TGMatt wrote:
Just as an aid in thinking..
The competition needs to be its own attractant, we wont be spending more money on advertising, and we want free an paying members incentivised to bring new folk here..
As for Target only stuff, unlikely as that shuts down the idea, for anyone not already a part of Target, and the idea is to help us grow beyond where we are at..
Thx keep it all flowing
Going back to my College days, and Marketing studies, you need clear guidelines about what you want to achieve, what's the aim. Next with the actual marketing you need to take care you actually market the product on offer, so are you selling TARGET membership or TotallyGuitars site, they are distinctly different, the pay programme as opposed to the free programme, again different. Further by leaning on collaborations you give the perception you drive that and teach that, whereas its not its the members themselves, so you could be marketing a third thing - the strength of the community? The collaborations are one of the biggest success stories here but TG only provides the medium for its being it doesn't teach you how to perform together so to design a competition around that alone might be construed as misleading potential members unless done in such a manner that no illusion about the 'How To collaborate' was created. As an aside this is potentially a new section 'How To Create A Collaboration' part of a overall Performance Category, same category could have threads about the Techs side of creating recordings using basic set-ups, I don't mean members posts but get real life sound/video engineers in (unless the member is one of those lol)
From a purely business point of view, you already have a pool of free members, maybe an incentive to get them on board in the first instance will provide a wider pool of members with greater knowledge of what's actually on offer, you are preaching to the partly converted, creating a bigger pool and in turn increasing the likelihood getting new folk. So I think as opposed to one competition an internal one first maybe solely for free members, with an incentive to join up to the TARGET programme then once you have a bigger membership launch the mother of all competitions and put up a really big major prize.
So big competition big prize what is it that works, well for example that recent Virgin Digital post I put up that picture went viral in the mid 2000's and there wasn't even a prize.
First I think you need to align with a major company, lets say Taylor or Cole Clark, then maybe hide small Taylor/Cole Clark icon guitars throughout the site which the participant has to download, each icon being different, the first to come up with them all and answer a series of questions about where they found them and what was on that page. Now I mention Coles partially seriously they are still a young company trying to break into various markets they have a quality product and just might be keen to collaborate, the Prize a guitar of Course
But Wait There's More an all expenses trip to collect it from the factory where it was made. To advertise this put out a You Tube video of the competition, send Press release to major radio stations, Music shops (get existing members to work for you on this.