Let People Know You’re Opening

Marketing includes more than just advertising. It includes everything you do strategically and tactically to gain and retain customers. That includes setting your pricing policies, how you’ll brand your company to create an impression in the customer’s mind, which products you’ll carry, which customers you’ll seek to reach with your greatest effort, etc.

You must make some decisions early in your planning, because what you plan to do and how you plan to implement it affects your business planning. Ideally, you’ve already made these major decisions:

Pricing

Adopt your pricing strategy before you open. Your pricing strategy affects your cost of goods, so you’ll need to consider this part of marketing before you run your financials. If you choose to discount all of your products 20% off retail, your gross profit margin will run about 25% instead of the healthier 40% or more you’ll attain with SRP pricing. If you choose to charge SRP for most items and a premium rate for certain items, you might attain a gross profit margin of 50%.

You don’t have to set the prices for every item you’ll carry this early in the planning. You do need to have some idea of your pricing strategy—discount, suggested retail price, premium pricing, a combination, or some other concept. You can do the fine-tuning when you install your point-of-sale system or start tagging things with a price gun.

Branding

Do you want to reach the hardcore multi-genre gamers, the family market, female gamers, card-playing teens and pre-teens, or what? Who you plan to reach helps determine how your store presentation and policies help you reach your customers. If you want to reach teenagers, for example, you’ll want to hire a younger staff, use contemporary teen language in your print ads, and plan your events around school hours and social activities. All of these choices help determine your brand.

It’s not an overstatement to say that all of your major business decisions flow from your branding choice—which itself is a marketing decision.

Product Selection

Do you want to establish a reputation for having everything, all the time? It’ll cost you a heavy inventory. Maybe you’re content just to have the best RPG section or the best CCG selection in your area. Choosing product categories was part of initial planning, but you also have to consider how deeply you’ll carry that category and what part it plays in the big scheme. A store that offers 10 board games presents an entirely different impression than one that offers 200 board games. Which one best fits your company’s needs?

Advertising

How will you set your advertising budget? Will it be a flat fee or a percentage of sales? Will it vary by season or month? Will you experiment with a variety of media or concentrate on one channel? How will you measure your advertising success? How will you create urgency in your advertising so that customers respond to it in a reasonable amount of time? Which customer sub-section, if any, will you concentrate on?

Add More Detail

As you approach the opening deadline, make some detail decisions on the broader decisions you’ve already reached. Having made the broad decisions will help you fine-tune these decisions as you approach opening day.

Some Specific Decisions

Design your uniforms or establish a dress code policy.
Decide how you and your employees will answer the phone, respond to common questions, and greet customers at the door.
Where will you display price tags so that customers can price items on the sales floor?
What products, if any, will you support with events? What events will you run? How often?
Will you have a website? If so, what type of impression will your graphic design choice create? How interactive will it be? Will you have your own domain name or just create a MySpace page?
How will you compete locally? Will you bill yourself as having the largest game room, the best prices, the most convenient location, the best staff, or something else entirely? What will you do to make sure your store is the best shopping choice for the customers you’ve chosen to target?
Choose your store’s graphic design, including a paint color or scheme, an overall theme, and lighting.
Design a logo or commission a design from a professional.

Separate articles will address the previous concepts in greater detail. For right now, this representative list is designed to encourage you to plan ahead on the details. You should be able to devise a much more comprehensive list on your own.

Countdown Marketing Suggestions

Your options before you open are limited by your lack of a storefront. It’s difficult to make a television ad if you don’t have a place to showcase in the ad. On the plus side, your alternative options are usually low in cost.

Maintain a Blog

If you’re in a market hungry for a new game store (and if you’re not, you shouldn’t be opening), potential customers will watch this blog closely after they encounter it. Keep readers informed about changes to your opening date, share your horrible contractor stories, and get them excited about how awesome the place is going to be.

Manufacturer Message Boards

Most game manufacturers offer message boards for the discussion of their products. Brief, informative and non-spammy messages in an appropriate place on a message board are fine. Substantive, interactive discussion with forum users is better.

Local Conventions

Whether you run a “teaser table”, run games, or just take out an ad, visibility at conventions will create awareness about your store. Local conventions cater to the leadership among your potential customer base. Get their interest, and others will follow.

Other Game Stores

If they’re willing to help you get started, you might run demo games at their stores. It’s a good deal for both of you. You encourage sales in their store, get some sales practice, and meet some potential customers. Talk to the game store owner and do this with his permission and under his guidelines. Don’t be the jerk who comes into a store on the sly to steal customers. The further away you plan to open, the more likely other stores are to help.
You might have a better relationship with stores with overlapping business rather than direct competitors: a comic book store, a bookstore, or a LAN center. Any of these businesses might see a referral to you as a service to their customers. You’ll have more bartering power if you offer the same favor in return.

Signs

A sign in front of the location can attract interest while your build-out is underway. You might buy a freestanding sign, a magnetic sign for your car, or install your shopping center sign ahead of time. A normal billboard might be prohibitively expensive, but a daily billboard might be affordable for a week or two immediately prior to opening.

Radio Ads

Normally, I advise against radio ads for most store purposes because of their high cost. Sometimes cost-effectiveness isn’t your main focus. Your opening might be one of those times. A carefully-plotted radio ad program shortly before you open could increase your early sales, jump-starting your cash flow and improving your chances of long-term success.
Establishing a relationship with the radio station might also give you a better rate on the remote you might want to do for your grand opening. You might even get time in the studio to promote your grand opening on the air.

T-shirts

Make up a batch of t-shirts and hand them out. You can hand them out in front of your shopping mall or arrange for a local radio station to give them to the first 100 callers or so. You might want some available for your grand opening, so order enough to spare.
Your t-shirts don’t have to be t-shirts. You can use any premium item for this: mouse pads, baseball caps, buttons, or whatever you like. T-shirts are popular because they’re seen by many people, not just the owner.

Flyers

Announce the opening through low-budget flyers and distribute them within your primary draw radius. Place them on windshields, ask to leave them on counters at restaurants, and post them on college or military bulletin boards. Flyers are cheap enough that you can use them in addition to almost anything else you do, no matter how expensive your major effort.

Newspaper Article

Your newspaper might be interested in the opening of a new business. In a small town, this might be front-page material, and even in a larger city, the business section might devote a paragraph or two to it, especially if it offers a unique business plan or interesting hook. A game store presented as a warehouse club might be different enough to deserve a column. Call or write to your local paper and find out if they’re interested.