Shimano experienced a tremendous growth in online reach in Europe by using Apostle

In 2017, Shimano struggled to reach the local community of their affiliate retailers through online brand expressions. The collaboration with Apostle made it possible to structure these efforts on the social media channels of their retailers and to help local them with Shimano marketing and store promotion.

Challenge

There was a need among retailers to get help with social media. In addition, these retailers are the eyes and ears of Shimano. They are the ones that speak to consumers in their stores, on the shop floor and in the workplace. On one hand, this offers retailers an opportunity to use the knowledge of a large organization regionally in the form of online support. Yet it also opens doors for Shimano to communicate with their consumers, especially on a regional level! But how would you do that?

Approach

Apostle came up with the idea of distributing ready-to-use social media posts on the Facebook pages of retailers. At the time, there were about 60 retailers that are licensed as Shimano Service Centers, but they could not help and reach out to all of them at the same time. Because of Apostle’s Brand Advocacy platform, this is now possible. “With this tool we can prepare ready-to-use social media messages for retailers that they can approve on the shop floor on their smartphone today. We decided to roll this out to a small group of retailers, and then expand. We are now active with Apostle in more than 8 countries,” says Erik-Jan Brunninkreef, retail services & concepts manager at Shimano.