How to Grow Your i9 Sports Franchise

Our detailed game plan helps you earn more customers

Marketing Guidance and Support

Effective marketing is the key to growing your business, and with i9 Sports®, you’ll have time-tested tools and the support of our experienced marketing team. We know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to franchise marketing strategies. i9 Sports‘ National Brand Fund is used to amplify awareness of our brand both nationwide and locally and gives franchise owners tremendous marketing leverage:

Examples of i9 Sports posts on Facebook.

SEO and SEM: Our search engine optimization and pay-per-click efforts helped drive over 2.3 million visits to our franchisee’s websites last year alone.

Targeted Email Campaigns: Through our national contract with a leading email provider, you have the templates and tools to customize and target your email communications.

Customer Satisfaction Measurement: Happy customers drive referrals. Through a national service, we provide the system to measure their satisfaction and methods for them to refer your program to others.

Online Reputation: Reviews on Google, Facebook, etc., are as important as word of mouth in the local community. Through a national partnership, we provide easy-to-use tools for responding to customers and a dashboard for monitoring feedback. Our marketing team helps you stay on top of your online reputation with five-star service.

Social Media: With over 158,000 fans, our Facebook page is one of the biggest referral sources driving visits to our franchisees’ websites. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest increase our reach and add to the daily engagement we have with our customers.

Building Your Game Plan

To help our franchise owners with local marketing, we have compiled our most successful franchise marketing strategies into what we call the “Winning Game Plan,” which is a step-by-step blueprint filled with cost-effective ways to reach target customers through local businesses, schools, community events and online marketing. We’ll teach you how to market, when to market and how to measure the results.

“We’re out there pounding the pavement, we’re out there at any event where we can set up a table and pass out flyers,” says Detroit-area franchisee Joe Russo. “Any place that we can go and get the word out about our programs, we take advantage of it.”

We begin by analyzing your market and identifying the areas with the highest concentration of potential customers. Armed with the knowledge of where to market, i9 Sports then provides you the business model with all the resources and tools you need to aggressively market your business locally. Through our web portal, you can access i9 Sports-branded templates that can be customized for your flyers, postcards, emails, presentations, banners, business cards, stationery and more.

Community involvement is also crucial for building awareness and goodwill among your customer base.

“We partner with some of the elementary schools to provide them some assistance, and in return, we get to participate in activities with them like fall festivals,” says Atlanta-area franchisee Craig Magram. “We work with some business owners in the area to do cross-promotions. Pizza places or haircut places fall right into our market base. We’re all about kids and marketing to the moms.”

Customer Service Center Reduces Your Overhead

Another of the most effective marketing tools you will have as an i9 Sports franchise owner is our Customer Service Center. Our team of highly trained customer service representatives will take all of your calls for you, which frees you up to run the business. The goal of our bilingual staff is to convert every inquiry into a registration. In addition, we are able to provide this incredible benefit to our franchisees at a fraction of what it would cost to hire someone locally.
Once a family participates in your program, building customer loyalty is what it’s all about. Our i9 Sports franchise owners run great programs, and word-of-mouth advertising creates momentum quickly becomes one of our best drivers of new customers.
“It’s not about the almighty dollar, because those will go away if you don’t do the right thing. It’s about what’s right for the kids,” says Magram. “If you do that, then you’re able to reap the benefits of running a good program. That gets the families coming back.”