Nathaniel Anthony & Chris Anastasi, founders of Muscle Nation, one of Australia’s fastest-growing activewear and supplements brands share how they used a market-first method to start their business.
Build your market then build your business
If you had the best products in the world but no one knew about them, how would you sell them? Before we started our own brand, we had experience in the business of social media marketing. Not so much in promoting a product to an audience but actually amassing people who would become the audience, gaining huge social media followings of individuals who were segmented by demographic and interests. The theory was that if you could tap into the crowd, you could find out what they wanted and create a product, service or brand to sell to them. And it worked.
We first met at a fitness expo and bonded not just over a love of health and fitness, but we could also see a gap in the market for a premium gym apparel and supplements brand that was about more than just selling a product. We wanted to build a brand that could connect a community of like-minded people, passionate about the same goals, and who uplift and support one another. That is how Muscle Nation was born in 2016.
Here’s how we developed the market before launching a business.
Offer value
People are quite protective of their time and attention unless you offer something of value in return. They are also less wary if you don’t come across as trying to sell them something. The secret here is to create value to build those numbers. For us, we started with free workouts and eBook giveaways on social media, targeted at fitness enthusiasts.
We developed a huge following for Muscle Nation in the early days of Instagram and Snapchat back when Snapchat was a more prominent social media platform. Doing the right thing across all these platforms, being generous by giving things away for free that other brands were charging for, or would value as an add-on, meant we remained in front of people so that when we did have a product, we could leverage the existing attention and popularity we enjoyed.
We also did this with our very first fitness expo. We took a loss-leader approach by printing up a whole bunch of t-shirts that we then gave away at the expo in exchange for people joining our database. We also invited athletes to join us to create excitement about having special guests. We were nobodies but our stall was super popular because of these two tactics, which created a buzz.
When it came time to launch new collections and ranges, people already knew who we were because of the brand awareness tactics we used at these fitness expos.
Leverage momentum
The next step is to create and leverage momentum from the market. If you have a certain number of people already in your community, you can do this by finding out what their triggers are for sharing info about, or recommending, your brand with other people who would also be potential customers.
Go wide in your thinking about marketing ideas and don’t be afraid to try the ones you think are best suited. From giveaway style promotions (‘tag three friends to win’) to encouraging social posts, reviews and testimonials, we tested plenty of ideas in the early days to see what would be best received by our customers. Social proof and word-of-mouth can push your brand really far, and for us it has been the Number 1 factor in helping us build an engaged, online community of over two million followers.
Listen to your audience
The secret to a healthy market is the same as with any relationship: it can’t just be one way with the brand selling to the market all the time, it also needs to be about the market being empowered to give feedback and suggestions to the brand with the business actually taking this on board. This isn’t to say every customer-generated idea reaches fruition, but we do seriously evaluate and reflect on what our community says.
This is a sign of true engagement. We’d like to say every business can do it, but actually it takes a lot of time and effort that many aren’t willing to invest. We have created a dedicated team to manage our online community who respond in a timely fashion to people’s questions and posts, good and bad. Showing this amount of attention and care helps to build rapport, trust and integrity. In the end that’s what people will remember about your brand. Sometimes you can create fans for life by responding to a problem or issue quickly with positivity and a satisfying solution.
We have cultivated millions of fans and followers in our time on social media and what we have learnt is this: Brands that take the time cultivate a community and really show they care are more likely to succeed without necessarily always having the best product on market. When you have the market, you can build the product and the business is likely to follow.
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