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Greetings once more - your favourite supplemental GAD fest is back again, taunting you with prizes you probably won't win like a carrot in front of a donkey. If you didn't love it, you wouldn't keep coming back.
Something a little different this time, in that this competition actually requires you to think a little rather than splatter your 'artistic' daubings on a banner :) What we'd like you to do is come up with some ways in which Special Reserve could promote themselves effectively. Bear in mind we haven't exactly got the backing of the Sultan of Brunei, we'd like you to drop us a few ideas on how best to get across the fact that Special Reserve are cheap, reliable and have a wide product range.
This could be improvements to ways we currently run things, new product ranges you think would appeal to our customers (bear in mind we currently sell rather a lot of stuff - see left sidestrip), new exciting ways to advertise our existing offers or just any ideas that have been floating round your head. Is there some range of products you just can't get hold of that would be perfect for us to sell? Let us know!
Post your ideas in this thread and we'll announce a winner at around the end of February, let's say the 27th. The best suggestions will win whatever prizes we give them, most probably yer standard £25/£50 GAD prize.
(And before anyone brings it up, yes we do think about this stuff ourselves, but we wanted to see what you lot think as well. So button it!)
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And the winner is..... phi11ip, for the following suggestion:
"Here's an idea, and if carried out correctly could be very beneficial. I've got a nice example too just to prove to you just how beneficial it is. www.staghosting.com was a free hosting service set up last year with the intention of boosting the ratings of a a few sites belonging to a company, one of these sites was www.actiondays.co.uk. Basically, unlike your free hosting, this hosting only offered hosting to domain names, you get 200MB disk space and 4 Gig bandwidth a month, you can upload from any connection unlike Freeola. So basically the company which has nothing to do with hosting has just set up a hosting site, sounds stupid doesn't it? What the requirements of this free hosting are though is that you must display a couple of small text links on your site, on mine you can see them on the links section on the side of the page. Google counts each link as a 'vote' and increases the pagerank of the site in question meaning that it shows up higher in searches, I see you've got 'cheap games' pretty much sorted but you don't show up anywhere when 'PS2 games' is typed in. If people were to display these text links on their sites it would soon make you appear high up on the search results. www.actiondays.co.uk was absolutely nowhere when it started, it had a low pagerank and didn't appear on searches. Have a look now though and you'll see that searching for 'corporate event' on Google.com returns the site as number 2 out of 6,500,000. Think about it. You've already got the hosting capabilities, all it would require is a server and someone to monitor the sites every now and then to make sure the links are there."
Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered.
Something a little different this time, in that this competition actually requires you to think a little rather than splatter your 'artistic' daubings on a banner :) What we'd like you to do is come up with some ways in which Special Reserve could promote themselves effectively. Bear in mind we haven't exactly got the backing of the Sultan of Brunei, we'd like you to drop us a few ideas on how best to get across the fact that Special Reserve are cheap, reliable and have a wide product range.
This could be improvements to ways we currently run things, new product ranges you think would appeal to our customers (bear in mind we currently sell rather a lot of stuff - see left sidestrip), new exciting ways to advertise our existing offers or just any ideas that have been floating round your head. Is there some range of products you just can't get hold of that would be perfect for us to sell? Let us know!
Post your ideas in this thread and we'll announce a winner at around the end of February, let's say the 27th. The best suggestions will win whatever prizes we give them, most probably yer standard £25/£50 GAD prize.
(And before anyone brings it up, yes we do think about this stuff ourselves, but we wanted to see what you lot think as well. So button it!)
---------------------------------------------------------
And the winner is..... phi11ip, for the following suggestion:
"Here's an idea, and if carried out correctly could be very beneficial. I've got a nice example too just to prove to you just how beneficial it is. www.staghosting.com was a free hosting service set up last year with the intention of boosting the ratings of a a few sites belonging to a company, one of these sites was www.actiondays.co.uk. Basically, unlike your free hosting, this hosting only offered hosting to domain names, you get 200MB disk space and 4 Gig bandwidth a month, you can upload from any connection unlike Freeola. So basically the company which has nothing to do with hosting has just set up a hosting site, sounds stupid doesn't it? What the requirements of this free hosting are though is that you must display a couple of small text links on your site, on mine you can see them on the links section on the side of the page. Google counts each link as a 'vote' and increases the pagerank of the site in question meaning that it shows up higher in searches, I see you've got 'cheap games' pretty much sorted but you don't show up anywhere when 'PS2 games' is typed in. If people were to display these text links on their sites it would soon make you appear high up on the search results. www.actiondays.co.uk was absolutely nowhere when it started, it had a low pagerank and didn't appear on searches. Have a look now though and you'll see that searching for 'corporate event' on Google.com returns the site as number 2 out of 6,500,000. Think about it. You've already got the hosting capabilities, all it would require is a server and someone to monitor the sites every now and then to make sure the links are there."
Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered.
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Also, why not do something nice for the community, and plaster your name all over it.
Probably somewhere near a store, you could set up a rounders league, or even just a rounders club.
Nice semi-competetive sport that's fun in the summer and doesn't take too much effort (did anyone ever break a sweat playing rounders?), doesn't need much equipment, and if people aren't gaming so much in the summer, you may as well expand into stuff they are doing :^)
Or you could set up a 5-a-side league, with divisions for ability / effort.
Might cost a little more if you needed refs / insurance / a venue (more than a big empty field for rounders), but you could charge teams a little bit to cover that.
Doing something nice and getting blatant free advertising - everyone wins :^)
Probably somewhere near a store, you could set up a rounders league, or even just a rounders club.
Nice semi-competetive sport that's fun in the summer and doesn't take too much effort (did anyone ever break a sweat playing rounders?), doesn't need much equipment, and if people aren't gaming so much in the summer, you may as well expand into stuff they are doing :^)
Or you could set up a 5-a-side league, with divisions for ability / effort.
Might cost a little more if you needed refs / insurance / a venue (more than a big empty field for rounders), but you could charge teams a little bit to cover that.
Doing something nice and getting blatant free advertising - everyone wins :^)
Have a membership referral system to boost member numbers.
When a member introduces a non-member to the club, the member gets a free gift too.
As I see it, the biggest challenge for a company like you is getting people to join up (the next biggest being keeping them).
This gets new people to join. Which is good.
Prices - there used to be loads of cheap places to buy games on the net, but now they're all jacking their prices up.
If the site offered all its games for under £30 that would be fantastic, you'd get tonnes of customers, everybody would come straight here and hardly bother checking the competition for most games.
If you didn't want to do it for this site, you could set up another subsidiary company, selling only the games which you want to offer for under £30. You've got 999gifts.com , so why not 2999games.com ?
Membership and free gifts:
As a first-time buyer, I imagine the buying process isn't all that clear.
That has to be a bad thing, putting barriers between your customers and the sale.
Think about it, you're a new customer, you add something to your cart, go to check out and see you have to be a member. Then you're asking for them to spend even more money up front, and go through more complicated steps to complete the order. More hassle, more money.
The remedy?
Fist, have a link on every page, somewhere in the blue bar, maybe an image below the sr logo, reading 'new buyers - click here' or something.
That takes them to a page *clearly* explaining the membership (and free gifts) thing.
(I'd consider not mentioning the reddies until later - I joined a cd-buying club which let you buy one cut-price cd for every full price one, but only told you about that after you joined. This made the joining process clearer and more simple, but most importantly when you did find out about the offer, it was like something extra, something not asked for or promised, but they were giving it to you anyway. It felt good, like they were going one step above expectaions. I was very impressed)
Also, I suggest offering members' and non-members' (slightly higher) prices online.
Something like the inc. and exc. vat prices you have now (do you need to show no vat? If not you could replace it). You'd need to explain the two alternatives on the 'new buyers' page of course.
I know membership is a good way to keep customers with the company, but allowing people who don't want to be members to buy stuff will bring more customers, and so long as you offer a good service and low prices, they will come back anyway.
And probably then become members later.
Other stuff:
The jam-packed blue side bar looks a bit daunting. You could tidy it up a bit by having either drop-down menus or more generalised links - eg) 'PC Stuff' - then if you were in a pc page you could then include all the subdivisions like cases, peripherals and stuff.
You could do the same with 'domains and web hosting', 'customer help', 'corporate' and 'site maps'.
And maybe roll bb guns, gadgets and rc toys into 'gadgets', phones and ringtones into 'phones and ringtones' (genius!) and dvds and dvd players into 'dvd'.
Obviously you could do the same with games, but since it's the main line I don't think there'd be any point.
When a member introduces a non-member to the club, the member gets a free gift too.
As I see it, the biggest challenge for a company like you is getting people to join up (the next biggest being keeping them).
This gets new people to join. Which is good.
Prices - there used to be loads of cheap places to buy games on the net, but now they're all jacking their prices up.
If the site offered all its games for under £30 that would be fantastic, you'd get tonnes of customers, everybody would come straight here and hardly bother checking the competition for most games.
If you didn't want to do it for this site, you could set up another subsidiary company, selling only the games which you want to offer for under £30. You've got 999gifts.com , so why not 2999games.com ?
Membership and free gifts:
As a first-time buyer, I imagine the buying process isn't all that clear.
That has to be a bad thing, putting barriers between your customers and the sale.
Think about it, you're a new customer, you add something to your cart, go to check out and see you have to be a member. Then you're asking for them to spend even more money up front, and go through more complicated steps to complete the order. More hassle, more money.
The remedy?
Fist, have a link on every page, somewhere in the blue bar, maybe an image below the sr logo, reading 'new buyers - click here' or something.
That takes them to a page *clearly* explaining the membership (and free gifts) thing.
(I'd consider not mentioning the reddies until later - I joined a cd-buying club which let you buy one cut-price cd for every full price one, but only told you about that after you joined. This made the joining process clearer and more simple, but most importantly when you did find out about the offer, it was like something extra, something not asked for or promised, but they were giving it to you anyway. It felt good, like they were going one step above expectaions. I was very impressed)
Also, I suggest offering members' and non-members' (slightly higher) prices online.
Something like the inc. and exc. vat prices you have now (do you need to show no vat? If not you could replace it). You'd need to explain the two alternatives on the 'new buyers' page of course.
I know membership is a good way to keep customers with the company, but allowing people who don't want to be members to buy stuff will bring more customers, and so long as you offer a good service and low prices, they will come back anyway.
And probably then become members later.
Other stuff:
The jam-packed blue side bar looks a bit daunting. You could tidy it up a bit by having either drop-down menus or more generalised links - eg) 'PC Stuff' - then if you were in a pc page you could then include all the subdivisions like cases, peripherals and stuff.
You could do the same with 'domains and web hosting', 'customer help', 'corporate' and 'site maps'.
And maybe roll bb guns, gadgets and rc toys into 'gadgets', phones and ringtones into 'phones and ringtones' (genius!) and dvds and dvd players into 'dvd'.
Obviously you could do the same with games, but since it's the main line I don't think there'd be any point.
maybe if you actually had free games that people could send and we could play and you could give a GAMEADAY to the person who sends the best game every day!!!!1
another part of your site selling and buying games and the more they sell or buy the more store points they will get and as soon as they get a certain number of points thewy get agame or gadget of their choose worth between £20 and £75
make another part of your website for members and non members to sell and buy games/gadets/consoles and even discounted games just out all year around.
you could develop a magazine or post a page in a top games magazine
64 - 69
PS2 is still more popular.
Stupid PS2.
PS2 is still more popular.
Stupid PS2.
Set up a new part of the website to have people sell the games they no longer want on your site and you are given a total price on how much they would get. Then if they agree then they choose what they can get for the games the sold and any money left over will be on a reciept giving them some store credit.
The best way to promote yourself is to have downloadable demos and game clips. By doing this, people will download the game demo or clip see for themselves how good it is and then they will most likely by it. (note: most people would rather play a demo or watch a clip then to read long reviews.
A wise person wrote:
> An Excellent Idea:
>
> Men with sandwich boards.
>
> Put them in the towns in which SR have shops, or maybe other bigger
> towns and cities. It's a publicity thing. Loads of publicity, that's
> the key. And remember: there's no such thing as bad publicity.
>
> Set your testicles on fire, I dunno. Do something mental.
> An Excellent Idea:
>
> Men with sandwich boards.
>
> Put them in the towns in which SR have shops, or maybe other bigger
> towns and cities. It's a publicity thing. Loads of publicity, that's
> the key. And remember: there's no such thing as bad publicity.
>
> Set your testicles on fire, I dunno. Do something mental.
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