How To Advertise Your Skate Shop To The Right Audience

It can be difficult to get word out when you're opening a new skateboard shop. Unless you have a sweet location, such as right across the street from a skate park or in a downtown location where skaters hangout and street style (ride public railings, curbs and benches), you will need to do some sort of marketing. Skaters won't hunt out your store, it's your job to make it known to them and get your name out there. Here are three ways to do that.

Sponsor An Event

The fastest way to make a splash in the skateboarding community is to sponsor an event. You will put up some of the cash for the prize money. In exchange you will get a banner, or some other display for your company. It can be very expensive to sponsor a national event, so you should focus on smaller local events. A great way to find out about these events is to search online websites that cover local skateboarding culture. Find a list of upcoming events and contact the organizers. While you are there you might want to get a company to print up skateboard stickers or t-shirts that feature your company logo and the address and then hand them out for free to the skaters.

Target Online Websites

The only problem with sponsoring an event is that it is a one-off event. You have a huge audience, but it's only for a single day. This is why you might also want to target an online website. You can have them display an ad for your skate shop on their site for a month or so. This will get daily traffic from skaters around your area. Again, you should focus on skate websites that specialize on your local area. So if you have opened a skate shop in Brooklyn, there's no reason to advertise with a magazine covering San Francisco skate culture.

Mobile Marketing Outside Of Skate Parks

If you want a really excellent way to reach your skaters, then you should consider a mobile trailer. These can have a huge graphic on the side of the truck that displays your company's logo. The truck can park outside of the skate park where it will be highly visible to everyone who is skating that day. You could schedule to have an employee ride with the truck and hand out free shirts or stickers to some of the skaters. The benefit to a mobile marketing trailer is that it can move around. This is great because you can hit all of the skate spots in your city. So one day you can park the trailer outside of the park, then the next day you can hit the downtown location where the street skaters hang out. This maximizes your total visibility and word will spread within the community that there is a hot new shop in the area. Contact a company like ExhibiTrailers to learn more.