We get a lot of questions about how RunSignup can promote your event, and people are always surprised when we say we don’t promote your event − we give you the tools to promote your event. This doesn’t mean we don’t understand the importance of marketing to your event; on the contrary, event marketing is one of the key product areas we have dedicated a tremendous amount of development time and effort to over the last few years. This is an intentional choice, consistent from the early days of the company, for a few important reasons:
1. Your Data is Your Data
We don’t promote your race (I.E., send emails or post ads on other race websites) to participants of other races because we don’t own that participant data − the race does. That works both ways, meaning we also won’t take your participant data and market other events to your participants. We won’t email your participants about a rival race, and we won’t put an ad for that race on your event website.
2. The Most Effective Marketing Comes from Sources You Trust
Ads can work if you have significant financial and creative resources to put towards them, but consistently the marketing programs that come back with the highest ROI are those focus on word of mouth. Why? Everyone trusts their friend or family member more than an ad on the internet or an email from a company. And year after year our RaceTrends Report confirms that social strategies have the highest ROI. We provide tools like referral rewards, team size refunds, and social sharing customization to help you incentivize your participants to engage their community − a community that is already more likely to be a fit for your event.
3. Technology Matters
How can we help support your your promotion efforts? Technology. We built making it east to find your race into the core of our technology. Our race websites are built with search engine optimization so your runners can find them organically. Our email allows for the separation of marketing and transactional emails so you can keep your lists clean. Our social sharing tools populate automatically so it’s simple to swap out your race image or change up your sharing language. Every website and email is mobile optimized to make registration easy for the 70% of participants who access your race from a mobile device. We track every click and purchase on your race website, an it’s simple to add a conversion code to your race website to further evaluate your ROI. All that attention to detail with technology saves you time and money (no SEO audits, email consultants, or social media firm needed), ensuring that what money you do spend on marketing goes directly to recruiting new participants!
Want to learn more about how we boost your marketing? Check out this blog round-up of the key marketing tools on RunSignup!