up around town and outside the ground, yet baulk at putting money into forms of promoting themselves that could be much more effective and measurable.

I don't really get this numbers thing, it's not about numbers it's about maximisation of what you have. Wakefield and Csa will never match Leeds for crowds because one is a huge city, one is a town pretending it's a city and the other is a suburb of that city. Despite this both clubs do ok, Cas average arounf 8k Wakefield 6k. I honestly don't see how Cas could get many more if their stadium were made of gold. Wakefield could maybe get up to 8k with them but what you have to remember is that Wakefield the city as opposed to WMDC are two seperate entities. The population ofthe city is quiet small, the MDC is large but vey diverse and has no affinity to the city in a sporting sence.

Where we do lose out due to our crao stadiums is on corporate and general usage, on that one you are correct. It is here where we could drasitcally improve oure income sources and it is here where we are being held back.

Once you take juniors, concessions and costs from ticket purchases then if your lucky an extra 2k supporters may net you an extra 25k a game (approx 300k P/A). Not to be sniffed at but corporate lounges, boxes and all year round events if done well could give you a P/A income of double that, maybe more. Added to this I think it's a lot easier to attract corporate money than it is to attract new or lost fans, that can only really happen with sustained success on the pitch which is a real catch 22. So imo it's the lack of corporate/commercial facilites rather than fans through the turnstiles that is really killing us.

Just a quick look around the SL club websites and Twitter shows they is not enough donr in promoting the first game.

I just hope that the down turn in spectator numbers is arrested, and attendances increase. Sell outs are going to be difficult to achieve.