Christopher Degenaars, Cadence Cyclery’s Marketing Manager, sat down with the Promoboxx team this week to share his thoughts on building a community, his team’s focus on in-store events, and what he loves about Promoboxx.
Since the fall of last year, Chris and the Cadence Cyclery team have used the Promoboxx platform to promote Specialized Bicycle Components content across their digital channels. The quick access to content has helped raises awareness for their bike shop and bring more local customers in-store.
I’ve been racing for about five years and have been an avid part of my local cycling community for a while, so I knew about Cadence Cyclery. I had been racing for Cadence Cyclery for about a year before I was brought on as a sales associate. Overall, I’ve been a part of the Cadence community for about two years.
I’ve always been known at Cadence as the ‘social media guy’ so I was excited when the store asked me to start posting from time to time on social media about the shop and products. I began working at a marketing agency, which gave me the opportunity to come back to Cadence as a marketing manager this time and focus my time on marketing and helping the shop grow. My role went from selling bikes to being able to live the brand and encourage others to live the brand and sell the brands we carry, which is where Promoboxx came in.
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My day-to-day includes trying to create and support campaigns for the brands we carry across our three stores. I create actual graphics and marketing materials to support the bike shop and work with Chad, the owner of Cadence Cyclery, to figure out what the shop should be focusing on, and what the main sales goals are and then figuring out how to promote those goals through social media and marketing.
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We work to integrate our promotional campaigns into what is going on in the cycling community, for example any large races and big races going on in the cycling community are great to leverage so we can connect with our ideal customer through our shared interest. We want people to understand that they aren’t just getting a bike, they’re getting the bike shop. A big part of our strategy is sharing our story and encouraging customers to see us as a place to learn about bikes and come to hangout.
We host our own Saturday morning group ride every week to get people out and on their bikes. Attendance can range from five to 70 riders. The last Friday of every month we partner with TUPPS Brewery to host an in-shop happy hour. It’s a great off-the-bike event to get people to come into the store, get to know us and get involved in the shop and our products.
That is one thing we pride ourselves on. We might provide large brands, but we also provide old-school customer service and want to make sure our customers end up on the right bikes. We want to show that in our content.
It’s very easy to get people involved on Facebook and promote events. We really are focusing on interacting with our local community and engaging them on Facebook to build our company awareness. Consistency is key on Facebook I’ve found. It doesn’t need to be perfect, posts that are inspirational or even just photos of the store get a surprisingly high number of likes.
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We also sponsor racing teams and riders, which is a nice way to advertise Cadence Cyclery in our community. We do some email marketing, which is a good way to segment stuff out and connect with customers. Creating promotions on Facebook has been an effective tool to get people into the store. We’ve done quite a bit of different styles of promotion and testing.
There’s no doubt I’m a huge fan of Promoboxx. The campaign availability with all of the assets right there is probably my favorite thing. I would say one thing that really stands out to me is having the content available with actual suggested text on it. Specialized utilizes having optional preset text in their campaign content, which makes it so much easier to share posts quickly on social media. I hope and wish that more brands would get on board with Promoboxx!
Specialized Campaign Dashboard for Cadence Cyclery
The Local Ads feature is another huge perk of the platform. Its makes it that much easier to get an ad up and going without having to go through the process of creating it. Being able to run local, targeted ads has been great.
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A challenge that we’ve experienced is the difficulty of sharing content from all of our brands across different management systems, sharing methods, and places. Scheduling content and keeping track of all of the content and brands is difficult and takes time, I often have to create my own text, campaigns, custom graphics, and materials for brands. The goal is to automate the brand content sharing process.
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Brands have come to us about not supporting brands enough on social media, but we found that we just didn’t have the time to dedicate to organizing and creating materials for all of the brands we carry, and the automation of brand campaigns on Promoboxx was great. Promoboxx helps us to easily promote content easily while staying on brand.
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