Share This Article
Sniper’s Hide is an online community for long-range shooting enthusiasts, hunters, and tactical marksmen. The forum brings together experienced shooters to share insights on rifles, optics, ammunition, and shooting techniques. Beyond gear discussions, members exchange tutorials, ballistics calculations, field reports, and real-world experiences, making Sniper’s Hide a go-to resource for anyone serious about long-range shooting.
Strategy Overview
Our goal when partnering with Sniper’s Hide was to continue building on and growing their community by introducing new ways to engage and monetize. Beyond engagement and revenue increases, it was critical that we brought in and retained new users, created an organization to the site that both returning users and new users can enjoy, and make sure the site is easy to look at and performant across desktop and mobile devices.
All of these considerations fall into the principles of what we believe make a community thrive. To summarize:
- Foundation: Creating a simple and reliable tech-setup
- Experience: Making sure your site is easy to look at and navigate
- Wellness: Developing a fair and transparent community with minimal toxicity
- Monetization: Discovering new strategies to maximize revenue
- Onboarding: Bringing new users into the site with a guided experience that keep them coming back
- Gamification: Rewarding users for their positive contributions to the community
- Engagement: Implementing new ways for users to interact with the site and form deeper connections
- Optimization: Creating a performant experience that is accessible to all
By considering the core tenets of our strategy and the nuances that make Sniper’s Hide a one-of-a-kind community, we were able to develop a tailored strategy and roadmap to ensure new users were joining the site, more money was coming in, and members had something to do every time they visited the community.
Engagement
To improve engagement, we wanted to focus on directly interacting with the community and improving content visibility. We did this in a few ways:
- Regularly running contests
- Hosting quarterly webinars to connect with members
- Running surveys to make sure we’re implementing the changes members want to see
- Highlighting viral content to increase views
- Reaching out to users through push notifications, private messages, and newsletters
All of these strategies have contributed to more consistent engagement on the site, and increase in returning users, and more visibility on everything the community has to offer, making it easier to recruit new membership.
Monetization
Before we partnered with Sniper’s Hide they already had several subscriptions running on their community and a dedicated group of subscribers. In our initial discovery, we found that they offered too many plans, weren’t taking advantage of the prices that members were willing to pay, and also didn’t offer enough perks per plan to always justify a long-term recurring subscription.
What we changed here was:
- Instead of offering 5+ plans, we decided to offer 3. A basic supporter plan, a more premium tier, and a plan for businesses hoping to promote their brand on the site
- We offered a way to donate to cover hosting and site maintenance costs
- To incentivize purchases, we offered additional perks using methods that are valuable to members but don’t cost money. Things like highlighting your username, giving you access to subscriber only streams, and more.
Launching HideTV
To us, it was critical to offer a form of live engagement to compliment the forum and keep up with modern social media trends. We officially launched HideTV the week of July 4th, 2024 and were met with a wave of positive feedback and requests to create content on the site. In this period, we:
- Began recruiting creators to create videos for HideTV
- Launched a new merch shop and designed official HideTV merch
- Ran contests for subscription and merch giveaways
- Ran several free and premium live streams to get members excited about the new experience
Once we launched HideTV, we continued the momentum with:
- Frequent contests
- Monthly merch drops
- More free and subscriber-only content
- New courses
- In-person training sessions
Our goal was and continues to be to make HideTV feel engaging and like there’s always something to do when you land on the site. As we’ve become more established, we’ve been excited to see videos posted frequently, views increase, and subscription numbers rise.
Some Highlights
A Word From Frank Galli, Owner of Sniper’s Hide
“After 20 years of operation with my site I needed a refresh. I tried a lot of custom developers often overpaying for out of the box work disguised as custom code. After a dozen tries, I found Audentio.
They not only worked with my community, they took the time to understand my needs and how to put my vision together on the page. They gave me the refresh I was looking for while being proactive to my community needs.
I appreciate every member of the Audentio Team that has contributed to my site’s success. It’s been a seamless process that has helped me adjust my focus to other areas. They understand the systems, the community and my concerns, it’s been a great journey with the Audentio Team.”
Conclusion
We’ve loved partnering with Sniper’s Hide. It has been an amazing experience to work with the Sniper’s Hide team to grow the community and find new ways to engage with their audience. Although we started with a strategy and roadmap to grow their site, what we’ve been able to accomplish and build has gone far beyond what we outlined and we are excited to continue bring in new users, find new methods of engagement, and maximize revenue for the Sniper’s Hide team and any creators that have joined the HideTV network.
