Marketing and PR excellence: A-Star Sports Ltd

Today sees the A-Star Sports entry into the Guardian’s Small Business Showcase’s marketing and PR excellence category featured on the Guardian’s website:

A-Star Sports is a fun-filled multi-sports experience for children aged two to 10 years, delivering fundamental activities and 10 core sports through weekly classes, holiday clubs, parties and events.

As a new business, we needed an economical campaign with a clear strategy to raise awareness, build the brand and provide a platform from which to project credibility as a franchisor, as well as a multi-sports provider for children. Striving to achieve accreditation with the British Franchise Association played a huge part as the first step and in setting out to do things right, we then aimed for a balance of recognition strategies under the ‘on your marks, get set, go get noticed’ banner – most notably through awards, association and expertise and best practice.

In 18 months (from January 2012), this campaign brought us six national awards, including winning the Guardian Small Business Network’s Best Practice Exchange Starting Up category, a showcase on Granada Reports (ITV) on the opening night of the Olympics, more than 55 other media articles, which measured 18,000 plus words from over 25 publishers with a combined circulation of three million.

Our increased profile and the power of social media has also enabled us to join forces with additional specialist industry advisers, find like-minded partners such as the charity Support through Sport UK and write impactful articles for blogs like Sports Think Tank.

Best of all, we smashed our growth target – now with 15 operational territories – and became an inaugural member of the Accelerate 250, Lord Young’s chosen representatives of the UK’s fast-growth businesses.

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Winners will be announced in May 2014.

A-Star Sports’ and other entries can be seen on the Guardian website.