SportBall is a sports business that started in Canada and expanded to the US and Singapore markets. There’s lots of potential for how the business can grow 10x in the next couple of years. Let’s dive in and talk about different strategies their team can pursue.

With COVID over it’s a perfect time for all businesses that bet on offline events to bounce back and start growing, here’re some strategies I think SportBall can utilize to fuel their growth.

SEO

SportBall is a decades-old business, and their domain is 20+ years old, yet, somehow the amount of organic traffic coming to the website is very tiny.

This can be easily solved by utilizing the strategy used by companies like Expedia, Yelp, DoorDash, and others – programmatic SEO. SportBall’s advantage is in its distributed network of franchisees all across Canada and several spots in the US.

Programmatic SEO is a simple formula of several variables to generate long tail keywords, like this: Sport type + Action +Geography + Flavor.

For example: “Soccer Training in Minneapolis for Kids” or “Florida Baseball Competition weekend”.

With this approach, you can generate tens of thousands of pages to start generating organic traffic and leads, and later convert them into your users.

The same goes for sports comparisons and sports guides: “Soccer vs Basketball”, “Baseball guideline for kids under 10” and so on.

Another “must have” for this type of business, is to create listings of all of their locations and events, and services they provide, it will easily generate another couple thousand pages, and most importantly provide enough data points to understand the demand in different geographies, which is important as the sports popularity is different between different countries and age groups.

Not to forget different languages, that would easily multiply amounts of content and essentially the amount of organic traffic for them. Canada speaks French and English, while in the US it will be Spanish and English, same for Singapore: English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil.

Rolling out full international support is a bit of an undertaking, so I’d recommend focusing on several countries, and languages before expanding further. The obvious focus for this would be English and Spanish versions for Canadian, US, and Mexico markets. With the ability to expand to LatAm markets with the Spanish version later, and the French version into Europe and several African countries.

But that’s not all, SportBall organizes events like birthday parties and camps, which is another great source of leads. Creating a page per event is an obvious way to get started. Companies like Meetup and Eventbrite are doing just that. Event pages should become a great way to generate backlinks from the local press and glue thousands of other pages together.

But before all that can be implemented, SportBall should fix their Technical SEO and Web Vitals first.

SportBall has three main top-level domains so far: us, ca, com.sg. Since there is zero to little SEO done so far, I would move all three to the root com domain and set up different country sections, so it would look like domain.com/country/locale, and practically look like sportball.com/canada/en_CA.

E-commerce

This is another huge revenue stream the company is missing out on. While the main business is healthy with the membership dues and sales fees, e-commerce would become a main driver of revenue for businesses like theirs. Companies like NBA and Nike have done just that, there’s no reason not to follow their steps and replicate this strategy for their target audience of K12 kids, whose parents are active spenders.

This strategy doesn’t have to be heavy in the undertaking, it’s enough to start with a couple of simple dropshipping partnerships (here’s a simple one) to roll out branded merchandise to their end consumers and enable their franchisees to make fees (sales, referral, affiliate) on the products they resell to the customers.

With a slow approach, SportBall would be able to collect feedback from their end users and their network of franchisees to understand what works well, support facts with the data, and then double down and expand on the products and partnerships that sell well.

The key leverage here is the same as in the SEO section, it’s the geography diversity. Because of the unique data SportBall can collect, the most interesting entry point would be an email marketing strategy funneled by an email drip marketing campaign.

All of the training, championships, and events are happening quite regularly and on a predicted schedule, therefore it’s quite easy to mix marketing emails together with the transactional emails on their bookings and engage end users along the way to get them hyped about their achievements and track the personal and team progress. It is also a fun thing to do as a whole family. And since most spenders are not kids, but their parents and relatives, making it easy to share their content with friends and family is super crucial here.

All-in-all this is low-hanging fruit to reduce the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increase users’ lifetime value (LTV).

Once merchandise sales become healthy and predictable after a couple of quarters, it will be a good time to start testing early partnerships with the equipment vendors. These launches could be also very targeted for certain cities, types of sports, and types of equipment. So by minimizing risks companies will be able to learn from each type of launch, and then scale successes nationally for each sport. Steady and predictable growth for E-commerce is a sure way to increase company valuation in the long run.

Social Media

SportBall’s website has Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin links. Let’s break them down one by one.

LinkedIn – is a social media for white collars, yet SportBall managed to amass almost 2000 followers there. There’s not much upside for their end-user there, as kids don’t hang on this platform, and I bet only half of their parents have accounts there. Though SportBall is investing time into this social media, LinkedIn could become a good source to hire new sports coaches and become a good platform to host some of their certifications and sports courses taught by their coaches.

Twitter – this social media has a different demographic compared to LinkedIn, the majority of them fall into the 25-34 age group. So it can be useful for young parents and coaches starting their careers. Also, Twitter was famous for its sports coverage, if this trend continues it should be fairly easy to generate organic traffic by aligning your content with sports events and having a solid strategy to cover events happening on the SportBall platform. Once the following grows beyond 10,000 followers from the current 2,000, it would make sense to run retargeting campaigns to funnel new users into the email campaigns and engage with the local franchises.

Instagram – I’m surprised SportBall’s Instagram account only has a bit more than 2500 followers. Being visual first, there’s lots of User Generated Content (USC) that can be leveraged in content creation as well as engagement strategies. Running regular giveaways would let them generate an active user base and engaged following. Meta Business Manager would allow retargeting users between Instagram and Facebook platforms. This can become quite efficient once they figure out the data points for CAC per platform, and optimize it for the seasonality of events and programs in different geographies. I bet there are underserved markets where this channel can be useful.

Facebook – instead of just running a single-page account, I would leverage a strategy described in the next section, called Communities. Facebook allows hosting groups and given there’s a decent number of parents on the platform this channel can become a key way to communicate with them. I would also create several groups with the same premise we already explored in programmatic SEO. So something like “Basketball for Kids in Boston by SportBall” or “Soccer for Kids in Toronto by SportBall” would be a great start (though they started doing something similar for the pages).

This strategy, however, would require hiring community managers and becoming more intentional in how they’ll plan to grow. But it also gives great leverage to go city by city and expand. There’s already an established brand stickiness, and since there’s a good fraction of parents moving from city to city, this strategy can leverage resting brand ambassadors alongside the franchises. And since parents are active networkers, SportBall just needs to give them a reason to talk about their brand. So affiliate commission, invite-only events, contribution recognition, levels, and scoring would yield a good enough reason to mention the brand. I’d copy some of the tricks from the Starbucks loyalty programs here. And start with the main hubs in Toronto and Houston to create fear of missing out (FOMO) in other cities.

TikTok – SportBall is clearly missing out on this platform, since it has millions of kids on this platform, so creating a consistent branded channel is a must. It should be a straightforward path to reuse the content from previous challenges and USC in general. After the initial following is built, I’d focus on creating incentives for small influencers (both students and coaches) to start sharing more branded content.

SnapChat – same as TikTok, Snapchat has plenty of kids on the platform. In a similar fashion, the strategy can be reused, with the goal to build a funnel for the newsletter and seasonal programs the company sells.

Pinterest – given that decision-makers for SportBall users are student parents, and especially mothers since they’re the main driver of household spending. So replicating a similar strategy and creating an inspiration board per city + per sport would allow them to easily reach new potential customers. Pro tip: make your pages look consistent by reusing the same design elements and local aspects.

YouTube – YouTube for kids is one of the few platforms that legally allow minors on the platform. Since SportBall’s primary product is educational sports activities, it’s a no-brainer to expand into the course creation for their target demographics. It pairs well with the number of coaches and franchises they already support and instead puts them on track to build out the EdTech platform for sports.

Creating a set of free self-serve courses by SportBall coaches could be a good way to cement brand awareness among its audience and hook kids and parents with the free content and branding attached to it. So whenever parents and kids are ready to take the next step in the funnel, SportBall is naturally there to offer their services.

Vimeo – few of the franchisees have Vimeo accounts to host their videos. Vimeo and YouTube evolved from the same basic product of uploading videos, though they positioned themselves very differently. If needed Vimeo can be integrated later for paid courses to host the videos and provide protected access to the paid subscribers. Otherwise, it does not really make sense to use Vimeo this early.

LinkTree – same as Vimeo, few franchisees use LinkTree to create top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) for their social media accounts. This is something I’d automate right away by providing an easy way to manage franchisees’ pages on SportBall’s website. More importantly, SportBall should collect analytics and data points on TOFU conversions, so they can relay these insights back to franchisees and help drive more traffic and sales to the areas that need to be improved.

I would revisit strategy per channel whenever SportBall decides to expand into any particular geography and language, as there’d be new opportunities to leverage local channels.

Depending on each franchise, making partnerships with the local venues and being able to showcase the digital signage with the USC would play a good favor to both, the venue and SportBall.

Communities

This is my favorite type of growth, and though it’s pretty hefty in undertaking from the start and requires continuous support as it grows, this, in my opinion, is one of the sustainable ways to grow a multi-dimensional business like SportBall.

There are kids, coaches, parents, franchises, schools, fans, relatives, and so many different stakeholders who would be interested in engaging the community, so naturally, it creates a multiplier factor for everything that happens around kids and their success within the community.

All that is needed for such a community to thrive is a system.

One of the books I recommend for building communities is called People Powered by Jono Bacon, where he outlines the limitless number of connections a community can build, and how building a scoring system of contributions can create a drive for its members. Similar to how Quora and Stackoverflow reward their members with some tokens of recognition. Jono Bacon focuses on leading you to discover that the goal of community building is not about “selling to the community” but facilitation.

It would work out perfectly for the community, as it already has coaches, and with the right nudge community ambassadors and managers can build the daily engagement that would keep the community of kids, parents, and coaches focused on the sports by contributing to the community and to the platform altogether.

Once the community reaches 100 active members, it will become ready to be scaled to multiple cities, and once it hits 1000+ active members it will become a fertile platform to run experiments with the product and marketing campaigns to seek early validation of new ideas.

Direct To Consumer (DTC) App

We all love new apps, kidding. But in this case, it’s fairly easy to start with a simple utility application to solve a single problem of the schedule, and then slowly engage kids and their parents using push notifications.

Similar to how Starbucks started with a simple ordering app and then expanded into the loyalty system with an active marketing channel.

It’s a perfect entry point for a longer horizon strategy of becoming an EdTech platform and starting to sell the content to customers that can not be served in their own geographies yet, or simply those that can make it and use services on a consistent schedule.

Combining loyalty with UGC can become a long-lasting strategy for SportBall customers, community, and friends.

But a low-hanging fruit here would be getting kids’ families on board.

I would gamify the whole user experience, almost to the extent of what Duolingo does with their engagements, and create incentives for kids to pull in their relatives into the process for the sake of virality and virtual social currency of them achieving success in their own categories created by SportBall.

Once the first version is built and there’s enough adoption the marketing and sales data can be augmented with mapping data a la FourSquare or Yelp and expand into a powerful distribution channel.

Once this step is done, this can become a powerful distribution channel. Similar to how ski resorts sell family passes, SportBall could leverage and retain similar strategies in engaging each family member and creating viral loops across the kids’ sports activities.

Imagine what you’d be able to do with the visitors’ pass or a day city pass to enable discovery function and cross-sell sports activities to a broad network of customers in each city. Think like a Starbucks app retains a customer via push notifications, and leads customers to the closest location to satisfy their freshly created coffee thirst.

Also, this app will serve as an easy entry point to test engagement and collect feedback from kids and parents. For the later stage, similar to what Uber does with the Drivers’ App and Riders’ App, SportBall could clone scheduling functionality and build a standalone interface for coaches to help them facilitate the programming easier and better.

Leaderboard

Remember how Starbucks launched summer games to drive more engagement and retain their customers?

Here’s a simple thing SportBall can launch to leverage the network effect and incentivize kids’ and parents’ engagement.

Create a simple branded website where each kid receives points for each action they do within SportBall. Show up for a class – win a point. Win a game – get more points. Refer a friend – more points again.

Same as Yelp incentivizes you to leave reviews, SportBall can solicit your customers and users to leave more positive reviews. The same goes for App Store reviews, there’s lots to learn when it comes to working the customer support and creating great incentives for customer development.

Of course, each review gives you some points too, if you leave a lot of points, for different programs, different cities, and events… yes, you’ll get rewarded with more recognition. Think as Apple Watch rewards you for fitness achievements or StackOverflow rewards their contributors with extra badges for their posts, comments, upvotes, and moderation efforts.

Last but not least are ambassadors. These are special kinds of users that will propel your brand forward and will feel recognition at the same time. All you need to do is facilitate it: create guidelines, provide training and support, and still mind that your ambassadors are volunteers.

Combining all together: reviews, referrals, and ambassadors you get yourself a flywheel that requires little maintenance moving forward, but creates a well-designed momentum to drive more and more customers, and piggybacks off of a great sport spirit.

Coaches-Influencers

After running several businesses myself, I realized how important it is to make sure that customer-facing employees are very well-trained with company values and quality level. Since coaches are the ones engaging with customers (kids and parents) the most, I’d focus on their performance and satisfaction rates first and foremost.

Also since coaches will eventually become content creators, and then course creators, I would start by creating an internal support team split into two groups, one – Editorial, and the second one – Trainers.

Similar to how the LinkedIn Editorial team runs, I’d start with a single person that would oversee content across all channels, and run the agenda and schedule for all events in the North American market first.

The other part is similar to Twitch and YouTube, before you get good content on your platform and can truly enjoy good high-quality feedback on your platform, you’d need to get it from somewhere. It’s always the same challenge, look at Netflix, Xbox, or ClassPass. All of these companies had some kind of support for their early content creators, and all of them continue to support their top creators in different ways.

With SportBall it will take some experimentation to figure out what Trainers should actually train coaches for. But starting with the basics of creating content, cadence, engagement practice, and showing how to collect feedback from their existing classes will not only improve the quality of their classes and enable a deeper connection with kids and their parents through the digital medium but will also open new doors for both coaches and SportBall.

My favorite example of such synergy is Figma, especially after visiting their recent ConFig conference.

One of the reasons Adobe wanted to acquire Figma (though it couldn’t pursue this because of the Antitrust committee, they engaged in a new partnership in June 2023) was a very healthy number of in-house influencers becoming product evangelists in each small community across the web, and each city and each event. Figma scaled this playbook very well, the playbook that was well adopted by Pelaton and Gymshark that scaled to millions of followers and sales using the very same strategy.

Coincidentally the guided approach to the content creation and coaching the coaches (pun intended) will let the company run healthy experiments on the online courses, before fully committing to this course. Maven and EggHead did exactly this, with a much smaller following in the very beginning.

Another way to hack it is by pairing coaches with volunteers (or part-time contractors) who would join the sessions and record the content of kids and coaches in action, these roles can be crowdsourced from friends and family.

Cheerleading

As I mentioned before there are other partners and stakeholders in this business: venues, schools, equipment companies, leagues, and so on. Though, surprisingly, one of the obvious underserved marketing is cheerleading as a sport.

There’s a lot of opportunity to cross-sell and engage different types of sports, with essentially one sport, and that’s cheerleading.

An easy way to hack it is to start by sponsoring a local team in their biggest hub – Toronto.

Then creating all-year around competition and national championships in each country, US and Canada. With the final championship of North America that would become an event on its own, and something that’s already happening in other age categories.

But more importantly, because of the entertainment aspect of this sport, this could become a silver bullet for all the social media across all of the channels.

This works well not only vertically but also on the inter-city and inter-community levels, as there’s tons of room to drive engagement between different states, cities, teams, and so on.

So with the same budget spent, there’s an opportunity to place the SportBall brand in multiple events and reuse NBA & NFL playbooks here.

Franchisees

This should become a technical cornerstone of the business. There’s a lot to learn and draw from conventional models run by Mcdonald’s and Starbucks. But the key differentiator is a hybrid model between company-owned and licensed stores operated by franchisees.

For businesses like SportBall to successfully scale they have to put operations of training and supporting their franchisees very seriously. Starting with the operations of running the services, to community building, and content creation.

As we’ve seen in the Social Media section, there’s enough chaos on different pages that are sporadically managed by each franchise, and it is a lost opportunity. It is customer-facing, therefore it’s important to get it right.

SportBall can draw inspiration from how Private Equity and Venture Capital firms create horizontal teams of experts to help their portfolio companies.

Though in their case it should be the editorial team, logistics team, content team, social media marketing team, and PR team available to back SportBall’s franchisees each day.

Ideally, this team would focus on Canadian and US markets first, and add specialists for each team per country, once the process gets the scale.

Technical stack

There’re lots of tools and services that will bring value to the day-to-day operations happening behind the scenes.

I would start by establishing two main flows to answer two main questions:

• What are your customers up to?

• What are your franchisees doing day-to-day?

One of the easy tools to start aggregating all the data points that will be collected later is Retool, which allows you to connect different data sources and create an interactive dashboard. For a more advanced version, you can get a vendor locked in with Tableau or Looker BI interface, or if you like me, you could go with an open-source version using Cubejs.

Eventually, Retool would replace their Wordpress-based interface and separate layers of concern between the marketing websites and actual operations, creating a single point of management for franchisees, and an easy oversight from the franchisor’s ops. Marketing pages can be moved to static website hosting to optimize for cost and Google’s Web Vitals.

Okay, now that we figured out where we want to store the data, and we made sure not a single data point will be lost, let’s focus a bit more on the attribution.

The default starting point is Google Analytics (which is in the midst of its internal migration), alternatively, you can choose Plausible, but I would definitely recommend throwing things like Mixpanel (cohorts and funnel analysis) as well as Segment to redirect data flows between different integrations, eventually, it will become its own extract-transform-load (ETL) pipeline.

Email is the backbone of the outreach, and there’re tons of good providers like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Mailgun, but my favorite one is Klaviyo. Specifically, the ease of setting up the campaign flows based on previous purchase behaviors along with the ability to track customer lifetime value (CLV). It also lets you set up an SMS outreach campaign as well, though I’d supplement it with Twilio to run transactional messages about the bookings and any time-sensitive updates.

By the way, an easy and low-hanging fruit with emails is to collect feedback and reviews after each session is complete, do a temperature check on the attendance, on what went well, and what can be improved, ask customers to document with a happy picture of the sports practice, and generally collect NPS-like metric. In return, you can award customers virtual points for their participation, which gives them “bragging rights” and exclusive access to early features and sales.

Instead of building a full-fledged CRM right out of the gate, I’d start with integrating something like Asana (or Notion, Monday, Trello) to integrate all of the workflows related to franchisees. Since this process is likely to change and adapt a lot, especially in the first days of the reorg, it’s important to try to make this process really effortless or at least as smooth as possible.

Getting the schedules in order, coaches, programs, and students, and then the UGC reviews for social media and newsletters, customer support from parents and students, including marketing outreach and sales campaigns, and so on.

Later this can be replaced by something custom-built or a workflow built on top of Retool.

For the sake of A/B testing, I would set up different workflows for Canada-based franchises and US-based ones. Later this will become a blueprint for launching new countries.

Once the basics are done, it will be a good time to set up the first DTC application, close the loop in communications with the students and their parents, and also offload some of the costs billed by the above solutions.

To keep the business healthy, it’s important to pay close attention to the finances of the entire operations, especially for entities operated by franchisees, who might be not as financially savvy as the franchisor CFO’s team.

Horizontal integrations with Stripe and TaxJar will simplify your compliance and report preparation time by a mile, especially after you get into e-commerce and drop shipping at scale.

Pro tip: document all new changes and workflows in Loom, and store them on a Notion knowledgebase.

Make sure to host regular monthly and quarterly all-hands meetings to collect feedback from the entire team and temperature-check the bottlenecks of the operations. One of my favorite books on this topic is Working Backwards, to organize teams around your processes.

Instead of the takeaways

Companies like Uber, AirBnB, and surprisingly WeWork had great playbooks for launching new markets city by city. City-level planning can become a crucial operational unit for the company to enable growth, of course with horizontal support from the back office teams leading product, marketing, community, partnerships, and operations.

Even if a company is not funded by VC money, there’s a great book by Elag Gil “High Growth Handbook” that speaks more about the structure and departments needed to prepare for the growth of a company like SportBall.

Companies to learn from

• ClassPass
• Uber
• Meetup
• Eventbrite
• Airbnb
• Shopify
• Alibaba
• Maven
• Egghead
• Pluralsight
• Nike
• Netflix
• Xbox
• YouTube
• Twitch
• LinkedIn
• Gymshark
• Peloton
• FourSquare
• Yelp
• NBA
• NFL
• Apple
• Stackoverflow
• Reddit