Marketing to businesses (continued from my future post)

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Lol, thanks man. Thanks for the N-Able tips and info by the way. I'm starting to grasp this monster finally. I can feel it's power under the hood but it has a much bigger learning curve than Continuum did. We will need them to accept our counter offer to come aboard I think which if they agree to then we'll sign on the dotted line right away. I just have to feel comfortable rolling this bad boy out at clients without it blowing up or backfiring on us. That is the one positive thing I can say about Continuum, fairly easy on the initial setup and super easy to deploy and understand after that. I'm just getting addicted to the extra power and tools that N-Able has.

I hear you on the N-Able front, I'm still trying to wrap my head around everything as well. I have a meeting coming up with them for best practices next week. I've been working with it, but I have to be doing somethings the long/hard way. It will just take some time to get everything figured out and configured correctly, then to soak in all the information.

 

[fencepost]

stock a range of items all the way upto razer and madcatz peripherals

Something that occurred to me - do you have an online store linked to your inventory? Even if your prices are bad by online standards, if you can get listed as a physical location with stock in Google Shopping it might actually be worthwhile depending on what else is around.

Not sure if it'd be worth the hassles, but it occurred to me while out and I wanted to brain dump it in case other folks have looked into the question.

 

[ChipsPC]

Something that occurred to me - do you have an online store linked to your inventory? Even if your prices are bad by online standards, if you can get listed as a physical location with stock in Google Shopping it might actually be worthwhile depending on what else is around.

Not sure if it'd be worth the hassles, but it occurred to me while out and I wanted to brain dump it in case other folks have looked into the question.

We have tried selling online before and to be honest there is no way you are going to beat prices on amazon and so on cost us more to run then we made. We like to spend our time with the customer instore to make sure the buy the right thing rather then shipping a box and making nothing on it

 

[fencepost]

Right, I wasn't talking about actually making sales online - I was thinking that Google Shopping shows an option for "Also available nearby," Depending on your area (how long does delivery take, what other stores are within 20-50 miles, etc.) and what sorts of things you stock, it might be possible to be the "desperation destination" for some items that might be things you keep on hand anyway like power supplies.

Looking into it, it seems like Google Shopping is actually part of their advertising system, there's a link to Information for Merchants at the bottom of the page. I have no idea whether it'd be worth the time, expense, or time expense to actually get involved in this and the more I think about it the more I think "probably not at your size unless there's nothing else around."

One other thing that jumped out at me since I think you said you were looking for a bigger shop - are LAN parties still a thing or did they pretty much disappear once people got better Internet connections? If they are still a thing, having a space where you can host them might bring in people inclined towards impulse buys of gaming mice, keyboards, cases, etc.

 

[Matthew Bradley]

This is a great thread. I love the pics. I opened up my shop 8 years ago - by myself; A one man operation. This was after one year of doing things out of my basement. It was incredibly difficult and rewarding all the same. I'm a type A personality - more of a neat freak, so my shop was very basic. I didn't want to keep a lot of random items because it made the place look too busy. I'd keep things like RAM, fans, adapters, etc. in the back because I thought they littered the show floor (and less theft). The last two years we've seen residential support drop by more than 50% and have a staff of 4 people but we've never been happier. We now cater more toward businesses and hardware sales but it's such a small town, literally everyone knows us and about 15% of our revenue still comes from residential support. It's basically a wash, where this 15% covers our operating expenses and salary for our office manager so I can't really kill it off - yet. Marketing has always been extremely difficult for us, however. I can probably go through thousands of dollars spent on various campaigns with basically a zero ROI. It sucks. Revenue grows at a steady rate however I'd like to see a big jump in 2016 (as we all would I'm sure). Last night we went to an annual chamber dinner with all the who's who in business. Had to sell a kidney to get into the thing - very high class and well organized. However, zero leads. We ended up talking to a half dozen clients we already do business with. It was frustrating. Anyway - I've ranted long enough and have probably gone way off topic here but the bottom line is any successful marketing story I'd love hear.