7 replies to this topic

[Cheater]

Slotblog member Mark Horne's home raceway made the front page of his local weekly paper, the Jefferson County Leader, in Festus, MO.

 

 

 

 

[Kim Lander]

Great article.

[garyvmachines]

Good-lookin track...!!!
Fair-lookin owner... Har, har, har...

Great article...
Way to go, Mark...!!!
 
GAV

[MarkH]

Gary, I can't argue with your first two lines of assessment. 

[MarkH]

So, after approximately 55,000 households received this article we had 4 people contact us. I hoping for at least 2 so yeppers for doubling the hopes. Two of the 4 are retired and have raced in the past. One has medical issues and must wait until he has those resolved. The other retiree came by this evening and ran the track for around 600 laps. I moved him around in normal rotation and he turned very respectable lap times after getting the rust of the trigger finger.

One of the others lives in Festus Mo just 20 minutes from the house. He is a Scout Master and is covered up with Pine Wood for the next month or so. BUT, he intends to come and race. He has raced in the past, ovals, and ran 40 laps turning a 3.934" lap. The pole for the last race was 3.592". So He should be a competitor in short order.

The last one is an old karting friend. He intends on giving this a try. He ran a bunch of laps race day morning and did real well considering he has never held a controller, ever. He turned some high 4.x second laps. I will work with him to bring him up to speed.

 

So in the end we may have gained a couple more racers. We had over 530 hits on the web site during the 4 days of mailings. So it looks like 4 out of roughly 150,000 people were interested. I am glad to get new people what ever the ratio to the population as a whole.

[Pappy]

When I had my first raceway we advertised in those little packets of coupons they distribute to thousands of houses. We had a coupon for a free twenty minutes on the track with car and controller included. I think I paid about $600 and got two coupons back.

 

Right after that I talked to guy named Buddy of Buddy's Carpet Barn. Buddy became very well known in the Cincinnati area and had ads on TV and the radio all the time. He told me he spent about a half a million a year (back in 1988) on advertising but didn't spend one dime in print, all TV and radio. He said putting it in print is a total waste of money.

[Phil Smith]

I own a pawn shop and years ago I considered doing fliers. I called a friend that owned several pawn shops. They did 1K fliers that offered a discount on a purchase. No responses. So they did 1K more that offered $5 cash for coming in, no strings attached. They got 5 or so fliers redeemed. So they upped it to $10 and did another 1K fliers. Around 15 people responded.

 

They never did fliers again. And I didn't bother with them.

 

TV and radio ads cover a large area. In my case all of DFW, I think over 4M people. And the ads are priced accordingly. A pawn shop is a local business, like a convenience store. There are at least 75 pawn shops in the DFW area. Probably a lot more than that. Maybe twice that many. Someone that's 20 miles from me has several pawn shops between me and them, and the vast majority of people won't go any further than the nearest pawn shop.  

 

So TV and radio is not a cost effective means of advertisement for a single store like mine. But that's just pawn shops. It might work very well for a commercial slot car track that likely is the only track for hundreds of miles.

[MarkH]

The main thing that I have found is when someone is introduced to slot cars they have a great time. Some tell everyone they know about how much fun it was. Mostly they wish they could come and play on a regular basis. However, they rarely have time to participate. The kids have baseball, volleyball, soccer, basketball, football, fishing, etc, etc, etc.

Try and get kids involved and you need to have enough for them to race each other. I am now working on the scouting angle and with one of the new guys interested being a Scout Master maybe, JUST maybe we can get enough kids interested. I think we would need at least 6 kids and round robin them through with the parents helping turn marshal, working on cars yada, yada, yada.

We will see..........Stay tuned