Using Social Media To Grow An Organic E-Commerce Business
From YouTube to Discord, The OK Duo Is Building Organic E-Commerce Brands Through Online Communities And Giveaways.
Website:
okstuff.net
Industry:
E-commerce
Team Size:
3
Gleam Campaigns:
1
Products Used:
Competitions
Add your prize, choose your actions. Embed on your site, all in under 3 minutes.
Social media is massive. Most online businesses now use social media as the primary marketing channel for exposing their products to an audience, promoting their brand and attracting new customers.
It's no wonder that any time we open up Instagram we're bombarded with content from brands and influencers all competing for our attention.
Gaining attention from consumers is undeniably important, but there's something even more valuable than attention:
Community.
Most brands will hire influencers and professional photographers all in the name of creating quality content, but where they fall short is spending the time and effort on engaging and interacting with the people who will endorse their brand most effectively - their customers.
OK Media understands this perfectly. Using social media as their key weapon, they have built three successful E-commerce brands out of their online community on YouTube, Twitch & Discord.
With a combined number of over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, Tom Boyden and Jon Call (aka Jujimufu) from OK Media have successfully built an original fitness and lifestyle brand off the Internet by engaging online communities with high-quality video streams, successful social media marketing and outstanding audience interaction.
In this case study we're going to look at how OK Media was able to engage their audience, expand their community and grow their mailing list to 20k+ subscribers by giving away $7,000 worth of product to 150 lucky winners.
Setting Up The Giveaway
Having gained sufficient momentum from growing their online community, Tom and Jon turned their attention towards growing their mailing list and expanding their E-commerce offerings.
They knew that running a giveaway would help grow their mailing list exponentially and drive more traffic to their other social media channels, so that's exactly what they did.
When Tom first noticed that Twitch streamers were achieving overwhelming results by running giveaways with Gleam Competitions, he knew he had to give us a try.
We wanted to bolster our newsletter and I had seen Gleam used by folks in eSports and Twitch. Ever since I saw Gleam being used somewhere on Twitter, I knew it would be an insane tool for us to use!
It took no time for him to partner with 16 different fitness and lifestyle companies to build a $7,000 prize bundle to be awarded to 150 lucky winners:
Something For Everyone
In order to maximise the success of the campaign Tom knew it was important to reach his core audience of loyal community members as well as those who may be less familiar with the OK community.
This was achieved through the use of actions which awarded entries to users who were subscribed to OK's channels on YouTube, Discord and Twitch. This was an outstanding way to reward loyal community members who were already actively engaged with the OK brand.
Including these actions in the campaign was also a great way to engage new users and encourage them to join the thriving OK community.
YouTube has since prohibited the incentivisation of YouTube subscriptions with 3rd-party app giveaways, but you can still drive YouTube engagement by awarding entries to users who visit your YouTube channel.
Aligning Actions With Campaign Goals
The primary goal of the giveaway was to encourage newsletter signups and drive traffic to their brand new Instagram account, two actions which would greatly help OK Media develop their community, promote their offerings and drive sales.
Tom achieved this goal by awarding entries to users who signed up to their mailing list and visiting their Instagram account. To help drive these key actions, Tom put them right at the top of the campaign and awarded extra entries to users who completed them. Both terrific ways to maximise the completion of important actions.
Tom also awarded extra entries for the actions at the very bottom to encourage users to make their way through the entire list of actions. Nifty trick, eh?
Alignment Of Prize And Target Audience
A hugely important component of any giveaway is the prize.
You need to choose a prize that will appeal to the users you are trying to attract.
Tom wanted to draw in an audience that would be interested in the OK community and as well as their products, so he put together a fitness product bundle that would appeal to the exact group of consumers that he was trying to reach.
He also did a great job of clearly displaying all the brands he was offering products from to make it plainly clear what users stand to win.
Promoting the Giveaway
When it came to promoting the giveaway Tom had things well and truly under control due to his expertise in social media.
He promoted the giveaway primarily on YouTube and Twitch, while also experimenting with Facebook and Instagram ads.
We promoted via YouTube videos for 2 weeks straight, one "direct bumper" on a video and the rest mentions and links in the description.
Promotion On YouTube
Since Jon already had a massive following of over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, it was easy for them to promote the giveaway on YouTube. The giveaway was announced in one of their videos:
They also left a link to the Gleam competition in a comment underneath the video:
Promotion On Discord
Tom also used the #announcement channel on their Discord server to announce about their giveaway. Towards the end of the campaign they made another announcement to drive extra traffic to the campaign:
Promotion From Sponsor And Fans
Additional to their own promotion efforts, Tom also received support from both his prize sponsors as well as fans on social media:
Use Of Facebook And Instagram Ads
Tom also experimented with using Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic to the giveaway. This was their first attempt at using these channels and they were surprised by the fantastic value they got from the effort, as the campaigns had a cost per click of only $0.12.
I also used several Instagram & Facebook ads to drive traffic and they had insane $/click, around $0.12 per click for some of the ads.
In the future, Tom plans to focus on creating targeted videos ads for Facebook and Instagram.
The Results
At the end of the campaign, OK received 80,651 impressions for the giveaway and drove 125,613 actions from 21,651 users. They now have a beast of a mailing list at 20K subscribers and also grew their OK Stuff Instagram account from 0 to 4k followers!
Not surprisingly, the spikes in traffic and entry coincided with Tom's promotional efforts throughout the campaign. In the end, the campaign was so well received that it had to be extended:
From the breakdown of entries above, it's clear that bulk of the entries came from OK Media's existing community. It's also clear that most entrants completed the giveaway's primary action and subscribed to the OK newsletter. This goes to show just how successful the campaign was at using OK Media's pre-existing community of loyal fans to help grow their mailing list.
Tom also reported that there were even subscribers on Twitch that paid for a subscription plan in order to gain extra entries from their Bonus Entries for Twitch Subscribers action. This means that those users already had an intention to subscribe to a paid plan, so the entries from the campaign gave them that extra incentive needed to convert.
Furthermore, the campaign was a perfect debut for the OK Stuff Instagram account. From the 9,838 profile visits, they gained a total of 4,034 new followers - a whopping 41% conversion rate! Did we mention that this started from an Instagram account with 0 followers? 😎
From the comments on the Instagram post above, it's clear that Tom and Jon have built a whole lot of momentum and trust from their audience. People are eager to buy merchandise from OK Media because of the consistent value and sense of community they have offered. And by using a giveaway to grow their mailing list and Instagram page, they have set themselves up perfectly to promote products and drive sales.
Key Growth Takeaways
Know Where To Find Your Audience
There are a handful of common social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which are great for reaching a huge audience, but when it comes to building a community it's often better to focus your efforts on more targeted platforms which lend themselves to more meaningful interactions.
Knowing what content to serve to your audience is great, but so is delivering them on the right channel.
For Tom and Jon, the clear winner is YouTube. They had attracted the masses through their quality content on YouTube, which helped bring folks into their main portal on Discord. So while YouTube is a great platform for them to share their content, Discord is the real 'internet home' for the OK community.
Once you have an active community hub, if you're keeping your community engaged it's easy to get users to take action whenever you make announcements. This includes actions such as entering giveaways and checking out your new content on other platforms.
Once you've built a persona for yourself in the community, it's commonplace for users to want to get to know you on a personal level. This is when you can engage with them via your personal social media accounts.
Partner Up And Make It Obvious
For this giveaway, OK Media had 16 different companies sponsor their giveaway prizes which totalled at $7,000 value. Plus, all of the brands included in the prize bundle had been endorsed by Tom and Jon in their content, so viewers were already familiar with the prizes involved which helped increase product desire and motivation to enter.
The prizes in their giveaway were also perfectly aligned with their users' lifestyle which further increased the desirability of the prizes.
Remember when they announced the giveaway in one of their YouTube videos? Tom and Jon spent the first minute and a half showing off some of the giveaway prizes, reminding the viewers that these are trusted brands regularly used by the OK duo:
Fortunately for Tom and Jon, they maintained such a great relationship with their sponsors that the sponsor ended up helping promote the giveaway campaign, adding more fuel to their promotion efforts.
When setting up the Competition, Tom also took advantage of our featured image slider to show off all the valuable prizes which helped increase their allure.
Have a play below:
The sliding gallery helped highlight all the brands and their items.
Looking at the prizes in the slider, it's clear that Tom had reached out to brands that he knows his fans will love. We've got a guide here to help you find out how you can partner up with a complementing brand in your own niche:
Learn How to Run a Partner Campaign
Find out everything you need to know about using Gleam to partner up with other brands and run powerful giveaways.
Check It OutCommunity Is Fuel
Tom and Jon knew that the OK community was vital to their business and they also knew that support from their fans fuel their ability to continue creating quality content. They give an absolute 110% when it comes to serving their community:
In his own words, here are some tips from Tom on managing an online community:
- Discord or Reddit or a few other places allow you to directly connect with people and develop an internet home for them.
- You can get far by responding and listening to comments/replies on your products and comments, but developing a place for them to hang is big.
- Make the effort to meet up with people face-to-face. We've had free meetups with 200 people that are organized through Discord and YouTube, just gotta take the extra step that most creators and companies aren't doing.
- Develop a culture of you and the users together rather than "I'm over here"/"they're over there" or that they are fans/customers but that's all I'll acknowledge.
People just want to be a part of something and it's easier than ever to actually make that happen, before you'd have to make a cult or religion and register it at the State building. That would suck.
If you're looking for some quick wins in engaging with your online community, here are some pointers:
- Always respond to comments: Your fans have taken the initiative to connect with you, so don't disappoint them.
- Set up a Discord channel, Facebook Group, or a subreddit for your community to engage with each other. Private groups may be worth considering to encourage participation and exclusivity.
- Surprise your fans by creating fan-requested content. You can take suggestions from fans through polls or surveys. This can be in the form of artwork, video or podcast topics, mentions in vlogs - the possibilities are endless.
- Create ways for the community to participate in activities, one good way is by collecting user-generated content (UGC) from community members. You can learn more about collecting UGC through contests with our guide:
Learn More About Running Photo Contests
Find out everything you need to know about running an engaging photo contest and displaying submissions in a stylish gallery.
Learn MoreFocus On Your Campaign Outcomes
Focusing on a primary goal can be very beneficial when it comes to marketing your brand. Since Gleam can help you achieve a variety of marketing goals, it's important that you know what actions you want to drive and center your efforts around these actions.
Tom and Jon had plans to release a new product line for their clothing brand and grip strength equipment brand - OK Stuff and Grip Genie. In the lead-up to these releases, they wanted to drive newsletter signups and grow their Instagram following as a means of promoting their products to a highly targeted audience.
They successfully prioritized these goals by giving those actions prime real estate at the top of their campaign and attributing more entries to those actions. This resulted in users focusing on those actions which greatly helped OK Media reach their goals.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should corner your audience into performing one single action.
If they are not keen to sign up for your newsletter or complete another action you value it's imperative that you allow them to participate in other ways, especially if they already have the intention to enter.
Weigh heavily the actions that you'd like people to focus on, e.g. the newsletter for us. We still gave plenty of other actions for our following to engage with if they didn't want to sign up.
With the whopping 20k subscribers in their mailing list, it's no doubt they have achieved their goal and went way beyond just 'OK' 👌
Now, OK Media is focusing on driving further attention to their brand by posting on their new Instagram account to give fans a sneak peek of what's to come:
