(AI-generated image. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their rightful owners)
Many professional wrestling promoters, when promoting a local show without a lot of momentum, often skip out on solid online marketing. They may make a few posts on Instagram or Facebook, but they often miss out on several free methods to promote their shows. For example, if a venue could hold up to 400 people - but their current fans and social media posts only will draw 150 fans then this leaves 250 empty seats. Even at $10 a seat (ideally more!) that leaves $2500 of ticket revenue on the table + lost opportunity for the talent to sell merchandise, build a local fan base, and not compel local companies to sponsor the promotion's future shows.
Some of the free methods to promote a show, besides social media posts and non-optimized YouTube videos, include:
- Optimizing YouTube videos for the local city or town
- Marketing with local wrestling fans on YouTube by following them and/or leaving comments on their channels
- Posting on local online event calendars
- If there is an optimized Google Business (Maps) profile then post an "event" with the date, time, location, and any announced matches or incentives for people to attend (example: Veterans get in free)
- Optimized website pages to rank for "pro wrestling shows in CITY"
- Other free methods
However, especially when attempting to fill larger venues nearing 1000 or more fans, then a promotion may wish to explore intelligent online advertising. In addition to targeting pro wrestling fans in the local area on Facebook and Instagram, a promotion may wish to explore a platform like Google Ads. This is because it gives the promotion several other ways to reach wrestling fans in the geographic area:
- Buying ads for a search or keyword such as "pro wrestling events in CITY". Traffic then would be directed to a specific landing page on the website or even the ticket page (such as Eventbrite)
- Buying banner ad space on third-party blogs & websites being read in the local area by wrestling fans, even if the content on that website isn't wrestling-related. This is due to the tracking cookie and the browsing history of any logged-in reader
- Advertising in platforms like Gmail
- YouTube advertising. This is a unique aspect due to how much wrestling content is on YouTube. By targeting people watching specific genres of pro wrestling within a tight geographic radius (such as 10 miles around the venue), you have choices on the ads which will run ahead of time. Interestingly, if you run a 30+ second regular video (16:9 horizontal resolution) then if someone skips the ad after 5 seconds then you may not even get charged for the "view". It would count as an "impression", but not enough time would have elapsed to warrant being considered a "view" warranting a charge.
Once a promotion sees profits running these ads, especially with decent quality controls on maximum ad spend per day, geographic targeting, and other safeguards - then the company may wish to spend more on ads in order to attract more people and even running larger venues. At that point a reputable ad tracking platform, which can help the company increase the chances of ads being profitable by using AI attribution and similar new technology, can help a small promotion grow much larger within a short period - even as little as a year.
Hopefully this gives pro wrestling promotions some additional thoughts on how to attract brand new fans to its shows. Over time, assuming that the quality of the overall show is enjoyable to these new fans, then the fan who first became aware of the promotion by way of the online ad hopefully becomes a longtime fan who starts to bring his/her friends to future shows and helps to grow the company.