Why an independent media house is your new local bike shop

In the first part of our ‘CIN guide to Marketing which makes a difference’ we chat with Chris Nolte, founder of Propel, a New York based eBike retailer, and hear how one man saw it differently, did it differently, and found customers who truly valued what he offered.

The year is 2011. You’re a farsighted pioneer planning on blazing a trail as early advocates and adopters of eBikes. You know they’re a future you’re going to make happen, and you plan to enable as many people as possible to ride them. Winning news customers has never been more important.

One small problem.

Your bike shop is in New York, and in 2011 eBikes are illegal.

Welcome to the world of Chris Nolte and Propel.

Setting the wider scene, in the 6 years preceding 2011 a revolution took place. Below we outline those who changed the way we interact and communicate, with friends, with businesses, and with brands. Included here is a business which took the term, “content marketing”,  flipped that for “Inbound”, and in doing so radically transformed what marketing does, and how it does it – remodelling the way businesses identify and engage an audience – shifting to an approach which puts sharing knowledge, as a means to establish authority, expertise, status, and leadership, to the fore, redefining how we measure and define ‘value’.

Timeline

• 2005 Facebook, as we’ve come to know it, launches.
• 2006 Hubspot launches (arguably the first exclusively Internet Marketing business)
• 2007 Redbull Media House founded
• 2009 ‘Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs.’ First Edition
• 2009 Marcus ‘They Ask, You Answer’ Sheridan starts applying ‘Inbound’ tactics for RPS
• 2010 Simon Sinek gives 18-minute TED Talk which introduces “Start With Why.” to the world
• 2011 Propel Bikes is born (then known as Long Island Electric Bikes)

Digging into what transformed the world for businesses and customers alike, “HubSpot was founded on “inbound”, the notion that people don’t want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by salespeople — they want to be helped.” You can see where Marcus Sheridan gets, “They ask, You Answer” from already, hey.

These are major cultural shifts we’re talking about here, so much so that in 2017, Forbes rated ‘They Ask, You Answer’ as one of the “11 Marketing Books Every Chief Marketing Officer Should Read”.

In the sports industry, it’s the arrival of Redbull Media House which totally rocks our world. And changes it forever.

The Drum, a leading global publisher for the marketing and media industries, comments, “The 2007 launch of Red Bull Media House proved to be a brilliant foreshadowing of the role content marketing would play in the creation of dominant, expansive, and loved consumer brands. It also marked the first time a brand truly transcended from being an advertiser (tangential to the feature story) to becoming the feature story itself.”

In cycling terms, this is as revolutionary as Andy Hampsten’s ski gloves and base layer clad 1988 win on the Gavia was for cycling clothing. As Shimano’s 1990 launch of the first road STI shifters, the 1987 arrival of Formula disk brakes, and the 1990 arrival of Manitou suspension, for Mountain Bikes. In a cycling as transport world, think Term GSD, which totally changes the cargo bike game when it arrived in 2017.

Back to Chris, and his ride from 2011 launch ideas to creating an Indie film festival award winning cycling short film called #letpamelaride.

Chris sees cycling as a cultural movement. Something so much more than sport. This fundamentally drives everything which has become Propel.

When you see your goal as communicating something amazing – cycling as transport, and eBikes – to the wider world, you can understand why you’d naturally see yourself as a publisher, a media house. Strangely, it’s not how most IBD view the world they exist in. Yet that’s exactly what shapes Propel, winning new customers from across the United States, and beyond.

• Hiring a full-time videographer and writer is what’s stoking the customer fire at Propel.
• Knowing what your audience asks is what makes Chris and the Propel team sought after experts in eBikes.
• So much so that brands are paying to create content with Chris.

A stated goal for Propel is to end marketing spend, with YouTube content views funding all content creation, and generating revenue which feeds back into the business. Show me another bike shop, or bike brand, which covers its marketing this way!

When did you last chat with a bike shop who talked Affiliate Marketing?

Pause for a second here.

• Ask yourself why Chris is in what’s probably still a 1% club for the cycling industry (despite YouTube launching in 2005, followed by Redbull Media House in 2007).
• Then ask yourself if your business could become a publisher of content which customers would receive real value from (and you could generate revenue from).

To be clear, I’m not talking about a brochureware website with Instagram style photos of newly launched products. Or those organic posts you put up on Facebook, which generate a few likes and the odd comment. Social media has long been a ‘pay to play’ environment, with extremely limited reach for non-paying users. A 2016 Forbes featured article stated, “video content video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined”. TikTok, launched in 2017, totally disrupted the static image based social media world. Hell, as far back as October 2018 it was the most downloaded app in the United States. As of 2022, TikTok had over 3 billion downloads, and over 1 billion active users each month. That’s an incredibly powerful means of engage with and winning new customers.

Globally successful content creator and personal trainer James Smith (1.1 million Instagram followers) talked openly about 2022 as the year that a shift in focus from Instagram rapidly decreased audience engagement with his content. His response; create video content, shared via Instagram Reels, whilst also investing in building an audience on YouTube (87.3k subscribers), experimenting with both Shorts and longer form ‘knowledge share’ video content.

For context, the team at Propel Bikes, they’ve 54.2k YouTube subscribers. Average number of views per video: 36k. Most watched video: 1.8million views. Multiple videos with over 100k views. All this in the last 3 years.

Video is essential for customer facing B2B and B2C businesses. Sharing knowledge, insights and expertise is what people value. This gains you recognition, trust, respect, and traction.

Knowing this, how will you brand ‘truly transcended from being an advertiser (tangential to the feature story) to becoming the feature story itself?’

• What are your marketing plans for 2023?
• How will you reach new customers?
• How will you create content which delivers value?

In part 2 of this series of 4 we’ll hear from Kineta Kelsall, former Facebook and Google trainer, now Senior Director, Training (Social Media) at Jellyfish. Kineta shares research and planning based actionable insights, identifying audience targets and key messaging approaches, along with tools marketers can use to deliver the outcomes they’ve focused in on. Winning new customers will never go out of style. How we do that has changed radically. Now’s the time to embrace the change.