Content Curation, Please

According to this free Curata ebook, “Content curation the act of distilling information in an editorialized nature that helps your audience make sense of the big picture.” For specialty outdoor retailers, curating content is about providing information about your business and your local outdoor community—where to go outside, how to be best prepared to go outside, and who to go with. Furthermore, curating content is about storytelling. It is about telling the stories of your business and its mission in ways that are useful, engaging and fun. More than many other industries and businesses, specialty outdoor retailers have truly inspiring stories to tell with an expert voice. 

 As OIA has reported, “Some experts believe consumers are becoming fatigued by the limitless choices and information they find online. Retailers who help consumers navigate this maze of decision-making with thoughtfully curated collections of truly special products and experiences will be rewarded.”

In this great trends report, Hubspot reported, “Creating more and more content will be among the top priorities for marketing teams in 2013. In addition to the increase in allocating budget to content creation, we’ll find increasingly more curation services and “content marketplaces” that will help marketers deliver more in a content-heavy world.”

Content that serves a purpose will be critical. Hubspot writes, “To do marketing better in 2013, marketers will need to go beyond simply creating content to creating a personalized experience for their target customer that’s seamless across multiple interactions. These experiences will leverage context to make a company’s marketing jive with the searcher’s proclivities – the things you’ve learned about your leads over months and years of talking with them. The things they do, the things they say, the sites they like, the products they purchase, their happiness level with your company - all to have deeper and more meaningful relationships and better results.”

So why generate all this content? As retailers, the lifeblood of our business is selling product, but in the fast-changing digital service landscape (whether you are selling online or not), the amount of product you sell is increasingly tied to the big ideas: giving people experience, educating them, building trust, and being perceived as a town center.

According to Curata’s excellent free ebook on the case for curating content, “content marketing now outpaces search marketing, PR, events, and TV/print/radio advertisements as the leading B2B marketing tactic. Why?

Because content curation offers a bang for your buck in the following ways:

• Revives dropping or stagnant site traffic
• Improves poor SEO performance
• Increases the quantity and quality of leads
• Reduces lead acquisition costs
• Enhances brand credibility & thought leadership positioning
• Aides in the lead nurturing process
• Lowers content creation costs

Providing content for customers—through multiple social and mobile channels—that serves a need is becoming the best way to market your store—not only as the premier, local shopping experience, but also as the true informational hub of your outdoor community. As discussed earlier in this trend report, curated content in context is the best way to make marketing work better, by making it sharable and ultimately, indispensable.

According to Hubspot, “The SEO of tomorrow will be less about having the right H1 tag or the right keywords on the page and more about creating really good, original content that is socially consumed and shared.” Retailers can win the SEO battle through good content curation.

To create targeted content, you need the appropriate messaging to shepherd that audience through every step in their journey. Outdoor audiences need content that:

• Raises awareness by helping access the core components of an outdoor community: where to go and what to do locally outside; who to go with; where to purchase the apparel to suit the lifestyle
• Promotes discovery by drawing their attention to the fact that your company has the products, services, and expertise to serve them anytime, anywhere
• Fosters comparisons by allowing your company to showcase its knowledge, expertise, and authentic local knowledge, thus differentiating you from your competitors
• Encourages a sale by providing the right information to help people access the experiences that are conduits to products

RootsRated was built for specialty outdoor retailers to share their passion for their local surroundings with like-minded travelers and customers, with an easy-to-use mobile tool. It is a technology platform that allows retailers to amplify the authentic knowledge possessed by their staff. In so doing, it provides customers with a new and better way to tap into your outdoor community and places knowledgeable retailers at the center of that community. As stated eloquently in this great article on location marketing, “With any new technology at a marketer’s disposal, the value is not in the technology, it’s in what great marketing ideas the technology enables. Location-based marketing won’t work if the goal is just to interrupt more effectively. The big ideas matter more than ever.”