How Trek uses Sprout Social to support its social strategy around the globe
Starting in Waterloo, Wisconsin and now serving customers worldwide, Trek Bicycle is renowned as a premier manufacturer and distributor of innovative, high-end bicycles and cycling products.
With raving fans from Indiana to India, Trek understands the importance of social media in creating real connection with consumers.
But how does a global brand ensure a culture of craftsmanship stays consistent across far-flung offices in different markets?
If you’re Trek, you use Sprout Social.
Switching gears
With offices around the globe, Trek found itself struggling with content distribution, according to Director of Marketing Strategy, Ecommerce and Events Andrew Rosch.
“A big part of our job here at Trek’s headquarters revolves around supporting our global subsidiary offices,” Rosch said. “The marketers at these offices said it was hard for them to find good content and images that were going to perform well on social. And for a lot of the challenges we had on the marketing side, Sprout had solutions to solve them in very simple, straightforward ways.”
Director of Marketing Strategy, Ecommerce and Events
In addition to scheduling and publishing tools that help Trek plan, organize and deliver social content and campaigns across networks, the company immediately found value in Sprout’s Asset Library. Using the Asset Library, Trek can easily create, organize, edit and publish assets from a central location to ensure social posts are visually engaging, on brand and readily available to its marketers in different countries.
“The Asset Library was a very big step forward in terms of us getting assets to social marketers in other offices,” Rosch said.
Trek soon discovered Sprout could also help it enhance its customer care efforts.
“We did a pretty good job of staying on top of helping every consumer on social prior to using Sprout, but the way that we were doing it internally was pretty inefficient,” Rosch said. “It was fairly disjointed. If a consumer came to us through multiple channels, social was usually siloed from that and it was a little bit harder to connect all the dots.”
However, with the Smart Inbox, Trek was able to unify all its social channels into a single stream to monitor incoming messages and quickly respond to customers.
“The amount of time our customer service team was spending on each customer service case on social was disproportionately long compared to other customer support channels,” Rosch said. “We initially started looking at Sprout to make scheduling and publishing easier, but it became clear the Smart Inbox could help significantly with another pain point we had with customer support.”
Director of Marketing Strategy, Ecommerce and Events
Message Tagging also became a Trek favorite, empowering the team to easily label and quickly organize incoming messages to provide greater context and insight.
“With the amount of messages we get from different social networks, it can feel like drinking from a fire hose,” Rosch said. “Tagging has really helped us take that inflow of information and make it usable. Whereas before, it was an overwhelming amount of information.”
Sprout’s collaboration and workflow tools have also been helpful for Trek’s offices outside the US. For instance, Message Approval Workflows enable teams to create sequences for submitting, reviewing, approving or rejecting outgoing messages to ensure all social activity stays consistent with brand guidelines.
“We have some offices that work with agencies in different markets,” Rosch said. “So in some of our developing markets like India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, the marketers in those offices are setting up approval workflows so they can communicate with their agencies better.”
Global Social Media Manager
Tuning up
Evaluating performance using social data has long been a priority for Trek, and it now enjoys Sprout’s powerful social analytics and reporting tools.
“We have multiple angles that we look at data from,” Rosch said. “If we want to do a deep dive on content, on audiences, on specific campaigns—the analytics feature is a big one for us.”
In addition to providing customizable performance reporting options, Sprout’s data analytics are easily exported into presentation-ready reports, streamlining the sharing of information within Trek’s marketing department and beyond.
For instance, using Sprout’s Group Report, which aggregates common social metrics across networks and timeframes to highlight overall performance and health, Trek can show internal stakeholders that in the past six months, the company’s primary business profiles across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have garnered a:
- 59% increase in total social messages received
- 112% increase in total social followers
- 1,002% increase in total social engagements
The company has also expanded how it collects business intelligence using Sprout’s Advanced Listening product, which allows organizations to uncover valuable insights related to their industry, brand and competitors through social conversations.
“We’re in the middle of this evolution where we’re trying to get more data inputs directly from consumers,” Rosch said. “What we are trying to do is make more informed decisions by being better listeners.”
Global Social Media Manager Taylor Murphy explained how Trek can find conversations relevant to its brand outside of direct messages from customers.
“Our community manager uses listening to look for places where we’re being mentioned or talked about without people tagging us so he can participate in those conversations,” Murphy said.
This allows Trek to proactively identify, track and engage in conversations with both current and prospective customers.
The company is also focused on how social listening can help it better understand how its brand and products are perceived in different markets.
“As we continue to understand what platforms people are on when they’re having conversations about us and contextually what kinds of conversations they’re having, that helps us take the theories and plans we have and make them into something more concrete,” Rosch said.
Director of Marketing Strategy, Ecommerce and Events
Pedaling forward
Trek is committed to relentless progression, ensuring its products are continually refined to provide customers with bikes and cycling gear they love.
It makes sense the company would invest in a social media management platform also dedicated to simplicity, elegance and evolution.
“Previously we were using a publishing solution from one of Sprout’s competitors, and it felt like it was moving in the opposite direction in terms of functionality,” Rosch said. “Being able to move to a platform that is consistently expanding has been really nice.”
And while Trek’s primary goal on social is driving qualified traffic to its website using targeted ads, there’s no denying the efficiencies and opportunities offered by Sprout have been a boon to the company, both in and outside of marketing.
“I know that a lot of the feedback we get on social gets cataloged and delivered all the way up through the organization to our product teams,” Rosch said. “We’re really into aggregating and understanding consumer feedback at scale, so having an easy way to collect consumer feedback that comes in through social, organize it and deliver it—it gives us a variety of ways to get really direct, honest, unfiltered feedback from consumers.”
From a small shop in America’s Midwest to a global leader in cutting-edge cycling technology, Trek has always been dedicated to giving its customers the best.
With the help of Sprout Social, it can make sure it’s on the right track.
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