Market Your Rodeo with Merchandise
Branded rodeo merchandise is a great way to get the word out about your rodeo – it turns your attendees into walking billboards for your rodeo wherever they wear it. Plus, it adds another revenue stream to your rodeo.
You’ll want to develop good merchandise and create good sales strategies around it. We’ll cover both of these aspects in creating your rodeo merchandise strategy:
1. Rodeo Merchandise Development
The success of your rodeo merchandise sales comes down to a few things:
- Do people like the design enough to add it to their wardrobe?
- Do your merchandise items fit into your fans’ budgets?
Here’s how you can create rodeo merchandise that sells.
Design
Think about your fanbase and which ones are most likely to buy your swag. Your rodeo attracts a range of ages, so consider if you should target your merchandise to families, young adults, middle-aged folks, or seniors.
When you choose your audience, think about who has disposable income to spend on merchandise. Cater all of your clothing choices and design choices to those demographics. Maybe your seniors want to buy rodeo swag for their grandkids. Maybe your young adult audience wants to buy swag items for themselves.
Start with what you know about your audience and look at what other rodeos like yours do for their swag. Use that information to choose your swag items, develop your designs, and make your rodeo’s merchandise stand out.
Start with a small order, and see what sells. You can create different swag next year with better information about the kinds of merchandise your rodeo fans buy.
Quality
Your merchandise quality also determines whether or not people want to buy your swag. If the shirts are too thin, the hats aren’t well-made, etc., your merchandise sales will be low and you won’t generate the revenue you were hoping for.
The material quality of your merchandise, how many colors, and where you’re placing your design affect the cost of your merchandise.
- The better fabric you use, the more expensive your merchandise will be.
- Screen printing your design or stitching it also affects cost. The number of colors in your design also affects cost.
- And, if you’re putting a design on the front and back of a shirt, that affects the costs.
These costs will affect how you price your items, so you need to strike a good balance between quality and cost.
Pricing
Your prices need to fit your fans’ budgets and you need to add margin so you can generate revenue instead of losing it.
Gather demographic information about your fans with a post-rodeo survey. You can ask for demographic information like age, income, and more. Understanding the incomes of your participants will help you get a sense for what people are willing to spend on a souvenir from your rodeo.
If your rodeo is a big tourist attraction, your tourist fans may be more likely to buy merchandise as a souvenir than your more local audience. They may also be willing to pay more than your local audience.
Look at how other rodeos in your area are pricing their merchandise items to ensure that your rodeo merchandise is competitive.
Take all of these factors into consideration when pricing your items so you can sell your merchandise stock each year and generate revenue successfully.
2. Rodeo Merchandise Sales Strategy
Once you’ve developed your rodeo merchandise, you need a marketing and sales strategy. Post about your merchandise items on social media – you can even get people to vote and comment on their favorites while you’re developing your merchandise strategy.
Build your rodeo merchandise marketing strategy on your overall rodeo marketing strategy, and make it easy for people to purchase your rodeo merchandise:
- Sell Merchandise During Ticketing
- Sell Merchandise Year-round with an Online Store
- Sell Merchandise In-person at Your Rodeo
Sell Merchandise During Ticketing
Feature your merchandise in your ticket purchase pathway to encourage people to add items to their order.
This strategy helps you capture more merchandise sales and increase order sizes. People may not have seen your rodeo merchandise and decide to add them to their order when they’re getting tickets.
Even if people don’t add your merchandise to their ticket order, including it in your ticket purchase pathway gets them thinking about it. They might not be able to get the design out of their head, so they’ll be more likely to either buy from your online store or buy it at your rodeo.
Sell Merchandise Year-round with an Online Store
You can sell your rodeo merchandise from an online store and manage shipping costs, too.
- Order Notifications – Receive automated email notifications when someone places an order.
- Fulfillment Tracking – Mark orders as “fulfilled” when you’ve packed and shipped it.
- Inventory Tracking – Automatically track merchandise quantities so you don’t oversell your stock.
- Custom Shipping Costs & Discounts – Add shipping costs for each of your merchandise items. Create a shipping discount when people buy multiple items.
With this approach, you have more opportunities to sell your rodeo merchandise. You can market your rodeo swag as a great Christmas gift, benefit from Black Friday sales, and more.
Sell Merchandise In-person at Your Rodeo
People will want to buy your merchandise at your rodeo, too. With Rodeo Ticket’s built-in POS system, you can sell your merchandise from the same place you manage inventory and ticket sales. You can even sell merchandise and tickets in the same order from our app.
- Inventory Tracked in One Place – Keep track of your inventory as you make sales automatically, no need to worry about overselling when fulfilling online orders and making in-person sales.
- Cash, Check, & Credit Card Transactions – Accept cash, check, and credit card when people are buying your merchandise.
With all of these tools, you’ll be able to simplify your merchandise management and create another successful revenue stream for your rodeo.
