I handle the website and social media for out kart club. I’m not a professional by any means, and I’ll likely need to hand it off to someone smarter, and more involved with Tik-Tok and other forms of social media for youth. It’s a tough gig to keep a flow of good content, especially if you’re not good at producing content!
As for who to market to . . . I feel there are 2 very different levels to market to. We talk about the great work that Xander does, and I 100% agree. But that’s a very small minority of the karting community that will ever race at that level. I would hate for a person to think that’s what karting is. To me, karting is what you see at the club level. That’s probably as high as 95% of karters will ever go s club racing. So how do we market that? How do we market the small local club scene that CAN be affordable?
I think the problem is that if you have to even ask the question it’s already too late. We have had all the mechanisms and entities that did this. We have had karting magazine, I had a successful website and youtube channel. But it’s all largely gone to pot as social media has made those kind of entities very difficult to maintain. I think Kartpulse is now as good as it gets as it acts as a hub where inquisitive people can ask an educated user base.
And what is the ‘we’ in this equation. I did a Budget Kart Challenge with the most ubiquitous kart in the world - and OTK/Rotax. Anyone can pick those videos up and go “you can race on a budget to get started”. I generated $100 in ad revenue for me from around 30,000 long views + 11,000 shorts video views on Youtube. Facebook had a decent amount of views too, but didn’t generate revenue. I ended up losing money. Maybe a couple of hundred dollars down once I totted everything up.
That’s the thing. General karting promotion (that can be a force to promote a broad range of our sporting culture) is expensive for those that want to do it. It basically relies upon enthusiastic individuals in an era when monetising that interest is becoming increasingly difficult. I certainly believe I could create a channel that’d be fantastic, but the investment will need to be around $10k, which again is high risk.
All good points. I would say start small and try to engage local racers… and then promote what they are doing. Rock island has an advantage because of all the spectators we attract, but it wasn’t always that way and exposure of the sport to them is something we’ve been building on. We only mention upper level racing when promoting to spectators… over the years we’ve had Graham Rahal, Scott Speed, Conor Daly. Joey Hand, Nelson Philippe and others so we can say you have a chance to see “motor sports stars of tomorrow” but that’s the only time we mention it. We also are lucky to have a lot of good local racers who we can promote.
The other big failing of the sport is promoting it as a sport for women. Every female driver we have ever had here has said something like “once you put the helmet on no one knows if you are make or female.” Why don’t more dads take their daughter’s racing? Because the sport doesn’t put the idea in their heads. The women in the sport have all been willing to speak out but we all can do a better job there!
It’s not a failing so to speak. We’ve had a female FIA World Champion and multiple top level drivers. The difficult in attracting women, and by women I mean actual adults paying for their own kart and racing it, is the same issue we face with attracting men. I don’t think there’s a big difference. There’s isn’t any promotion really in the first place.
Having someone who REALLY “gets” social media is tough. Our kart club (EDKRA - Edmonton and District Kart Racing Association) was very lucky in 2022 to have had an INCREDIBLY talented club member who took over our social media - and it was game changing - for that year. In 2023, she had to step back to look after her own businesses, and we were right back to just being another club with social media accounts that nobody really pays attention to.
Xander hit the nail on the head when he talked about short form videos and quantity over quality - probably even more so, the less “professional” looking your content is - you just never know what will draw looks, so the more content you put out there, the better the odds of having something that makes an impression on people.
The biggest problem of social media, in both terms of consuming it and especially in terms of producing content, is the temporariness of it.
Social media (and I do not include search-engine-indexable forums like Kartpulse or Reddit for purposes of this conversation) is distinguished by:
Content which comes and goes from easily visible places within a day, at best several days and once off the main feeds is essentially lost to time forever. Besides not being searchable via popular search engines, the popular social media platforms themselves have extremely broken internal search functionality that makes this so (I encourage you to test it for yourself). This is not an accident on the part of the social media sites - their incentive isn’t to make good content from the past searchable, it’s to keep everyone creating and consuming “new”.
If useful for anything at all, the only long-term productive way to use ‘social media’ is for setting a hook in front of the general public which invites them to a place that you have more control over and which can be built upon to create a deep and rich experience, can be findable in search engines, easily bookmarked, and available for as long as you like. TKART understands this, and so do major advertiser across any number of major industries (you won’t see any car manufacturers setting up their whole existence on Facebook, Instagram, or X).
To put it another way, trying to run a whole entities primary web presence on a social media platform would be like trying to run your computer on only short term memory (RAM) with no long term storage (e.g,. hard drive) to keep track of all the accumulated knowledge, value, and data that you accumulate while you use it. Anytime the computer was reset of it would be gone in a poof and you would have to start all over again. That sounds crazy, but it’s essentially the equivalent of what many karting communities and orgs are doing.
And if you’re at the point where ‘there are only so many hours in the day’, and it becomes a choice of doing social media or taking part in your own website or a forum (or someone else’s), do the latter - you’ll be better off in the long run.
I agree with some of this and disagree with some of it.
A good website with informative copy, updated graphics, links that works, and, most importantly, a responsive team behind it once someone decides to learn more or reach out is vital.
Social media is indeed temporary, and fleeting at a cursory glance, but it also is evergreen in ways that contemporary media struggles to meet. What I do think it does do over time is create a network of media for someone to interact with and consume. I think that’s a big reason why YouTube is so popular and resonates with people. You can either pick and choose individual content, or follow a person, theme, brand, etc in a longer format way. If done well, social media allows for a longer term formation of a relationship with a customer or fan or follower or participant.
I get it, we would rather people read an FAQ or click on the website. But social media has presented an alternative to that, that is intoxicating for both good and bad reasons.
I don’t think a karting club or series can be dismissive of that in this day and age. It’s here to stay and consistent content generation does correlate to increased engagement.
I think you can’t do one or the other, you have to do both. As someone else touched on, finding people that do social media well is hard, and I also agree that having the same person to run social media that manages the races is not setting either up for success.
It’s tricky because the only aspects of our sport that have the dollars to invest in marketing are the upper portion that KC Streams at.
I’ve always operated by the notion that good will runs out, but someone’s bottomline never does.
To a degree, KC has a tie to the sport’s bottomline with our viewership monthly subscription. It’s also not tied to anything specific – I don’t owe any value to pay towards a sponsor in that regard.
I’ve been trying for the last two years to do some small sponsor deals of me going to do vlogs racing club races and bringing in an internet personality in the auto space to join me in racing 206 // 100cc. A mix of deals falling through last-second and the quick growth we experienced doing national streams forced me to back off a bit.
Even to that degree, you could argue that my goodwill towards the club project fell to the wayside for my bottomline to pay my bills by streaming big races.
Ultimately, though, I think it’s a multi-step process.
Clipping our KC Broadcasts and watching good highlights and actual racing go viral (not just the crashes) is the start. We need to first expose what we do.
Next up is me finishing work on the kart chaser website to include a Karting 101 page with KC-Certified shops and tracks. Plenty of karting websites have this info available but in my opinion the full package isn’t quite there. Whether it’s a lack of website traffic or connection to the industry across the board, it still doesn’t get a new customer to the finish line.
The last piece I’d like to do is sell a karting experience day on kartchaser’s website, boosted by our following that exceeds the size of the sport, in collaboration with a local shop and club track. Essentially a lead generator. If we can just get people to the track, into the driver’s seat, and paired with a good shop or team to help get them situated, we’ll be a lot better off.
Hell, the turnover in our sport alone is more than telling enough that we don’t necessarily lack in finding new karters – we need to keep them racing longer.
I’ve got a lot more thoughts on this all beyond my above plans.
I’ve been trying to do this with the How to get started - www.OVKA.com - Ohio Valley Karting Association page, to at least help people get going at our club level events. Between this now 30-page guide, our Intro to Karting Seminar at our big Swap Meet, and our annual Karting 101 “mock race day” that kicks off our season, I feel like we’re starting to get there in terms of doing what we can to help newcomers.
The rule-of-thumb I’ve heard for the club level is: “you lose 20% of your members every year,” either due to people moving up to focusing on regionals/nationals or car racing, Senior drivers moving away to college, or people deciding to get out of karting. This means that club-level racing REALLY needs to buckle down and lend a helping hand to prospective new members, since kart racing has a seemingly “vertical wall” learning curve to the average parent or interested teen.
Cynic in me says this is the wrong question that karting keeps asking itself. It needs some tweaking to be actionable…
First “affordable” needs to be defined, then compared with what is sustainable for the sport\club etc. Then pursue not only those that can afford it, but can afford it AND understand value it.
I think TKart is possibly a strong example of how chasing social media impressions can be an absolute waste of effort. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but for quite some time the page Karting Emotion and Passion grew a very large following on the back of freebooting other peoples content. It seems like TKart has some sort of relationship with them because TKart was basically the only non video related content that the pages posted and it looked like it got near crickets in response compared to the other videos.
At the end of the day, likes, shares comments and shares cannot be deposited in the bank and have limited utility. I am a huge proponent of reaching the right people, not lots of people (OK both is ideal). In any case, reaching the right people is the key strength of social media that people miss.
Limit organic posts to communication efforts with club members. Use paid acquisition (ie ads, interest targeting) and iterate on the process to attract new members. I’m not blind to the fact that many (maybe even most) clubs are volunteer groups… The point I’m making here is that the social media person or team should redirect their energy to understanding how to leverage the tools for targeting vs trying to chase reach and other vanity metrics.
For ad spend, throw a dollar a day at it to start off. Your metric for success is conversations with prospective members\racers. Engineer and iterate on the content, call to action etc based on that goal and you will come out on the other side as having a very marketable skill.
A pet project I’ve been (slowly) working on is getting an onboard stream setup working. Xander already debuted his at the Grand Nationals this year, but I was aiming for something like the “IRL streaming” content on Twitch. I have no idea if it’d be a hit or not, but it’s something that hasn’t been tried (that I know of).
I have the technology/equipment, I’m just missing a mounting solution. So if anyone knows a guy that can help me make a custom mount, like an extended battery box, I’d appreciate some assistance
What do you need to custom mount? I did a live onboard from the rock in 2014 or thereabouts with Josh Lane for fun… GoPro to a cellphone in the drivers pocket using third party app that did streaming. This is before Gopro added that ability natively in their app of course. Cell coverage was actually pretty solid.
What about a GoPro mount-helmet (or anywhere) mounted battery?
That’s good for about 6hrs of 4k/60 I think, video-wise. I did not notice a weight difference in my neck and I wore it for a brutal enduro (hot and me and Elias duoed).
I’m late to the party I suppose, but the last several days I’ve been discovering the brilliant work of Alan and Terence Dove’s karting media efforts (I’ve read Terence’s book this week, have just started diving into Alan’s stuff across the web) and I figure I would post about it here since it’s about ‘karting marketing’ for the benefit of others like me who haven’t been aware.
Kudos gents, considering the task (e.g., pulling karting up by its bootstraps) the results may not always be what you ‘deserve’ in total, but imho it’s top level content you’ve been putting out there, and reminds me very much of the higher levels of media I’ve seen with other motorsports. If the whole of karting marketing efforts were raised to this level it would be amazing for the sport and participants. Here’s what I’ve come across in my Googling:
“The last piece I’d like to do is sell a karting experience day on kartchaser’s website, boosted by our following that exceeds the size of the sport, in collaboration with a local shop and club track. Essentially a lead generator. If we can just get people to the track, into the driver’s seat, and paired with a good shop or team to help get them situated, we’ll be a lot better off.“
This is one of the few things I’ve read that can move the needle for me - generate leads for me and let me take care of the rest. Put people in my orbit that I don’t have access to currently and you are providing me value.
I have never sponsored a class, race, series or production outside of our local club. And other than for preferred parking, for the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone else does.
If someone does something like this to help my shop or the local club grow, you have my attention however.
Sadly I think you’re in the minority in making sure delivery takes over once leads are generated. It does explain the success you’ve created in your locale though.
I’d be thrilled if it was really 20%. Back in the day when we actually had some industry leadership a full blown market analysis was done and at that time their numbers indicated the average time in karting for a racer was 2.8 years. Even rounding up that puts you at replacing one third of your paddock every season.
20% or 33% - that’s an insane amount of turnover. As much work that needs to go in to keeping people happier, longer once they are in the sport.
I do think that number has trended the right way since the evolution of the 206 as out industry gateway. I think we have more people staying in the community for a longer period of time at the current moment.
Yep “try a kart day” gets people to the ah-ha moment. Make that as compelling attraction as it can be (expand on the VALUE vs cost). These days can and should be a cashflow positive thing too.
I hate to say this, but I think the biggest challenge when I was thinking about this would be the team selection. Historically many have gone with pushing that they need to sell vs what the best fit for a customer is. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the rationale… but it’s not a good customer experience.
For the sport to grow it needs to focus on the customer experience. That starts with LISTENING before we speak, meeting each customer where they are and helping them get to the next stage. At a later point pivoting that to retaining people in the sport/community in whatever way works for them…. Which is not always competitive racing.
Karting has a bunch of “services” it can provide. I think we fall short on identifying them and matching them with the right people.
I think the community here does a great job of that though. Listening and asking questions first rather than dropping a metric ton of info on people at the outset.
