Sensing a missed opportunity in its own backyard, Richmond International Raceway has crafted a new sales strategy this year that will see the track reallocate its marketing spend closer to home.
RIR, one of 12 speedways owned by International Speedway Corp., lists Richmond as its biggest market for ticket sales and Washington, D.C., about 100 miles away, as its second biggest. But the track has focused more efforts on gaining market share in the D.C. region in recent years.
However, after conducting hundreds of calls with current customers following the 2016 season, and hearing why some fans had become lapsed customers, track executives realized they could benefit by refocusing efforts back to Virginia, where racing has a richer heritage than in more stick-and-ball-centric D.C.
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Richmond International Raceway has recently focused more sales efforts in the D.C. area.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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“These are folks who, in a matter of a 10-mile car ride or a 30-mile car ride, can get back to the track pretty easily,” said RIR President Dennis Bickmeier.
RIR has homed in on what it calls its golden triangle, with Fredericksburg being the northern tip, Lynchburg being the western point and Virginia Beach being the eastern point. “If you put a point on the map at Fredericksburg, and you take it over to Lynchburg and then over to Virginia Beach … Richmond sits almost in the center of that triangle,” Bickmeier said. “And we feel like from a strategy standpoint — from a lapsed-customer standpoint — if we can get some wins in that golden triangle, that’ll help get the turnaround that we want to see in moving tickets for our NASCAR races.”
Bickmeier said RIR is not abandoning its efforts in D.C. but will make inroads there more so through digital media and an elevated public relations campaign. RIR is working with two agencies, St. John & Partners and PCG SportsDesk Media, for its marketing and branding projects.
Sparking a turnaround is a key goal for RIR, which opened in 1946 and has been earmarked by ISC for renovations. While attendance figures per track are not released in NASCAR, ISC in its third-quarter 10-Q filing cited RIR’s decreased attendance and admissions last season as factors driving ISC’s admissions declines for the nine months ending Aug. 31. The track, which had a 33-race sellout streak from 1992 to 2008, now has about 59,000 grandstand seats following a number of reductions, and also has 40 suites.
Another part of RIR’s plan to spark a turnaround is a recently announced booking partnership with AEG Live, which has a wider deal with ISC. RIR executives have taken note of the budding cultural scene in Richmond, with its restaurants, craft breweries and music establishments, and want to leverage that to bring more concerts to the track’s 6,000-seat amphitheater, which has been around for 25 years but has been used sparingly of late. Bickmeier said RIR is eyeing six to eight shows annually for the venue.
