Growing a Brand from Scratch
At then end of 2013 I was intructed by the CEO to grow our facebook presence. The company, Maxboost, had formed earlier that year and had less than 1,000 followers. As we were a start-up my budget was $500 a month.
Using a combination of daily promoted ads and qualified posted posts. I achieved our first 1,000 followers.
Once we started to field a small following, the next step was creating repeatable content that would not only keep our current following, but bring more followers in.
As we were an iPhone case company. I decided to have our design team find public-use stock images and present a few to our followers to pick from. The winning design would be manufactured and sold, with a few being featured in giveaway’s at certain times to our followers.
For fun, can you guess which of the four cases was the most popular? Scroll down to find out!
Within a month of reaching 1,000 followers, we had now eclipsed 10,000!
User’s would submit their votes as comments on the cases and we would then manually tally the votes. Eventually the entire design and marketing team internally were doing research and trying to find designs to beat each other on our weekly facebook post.
and the winner is….
…Case Number 1!
Over the next 6 months our numbers continued to grow. By June we had achieved a remarkable 80,000 followers!
Once the winning design was announced, a follow-up post was created asking our fan base to name the design! This encouraged user engagement in every major post.
By July 2014 – I had hit the CEO’s ultimate goal of 100,000 followers. But I wasn’t done yet…
While having a large active folllowing on social media is great, it doesn’t mean a whole lot if your followers don’t become brand ambassadors. (Notice, I didn’t say buyers)
First, the plan was to build a platform that would allow us to reach out to our fan-base directly so that we could engage with them in more detail. Thus, the VIPU reviewer program was born! We had as many followers as possible sign up to get priority access to cases before they launched, insider info on designs, and news on company developments, as well as options to review new products for free to help with Q&A.
In May 2015 we had doubled our followers to 200k!
VIPU members were emailed weekly, with the largest email at the end of the month, showing all the upcoming case giveaways and promotions for the following month! This created an incentive to subscribe to our email list.
Another year, another 100,000 followers. Hitting 300,000 was a huge accomplishment. We had become the largest case manufacturer on facebook, with a fraction of the budget that other companies were using.
Final Notes
The case program ran for 3 years and ended up generating over 350k followers. While the program was a mass success ultimately the decision was made to migrate the followers on facebook and the VIPU program towards a more review focused role and continue to build on a vast array of up-coming products versus just cell-phone cases.