Want to Cultivate the Next Generation of Racers? Check Your Phone.

Anyone running a motorsports event has at least some concern about getting new, young drivers to their events.

Making sure you reach them via their phone is critical. They live on those phones. They eat, sleep, study, date, socialize, schedule, travel, vacation, work, game and everything else on those phones. Anyone under the age of 30 was practically born with them… It’s their life.

So in order get to them, we all have to play in their sandbox – that is, we have to be on those phones. So here’s some practical tips to make sure you are doing what you can to encourage the next generation of racers.

1. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
You don’t need a native application, that is a mobile app that can be downloaded to your phone. Just make sure that your website is optimized to work as good as it can on a phone. If you don’t know how to do this, contacting a good web developer can really help. It may be a small investment, but well worth it. If your using a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, (such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal) you can probably change the theme to a newer one that is mobile-friendly very inexpensively.

2. Keep an eye on your stats.
Add Google Analytics to your website. It’s fairly easy, but again if you’re not comfortable with this stuff, find someone who can help you. Google analytics can help you see what your traffic is, where it is coming from, what they are doing when they get there, and in some cases, what makes them leave. One thing you’ll notice is that mobile traffic (that is visitors coming to your site via a mobile device) is rising at a faster rate year after year.

Here at Raceday, we hear continually from drivers who have ditched any internet or personal computers and are able to do anything via their phones, thus saving them more money to go racing.

3. Make sure your racers can interact with you via that phone!
If possible, give out a phone number that drivers can text to. They will do this much faster than they would call, and it will save you time as well if not so many people call. Some clubs will have a separate phone for the registration and rules people so that drivers can text any question in a heartbeat and get an answer just as fast.

4. Make sure they can buy from you on that phone.
Membership, registrations, swag, rule books, transponders, pit passes… all the things a racers may purchase from you should be easily available via that phone. It makes it so much easier for them and for you… and they will pick a facility that makes these tasks easy over one that has cumbersome, time-consuming, not-so-friendly process to take care of the administrative side of racing. Racers want to race. Not stand in lines and reading through paperwork.

5. Make life easier on your staff.
If any software they are using (like Raceday) is mobile-friendly, then it’s going to be friendly to those who use it the most – the people who physically setup and run your races. The easier it is on them, the better they can do their job, the happier they and your races are.

I know for a lot of people running race events, all this technology can be overwhelming… but it doesn’t have to be, and that is one of the reasons why we created Raceday.

Your next generation of racers are out there and would love to come play in the real world while driving something fun… we just have to reach them where they are.