Building a Customer Community: Primal 7

Primal 7 is a fitness product unlike anything else on the market. It uses a customer’s bodyweight paired with adjustable support for exercise, and can easily be used in an apartment, hotel room, or other location with limited space. Primal 7 makes exercise accessible to people with people with a wide range of issues that make it difficult to exercise, from injuries and autoimmune issues like arthritis, to age, size, or lack of baseline fitness.

“I didn’t think I could do a squat again!” is a common piece of feedback.

The challenge:

The CEO had a different mission in mind than just increasing sales: he wanted to make sure people actually used their Primal 7 regularly once they bought one. 

The solution: 

There were two sides to our strategy: content and community.

A solid content strategy can keep your customers engaged and motivated, and help solidify your relationship with them. This leads to better referral and word-of-mouth — two of the most effective methods of marketing.

Content strategy 

A content strategy requires not just the development of content, but knowing where and when to place that content. 

Primal 7goals were:

• Increase organic traffic to the website
• Maintain conversion rate (from website visitor to purchase)
• Generate leads for future nurture campaigns
• Engage with current customers 
• Establish Primal 7 as more than a piece of exercise equipment — it’s a partner that you take on your journey

We determined the following channels: 

• Email (for customers and for prospects)
• Facebook, Facebook Groups, and Instagram
• The Primal 7 Blog
• Affiliates/Partners
• YouTube
• Medium

Each of these were chosen specifically for their unique audience and how they use the web to consume and look at content.

Our strategy for most content marketing uses a hub-and-spoke model to be more efficient with the time and resources you spend.

By creating a large piece of content for a blog (the hub), you can then repurpose that content down into smaller, more bite-sized posts on social media or as a snippet in email (the spokes). Or in another example, take a YouTube video and use the transcript of that to create a blog post, and then use bits of that transcript or short clips to make social media posts. 

We created content pillars that aligned with the company’s values, their unique offering, and the goals, desires, and pain points their customers have. Then, we mapped those to a calendar, creating a content calendar for the next 12 months.

Customer Community

When it came to customer community (one of the most important elements a company can have), Primal 7 had all the ingredients that indicated their customer community had potential.

What does a customer community mean? Simple — it’s your pool of people who have purchased from you. Every company has it. What they do with that pool of people is what can determine success. 

That pool of people is incredibly valuable — not just for repeat sales, but to provide valuable feedback on your product or service that can help you or other customers. They can even help prospective customers by answering questions or providing an honest testimonial. 

Primal 7 had a small customer community already, it was just waiting to be unlocked, nurtured, and grown. The community needed more direction on how to use their Primal 7 and wanted to connect with people like them, ask questions, and help provide accountability and inspiration — and sometimes, just a place to vent.

Facebook Group refresh game plan.

An important piece of the community strategy was the plan we built to refresh and rebuild the Facebook Group. 

• Adding people

We integrated the Facebook Group promos all over their customer communications — from the post-purchase email, to the regular newsletter, to cross-promotion in social media. 

The product page itself was updated to promote the community as a way to keep accountable after purchase (a problem we all have with exercise equipment).

And, our best converter: the post-purchase page and email confirmation promoted the community to capitalize on the excitement in the moment. 

• Content

A Facebook Group is different from a Facebook page because it has to be more centered around the user and around conversation. Just posting the same things to your Group as you do on your Page isn’t taking best advantage of the group’s features.

Content series can help you create regular content, that fits with your strategy. 

A few series we made:

• Motivation Monday
• Gear Recommendations (Clothes + Shoes)
• Lunch Swap (Favorite lunch recipes) 

All of these were centered around getting the community to share and start conversation.

The results: Facebook group engagement increased by 46% in just one month, and has grown every single month since we kicked off this plan. The community is healthy, with members helping not just each other, but people who are curious about Primal 7 but haven’t purchased yet. Traffic from Facebook to the website increased by 10+% consistently, meaning that this channel has long-term benefits for the company.