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I think it would be a good idea to advertise off campus as well. We could talk to somewhat local gaming stores such as Gamestop to see if they would put a flyer or two. We could aslo talk to local LAN centers in Asheville and see if they would be willing to put up a couple of flyers. I think this would increase attendence to the LANs pretty well.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
I’ve said this for years and it’s still a great idea.
At one point Gamestop was an official sponsor. Idk why or how we lost them.
Well lets get this actually rolling then, lets compile a list of Gaming related stores in the area and see what we can do.
I’ve been preaching this for years, including getting the community college and the high school involved. I’ve gone and talked to the owners at The Nexus a few times and they aren’t very reliable, it seems they are too focused on staying in their own setting rather than trying to advertise more and get more people to come to their stores. Daniel apparently got Gamestop to donate a decent amount of stuff for prizes this past LAN and if we can continue working with them and possibly get an official sponsorship or even advertising from Gamestop then that would be great. There are so many ways and venues for advertising the club and the LANs but they require A LOT of work to actually get going.
Daniel did not have a TON of time to get things organized and advertising to go out properly in time, along with sponsors, but with the amount of time we have now we can get a ton of advertising in place and hopefully things completely populated. The problem is that we NEED people to take the initiative on things and to put the work in to get people to come.
Some things that could have been a bit better for advertising and to do next time:
1. Banner placement on the front of the UC. Whenever something is hanging off of the UC, people notice, whether directly or indirectly.
2. Servers need to have advertisements for the LAN running 24/7, pretty much.
3. The website needs it advertised on the front page weeks, if not a month or so, in advance.
4. Signups need to be set up and in place before hand as well.
5. Sponsors need to be contacted and they should be continuously contacted to check on the status, then their banners/etc should be added to the website and fliers.
6. Flier design needs to be 100% completed in the next month or so, with the final design being sent to the print shop for our quota of high quality fliers to be printed off. If there isn’t enough, use some of the money in the gaming club account and get more made.
7. Ask Gamestop if we can advertise for them on our website and then have the local store advertise for us. Don’t ask the cronies at the front desk, ask for the manager himself and explain things to him. Explain how we’ll work for him if he will just put up a couple of fliers and MAYBE tell people once in a while.
8. Maybe we can even ask Best buy as well while we’re there?
9. CRAIGSLIST! I don’t know how many of you actually use Craigslist or not to buy used games, etc. but Craigslist is an AMAZING advertising tool. When I was looking for Rock Band 2 for my PS3 back in Wilmington I saw a place in Myrtle Beach (45min south of me) advertising for their Call of Duty tournaments. Why couldn’t we do this for our LANs? Takes 5 min to make a Gaming Club account on Craigslist and another 5 min to make a couple of advertisements, especially if you just use the image for the filer as the advertisement.
10. The tables in the UC were great, saw a lot of people playing games and I hope it brought a few more people in. If we get games such as Halo on there I think it will attract a lot of people as well. Maybe we can have a laptop playing a VoD youtube of a SC2 match or something as well?
11. Freshman advertisement seemed good, we had nothing to track to see whether they were a freshman or a senior, etc. but I saw a decent amount of fresh faces so that is all is well. I didn’t see Dustin there (I don’t think?), so was there a reason as to why Dustin and a lot of the other freshman that were supposed to come with him didn’t show up? I think we could advertise once or twice more in the dorms for the freshman or even at places such as Harrill and the new dorms, but we should really be focusing on getting some appealing things that will draw people to the LANs, such as prizes/sponsors/etc.
There are A LOT of ways to advertise for our LANs and bring in tons of people, including highlighting certain popular games that are very attractive to gamers of all kinds (Halo: Reach, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Smash Bro’s, Tekken 5, etc.) The stuff they play at MLG, including maybe even CS/TF2/L4D2 on there, is a key thing that will draw people in. Games like BlazBlue, MeltyBlood, Guilty Gear, etc are all games that are amazing to play but appeal to niche gamers, which are great, just we need to appeal to the masses.
Lets get some of these ideas working, instead of just ideas.
Also Waffle, love your Tshirts, they look amazing.
I would be happy to go with someone or email these places. Only problem is I lack transportation lol. Did the club ever decide on an official flyer yet or is that still up in the air as well.
I agree with Phamous, Flakes for marketing director!
I remember when I was up there near Asheville around october, stopping into a mall on the way to the airport. I forgot the name, but it’s probably about 10 miles from it, anyway there was an arcade in there right across from the Gamestop. It seemed to have a decent amount of traffic going in and out. The manager seemed kind of nice, has anyone tried talking to him?
Phonetically Phamous (dice said:
flakes for marketing director
Not a chance, I’m finally graduating this semester
lol.As far as places such as Gamestop, The Nexus, and even Best Buy approach them as if we’re customers. If they advertise for us tell them we’ll buy from them. I don’t know how much money the gaming club currently has in its’ possession but if we tell Gamestop, Best Buy, or The Nexus (maybe all 3?) that we’ll be buying $100 worth of Gift Cards, merchandise, or other things from each of them at least twice a semester then they are able to look at us as a profit rather than a loss, all they would have to do is generate traffic for us. If they generate traffic for us that means we are able to generate more interest to WCU and to future sponsors. The more people we can get to attend the events makes it more and more appealing to larger sponsors and especially to the school, which gives us even more leniency.
Advertising at the arcade(s) in Asheville is a decent idea but Asheville is about a 45 minute drive from WCU, and while it would be awesome, I don’t see it plausible that we could get some people to take at least 2 hours out of their week to travel to Asheville, find arcades, and then try to negotiate with them when they’re decently far away. That’s why I recommended Craigslist, no travel time or expense time and it will reach out to Asheville and possibly further.
Do we have official fliers made yet? The last time I checked the forums I saw people were still designing them. Lets get this stuff in the works for the next LAN and start this sooner rather than later.
I deffinitly agree, if we treat Best Buy and the other gaming stores as customers they will be more likely to advertise for us. I know Azkuzan went to a LAN center in Asheville last weekend for a Halo: Reach tourney and we can talk to them as well. Lets start a list of stores that are likely candidates.
With the LAN centers it will be difficult for us to have them advertise for us. They want people to come to their store to pay and play games, not send people to ours. If the events don’t coincide with one another and we’re able to have both parties working with one another it would be exceptionally beneficial. Places such as The Nexus (since it is in Sylva) is a prime store but if they are not willing to cooperate with us to generate business for themselves then there is nothing we can do. If we are able to send people to their centers for popular tournaments (Halo, Call of Duty, etc) then maybe they can do the same for us, as long as they aren’t on the same days.
The only Gamestop we really need to be trying to work with is the one in Waynesville, if you try working with all of the ones in Waynesville and Asheville, we may be getting too far ahead of ourselves since all 4 would want us to purchase items from their stores. A way around this is to contact the District Manager for Western part of NC for Gamestop, if there is one. I believe most Gamestops are owned and operated locally at each store, but are “controlled” by the HQ of Gamestop, so if you are wanting all of them to work with us then we may have to go higher up, in which point it may be too much of them to ask since we cannot provide all 4 stores with sales.
True, I think we should consider at least one store in Asheville, lets say the one in the mall. I think would have the most population of gamers going in and out and would be a great place for our flyer to be seen.
Like you said in your previous post, we could see if we could work with the High School and community college to see if they will let us advertise somehow. We could also see about UNC-A considering its not too far away from us.
As for the LAN centers, I agree. If we both announce the tourneys I think they will cooperate.
LAN centers are a unique opportunity because few, in any, college students know they exist. They’d love for us to advertise for them as much as we’d like them to advertise for us, your goal is to open up this possibility.
One thing I can think of offering the LAN centers guaranteed advertising is if we announced their tournaments on the website in some manner. For example either on the main page or creating an new tab specifically for tournament sections etc…
Thoughts? Ideas?
Im trying to contact these LAN centers and think this would be something enticing to them.
a waffle said:
One thing I can think of offering the LAN centers guaranteed advertising is if we announced their tournaments on the website in some manner. For example either on the main page or creating an new tab specifically for tournament sections etc…
Thoughts? Ideas?
Im trying to contact these LAN centers and think this would be something enticing to them.
Love it, love the ideas.
a waffle said:
One thing I can think of offering the LAN centers guaranteed advertising is if we announced their tournaments on the website in some manner. For example either on the main page or creating an new tab specifically for tournament sections etc…
We have a sponsors tab on the main page…
Would the sponsors tab be enough? I mean when I check out the sponsors tab it isn’t quite what I had in mind, unless we update it every time they have tourneys and make an announcement of it on the main page. What we could do is announce it on the front page and make a post of it in the forums as well. That way yes they are in our sponsors page but we would still be advertising for them on the main page and forums.
Who has access to these sorts of things? I need to run it by them to make sure it is okay before I mention this to the LAN centers.
a waffle said:
Would the sponsors tab be enough? I mean when I check out the sponsors tab it isn’t quite what I had in mind, unless we update it every time they have tourneys and make an announcement of it on the main page. What we could do is announce it on the front page and make a post of it in the forums as well. That way yes they are in our sponsors page but we would still be advertising for them on the main page and forums.
Who has access to these sorts of things? I need to run it by them to make sure it is okay before I mention this to the LAN centers.
The only other thing I could think of would be to display certain sponsors within the forums… personally I think it would be annoying for me, but if it could be used to get more sponsors then I’m all for it.
Seems like to me you could use web stats from this site to get more sponsors. Tell them how many hits (don’t have to tell them it’s the same people lol) every day.
Sponsor adverts cycle on the main page. Also, any exec can create an announcement on the main page that X has sponsored our events.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to get into permanently placed ads on the homepage. No one does that anymore.
Im not talking about permanently placed ads on the home page, i’m more referring to the the Latest news section where we announce our own LANs and such and possibly announce it the forums as well for extra exposure.
a waffle said:
Im not talking about permanently placed ads on the home page, i’m more referring to the the Latest news section where we announce our own LANs and such and possibly announce it the forums as well for extra exposure.
I’m not sure how the latest news section works.. whether it reads from a private forum I can’t see or if it was hard coded in to accept another interface… but if it does come from the forums then maybe we could just make that section visible without letting people post in it. That way you wouldn’t have to post things twice..
Now that could be a lot of work depending on how the news section is setup. I don’t know if you really want to do that.
What I was thinking of is a Tournaments section for our tournaments as well as theirs, that way we can advertise for them as well on there and on the sponsors page.
a waffle said:
Im not talking about permanently placed ads on the home page, i’m more referring to the the Latest news section where we announce our own LANs and such and possibly announce it the forums as well for extra exposure.
That’s what I was talking about. Any exec can add something to the news section of the homepage by posting in a certain section of the forums.
That section isn’t hidden, idk where you guys got that idea.
I didn’t know, so I was just making sure before I told the LAN centers something that the club or the executives would did not want to do.
I also like Flakes idea as well
Well I can’t speak for the execs but I can’t imagine saying no to a sponsor over something like homepage advertising.
Short of sexual favors, we should do anything possible to get and keep sponsors. If the sponsors want sexual congress with someone, Derrick/Raven is more than happy to trek down and take one for the team
Well I will start contacting them then, lemme know if anyone knows of places I haven’t already mentioned in the thread.
I got in contact with GameXcape in Asheville and they said they would be happy to post our fliers in his store. Ill post when upcoming tourneys are for GameXcape in the forums since I do not have access to manage the webpage.
Has anyone else contacted anyone or is this my job lol
a waffle said:
Has anyone else contacted anyone or is this my job lol
Sponsors are supposed to be the execs’ job but uh… yeah.
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