Advertising rally company

If you had a rally based company, where would be best places to advertise?
Event sponsorship/spectator guides
Grassroots Motorsports
Rally America series partnership
Race Central TV
Subiesport TV
???

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Grant Hughes

How "rally based"? Like, do you offer services or products for street vehicles, or other motorsports? Or are you asking how to specifically market whatever to the rally community?

Tim.

Rally enthusiasts and general motorsport enthusiasts.
Not exactly rally specific.

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Grant Hughes

I think online forums that cater to my target audience would be a place to start.

I'd also look to a local event to help sponsor. I know 100AW has some interest this year from a start up company.

I'd give serious consideration about how do I show my product being used on a Youtube channel also. Add Facebook and Twitter to that list also.

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It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
William Ralph Inge

TANSTAAFL

I wasn't going to throw any specifics out there since I don't consider myself a typical consumer and maybe not in your customer demographic but since this thread is slow going, why not.

Something important to me in the automotive/racing space is a company (or person) who is involved in the community. Someone helping people out on forums (because that is where I do my bench racing) as well as actually participating in the activity.

For the same part, I'll buy from the guy who races over the guy down the street selling the exact same thing who has never raced before. And I'll pay more for it. This is a hobby, so the people aspect is an important part of it. Without the group of racers wanting to race together, there is no racing. So you support eachother.

Involvment also means you build a personal reputation. People know you, if they like you, that props you way up. If everyone is mad at you, see you later. Having that reputation to maintain in the community means you don't screw people over.

At the same time, being involved allows you to showcase your products or services without it being an advertisement. Your product is out there, people are talking about it, the evidence of its quality is out there. It sells itself. Just because a company says their product is good, doesn't mean it's good. Let's see it.

I wonder if John spends anything on advertising his suspension and other services. Other than an occasional "Hey the top X winners at some event were on JVAB suspenders" which is more of an actual result than a blantant ad like "My stuff rocks, buy it!". It's as close to an ad for his suspension that I've seen. But I know it's out there, and I know what it is capable of.

Tim.

Social media. Get a FB page for the business . like it, and spread the word on what your playing with at the shop. Seems to direct people way better then a web sight. NSR is posting up driving technique articals and actually are a pretty good read.

I never would of thought FB would be in my answer a year ago but it is ganging ground. How long it will last I dont know but its free.

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First rally 2013
Rally car type AWD subaru
Total rallies as driver 6
Total rally cars built 2
Total rally cars caged 3
Total rally cars repaired from offs 4
Total years racing exp other then rally 19 yrs
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Actually they've started charging I think.

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Grant Hughes

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NoCoast
Actually they've started charging I think.

I believe that's only to "promote" a post. You can still make a post and it'll still go out, but not to everyone who's signed up to like the page. Of course if someone comes to your page, the info will be there, but this recent change does cut down on the initial distribution...just means you have to post 10x more stuff!

Dave

You are in a niche business (realistically).

Therefore, you aren't after randoms IMO. You are after someone that is searching for what you offer, not just stumble upon it. I think GRM is a legitimate way to go for a couple of reasons, one of them being "supposedly" their rates are pretty dang cheap for print media, and 2nd of all, a very high percentage of the people that read it already race, and therefore, are looking for your product/service you offer.

More motorsports orientated websites probably wouldn't hurt to be a forum sponsor. You do Subie stuff, and it seems like Subie people are the rich version of Honduh guys. NASIOC has businesses that appear to have a single person dedicated to doing just NASIOC online stuff.

Nowadays, I literally buy everything based on forum reviews, preferably from a seller that advertises on that forum.

Can you elaborate a little more on what the business will do?

Advertising a product you build and can ship worldwide would be different than a service people come to you for.

The business plan is long.
We build rally cars. We build custom parts for rally cars. We are going to retail some of the additional equipment needed.
We are going to organize a championship series and host events.
The last part of the plan is a little more difficult. I've got my eye on a nice 320 acre property for $350k.
One big do everything rally company. Yeah, a little ambitious perhaps. The $350k property means we need outside funding which means a good business plan which is what I have been working on developing and writing. The marketing plan is mostly local but figured an ad in Grassroots and maybe a little forum support might add diversity.

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Grant Hughes

Quote
NoCoast
The business plan is long.

At the "rally based company" I work, we advertise in Grassroots and the Oregon region SCCA Magazine. Grassroots is a good deal for us but I don't think we get much business from this outlet, The local SCCA magazine brings us quite a few last minute Hans and safety gear sales.

Officially we avoid getting involved in internet forums because of how volatile these environments are, especially if you aren't already one of the "upper-classman". In our experience being a satisfaction guaranteed company(If you have any issue's with one of our products you bought from us, or even second hand in some cases, we will make it right) your customers will go to bat for you and that kind of support is more than worth taking a loss on deals that don't go perfectly. The best marketing/advertising for us is word of mouth, doesn't look like much on a business plan though.

The other thing that works well for us is having good placement on Google for searches on our key products, there are services for this but we don't seem to need them.

I put "rally related company" in quotes because 90% of our customers don't ever stage rally, which is a good thing because "people who stage rally" is an extremely narrow market, especially when you consider how many of us are DIY types. We rely on the steady stream of "back road" customers to keep the lights on so we can keep the lights on so we can afford to do fun projects.

This next season I want to explore buying ad space In the Rally-America rule book and or website, sponsoring local events and possibly some kind of contingency program.

Thanks Blake! I totally forgot about the SCCA's regional pubs and SportsCar!

A friend and I looked pretty seriously at opening a rally based retail company back in 2004 or so. It was pretty easy math. I said, I figure I need to make at least $3000 a month to live off of. If we have $2-3k in overhead and make 25-30% margins that means $20k in sales per month. If you really work hard, make a ton of connections and friends and have some money to lose I figure you could get there in three years. Of course, this is working alone/solo and after three years you'd be tired of working your ass off everyday by yourself for little wage and quite a few headaches. I decided instead to be a distributor and just sell stuff on the side to the small local rally community and not have any overhead nor quit my day job.
Ironically, about 6 months later Mitch decided to open Checkpoint and I gave him the distributorship deal I had. A few years later he'd done pretty well at building the business but closed shop nonetheless.

The lesson was that if you want to work with your friends it's got to be bigger than retail. I saw Mitch's customer base and a large number of them I wouldn't even want knowing where my shop was for fear of theft or they are such bitches that I wouldn't find them worth the money. I quoted a guy five figures for a roll cage last week...

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Grant Hughes