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Source: Q4 Sports Performance Basketball Shoes
On several occasions I’ve talked about the problem with performance basketball sales. I took a picture of a wall inside of a Finish Line yesterday and that post is coming, but the point of the post is the constant question of the chicken or the egg. Why are basketball sneakers straight to discount items today?
I’ve answered this question in a variety of ways since I shut down Center Court Basketball. In all of those answers and since 2004 I’ve never been approached by any basketball brand for a consultation. I guess I can’t make it sound so bad. I ran Sho-Shot and ARCH, my footwear companies from 2004-2016. This means that since 2017 I’ve never been approached by any brand that sells basketball gear for consulting. This makes sense as none of my work happened in Portland, Boston or Baltimore, so neither adidas, Nike, New Balance, Puma or Under Armour is aware that they can’t find a single person on their basketball marketing teams, grassroots or otherwise that has accomplished what I’ve done, even in businesses that closed.
I could reach out to them and cold call each division and explain what has to happen, but I run a very good third party sales hustle on StockX, so this isn’t about the money. This is about providing a blueprint that replaces what I was. I’m choosing Q4 as my case study because they are the smallest of the performance basketball companies which means there isn’t a budget to pay someone. Let’s get to this and any other company reading this, I hope you all realize what is really at the root of diminishing performance basketball sales… if not I’m here and I like flying and eating and talking, lol.
Currently Q4 has 1.19K subs on YouTube:
A quick look at their YouTube channel and it follows along the same line as other bigger brands. It’s driven by NBA and entertainment content. If adidas is placing Donovan Mitchell’s Don Issue 1 on sale and can barely garner shelf space and they are a 30 Billion dollar company, why would a million dollar company follow the same direction?
Currently Q4 has 1136 followers on Twitter:
One of the first posts on the account is of their signing of an international athlete. This is understandable. The international market is star driven and the game is in its infancy abroad. This means that it has the rabid fanbase of the Jordan era NBA where the League saw the most gross and success spreading around the globe. While this is good, in my first book I discussed “conquering your region”. That was over ten years ago and I still believe this, but I’ve adjusted it because the world is so much smaller as the internet has connected us more than ever.
Currently Q4 has 7K+ followers on Facebook:
Facebook is their second largest social following, but I’ve written countless posts on the problem of FB. You have to pay for engagement. As responsive as Q4 is on the platform with 7000 followers the average engagement on a post is around 30 interactions.
Currently Q4 has 43.9K followers on Instagram:
IG is the largest social following for the brand. IG is the same as FB and I’m sure you’re asking what does all of this mean? Why did I spend time writing about this? Most companies rely so heavily on social media for branding that they forgo the development of their websites.
This is the homepage of the Q4 website:
It’s basically a splash page with a small amount of scroll to the bottom. If I visit this site tomorrow, the same image will appear. Why would I visit this page a third day in a row? To find out how long it takes to convert a buyer a brand would have to look at the frequency of a visitor. I have an old data set from one of the largest e-commerce sites on the web where I ran a number of ads for my ARCH Footwear.
Number of ads: 38
Impressions: 708,791
Clicks: 1432
CTR: .20%
Total Spend: $51.36
Average CPC: .04 cents
Orders placed through the ads: 10
Product Sales: 245.00
Conversion Rate: .70%
This is on Amazon and not a personal website. People are on Amazon to purchase product and there are more customers there than anywhere in e-commerce. The conversion rate is still only .70% for an unknown brand. Now, imagine that Q4 had coaches as brand ambassadors in key cities across the U.S. Those coaches functioned as scouts and the Q4 site was a CMS with sidebars for advertising their products. The information from those scouts would arrive in the form of discussions on games of the week in every region. This gets me too far ahead and I discuss this a bit more at the end of this post. Let’s get back to some data.
Q4’s online marketing efforts consist of a variety of social media posts which should function as funnels:
Search Traffic to site: 47.07%
Social Traffic to site: 28.34%
Direct Traffic to site: 20.51%
Here is an interesting set of information for Q4, their best funnel from social is Facebook which is their second largest following. 90.14% of their traffic arrives from Facebook, the other 9.86% arrives via Reddit.
What Does All of This Mean?
The title of this post establishes that this is a case study. It’s unpaid and I’m writing this without any inside information on the company. I am simply doing a small amount of research to establish my thesis that Q4 would benefit from being a basketball recruitment website that is also a sneaker company. As I stated above, I’ve done what they are doing. They obviously have investors and some cash on hand, if not they are doing an incredible job. I don’t know the team there and I’ve never spoken to them.
On the Q4 site is a Team Sales page. The picture above links to that page. It is the smartest page on the site. The rest of the site however relies solely on product. The pictures are great, the layout is straightforward, but here I’m going to use a discussion point that I utilize when I’m lecturing at colleges:
If you aren’t Apple, Nike or Google, you have to give me a reason to visit your site on a daily basis.
I won’t post links to my book because I don’t need to sell anyone on anything here. Most companies make a product and then they bury it on a page that isn’t active. They utilize promo to drive engagement as opposed to living in the business they’ve created for. When I launched Sho-Shot and made my first basketball shoe I didn’t own it. It was a license. I placed over 30,000 dollars into making the kicks and importing it to the U.S. I wanted to work with an established brand. I was running a hoops website that was getting ridiculous traffic. The site helped send players to college. I was able to add coaches who loved my approach to getting under-recruited players into college. The college coaches loved the players I sent them. They appreciated the site so much, they bought uniforms. The high school coaches appreciated the work so much, they bought uniforms.
These were not free camps. Kids had to pay 50-100 dollars and they had to be invited by me or one of the coaches who helped me out. That money didn’t make me rich. I lost so much money driving around to different cities for games it was crazy. I was by myself primarily until I figured everything out. By the time I did figure it all out I was bankrupt and Sho-Shot was doing so well, the license holder rescinded the offer and sold the company. It was a success, but it wasn’t mine and I wasn’t owed anything.
When a kid paid for the camp, I followed them throughout the year. I had 50 kids each year. By default these 50 kids played on a different teams in the Tri State area. The first year I had to attend games to find players. I went to over 60 games during the season. Each game I broke down film and added to the site. This was before YouTube was a thing. Today companies have garnered multi-million dollar investments on the strength of high school highlights and they aren’t even doing it the right way. Which brings me back to Q4. Q4 should be the best basketball recruitment website in the country. If they don’t do it, someone else will read this long post and write and ask, why?
There is a reason Facebook is the site that moves more people into Q4s sales funnel. Facebook has aged up. IG is the home of youth culture along with TikTok. Youth culture will not buy Q4, they have too many options and they need to be cool and fit in. I understood this with Sho-Shot. Basketball, contrary to what every person thinks, is pushed forward by an older demographic, parents and fans of the NBA. The average age of NBA fans may be the youngest of all sports leagues, at 42, but that is also the age of those of us who grew up on the game. The new generation isn’t growing up on the game so a new brand has to develop their base.
Q4 has an amazing opportunity to be more than a sneaker company. They can carry the torch for under-recruited ball players in hoops and beyond. They can be what CCB was and it will work.
Visit the site to buy your baller a pair: https://q4sports.com/