September 2008
Life of a professional Racer Episode 5
This article is about learning to market yourself as a driver so as to project your talents and skills for potential sponsors. Many drivers are lacking in funds for their racing careers and many of them do not know how to properly go about trying to find sponsors. In the end, most will end up either frustrated and disheartened or broke from racing. While learning to find the potential sponsors for his career, Sean Edwards has learnt the perfect formula to creating interest in his racing and earning the financial rewards to take him further in his career. Sean Edwards shares with us what are some ways to improve your chances of getting sponsored.
Here are the steps that a driver should take if they want to promote themselves as professional drivers for sponsors:
1) Build a website
This is arguably the most important marketing aspect of being a driver. You have to treat your skills and career like a marketable product or company. Imagine a company with a wonderful set of products that doesn’t have a website or any means for customers to get in contact with for purchase. How do you think the company will fair? Sure, people that know the owners of the company can actively spread word of mouth and give great testimonials about the products of the company, but that will be very limited. Without a website to update your readers and potential sponsors about your latest racing results or thoughts, no one will be interested to sponsor you because there is just no interest.
So start by building a website and add quality content about yourself. Be sure to include the following:
- Pictures of yourself and every race that you enter
- News of your racing results, team and other gossips that you might be able to share with the public
- Contact details on how to get in touch with you or your public relations representative
- Miscellaneous videos of you and other aspects of your life. The public loves to know what goes on in your life so let them know. Take videos of the pit areas, conversations with the crew or any other information that you feel the outside world will not know about.
- Provide incentives for people that read your websites. For example you could provide a lucky draw for complimentary tickets to your next race.
Sean Edwards has a website that he actively updates with videos, pictures and quotes from himself and fellow drivers. In this way, he is able to connect to his audience about what is the latest news and results from him. Sponsors will not need to spend time searching for the progress and it serves as a good platform for sponsors to contact him too.
2) Develop a positive public image
It may seem that at lower levels of racing when there is not much attention on you that maintaining a positive public image is not important. It may be true at that point of time but when you climb up higher the career ladder, these things may come back and haunt you. So develop a positive public image to show the public about your personal life.
- Always be well dressed in public
- Gain publicity by attention events and doing charity work. Add these event and work pictures and content on your website for publication
- If you are comfortable with a certain brand, use it all the time. Do not brand hop. For example, if you like nike, use 90% of nike goods and do not use a range. When sponsors see that it is easy for them to pick up from where you are. So if you feel there is a good chance of getting sponsored by red bull, then drink it all the time.
3) Offer Driver training Services
One of the best ways to earn financial rewards from being a driver is that your audience will automatically think that you are a better driver than themselves. Sean Edwards offers his services about 2 years ago and now his clients have been part of sponsoring him too.
When his clients learn from him, they will be drawn by the amount of knowledge that he has imparted onto them. So in other words, his clients are already convinced he is a great driver and will not hesitate to invest to sponsor him for 2 reasons:
- He is now a friend as initial contact has been established
- He has proven he is a great driver which will signal great opportunity.
Use these 3 techniques that Sean Edwards has shared with you to bring your racing career to the next level by maintaining a high level of exposure for yourself and your racing career.
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