Curation: Custom made

To paraphrase the science fiction series Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the internet is big. Really big. The indexed World Wide Web is currently estimated to consist of nearly 4 billion pages; at the end of 2012 there were 634 million websites, 51 million of which had been added that year; and every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Faced with this unimaginable and still-growing quantity of content, how do people find the products and information they want? For brands in every business, it’s becoming more and more important to have an answer to this question, in order to compete effectively for consumers’ limited attention.

But according to Marc Mayor, chairman of ‘curated ecommerce’ site ToTheTops.com, they are largely failing. “There is a plethora of choice of products. There’s too much and it’s undifferentiated,” he says. For example, if you’re looking for a kitchen knife on Google, the search engine will offer you about 26 million results.

One way of helping shoppers find the one product they want is via personalisation – sites tailor the experience according to information held about each customer, usually based on browsing habits identified through cookies. At its simplest, that means a different home page for new customers from the one that returning customers would see.

There’s also the option of taking an approach that’s more editorially or creatively driven, using different kinds of content – either aggregated, user-generated or independently-created – to help consumers navigate in the most appropriate direction. This is the approach taken by ToTheTops, which focuses on women’s lifestyle products, sorting them according to the recommendations of experts and celebrities including fashion blogger Bip Ling, ex-footballer Patrick Vieira and TV presenter Ben Fogle.

The site launched in France at the beginning of this year and in the UK in the spring. As Mayor puts it, “the idea is to provide the eyes and ears of experts to guide people towards new products and designers”, however, he also points out the concept is hardly new.

“Magazines have been doing this for ages. We’re taking the same approach but going more in-depth than magazines can, then adding all the convenience of being able to buy directly.”

According to Mayor, what makes the site work is the credibility that the experts bring to it, and the trust that customers have in them.

“The site works as a customisation engine, but it’s not a database approach,” he explains. “It’s about following the lead of the experts, and the content really depends on them. So the first step is people getting to know the experts and then getting to know the products.

“What we find is that a customer’s first purchase comes about three months after joining, then repeat purchase rates are very high. And the average purchase amount increases with each order as the customers see the promise of the site being fulfilled. What’s more, the average purchase value is much higher than for most ecommerce sites, and it has doubled since we opened.”

This content-driven strategy isn’t limited to start-ups. Established brands such as online fashion retailers ASOS and Net-A-Porter similarly use a magazine-style approach to highlight new products and styles. And even brands without an ecommerce model, such as Sainsbury’s Tu clothing brand, have adopted a similar strategy, albeit with a slightly different aim.

“Our website has a specific role within the Tu communication mix – to drive awareness and consideration for the brand between store visits,” says Sainsbury’s digital and content marketing manager Susie Doherty. One way it does this is to feature fashion shoots on Tu’s dedicated area of the Sainsbury’s website, offering a ‘shop the shoot’ function that gives product and pricing information along with a store locator.

“We operate a ‘browse online, purchase offline’ model and structure our content to support this. We use content to add breadth and create features that give our customers easy-to-follow styling ideas and advice. Our content aims to introduce new customers to the [supermarket own-brand fashion] category and encourage those who currently shop with us to look at parts of the range they may not have previously considered.”

According to Doherty, Sainsbury’s research showed that before being persuaded to purchase, customers wanted to see Tu established as a credible fashion brand and to be shown that a supermarket label can not only be an economical way to shop but also a trend-led and inspiring experience. The brand works with content agency Seven to create fashion content as well as tapping into the knowledge of its own fashion experts, buyers and designers, with the aim of establishing Tu’s credibility.

“Ultimately, we are looking at conversion of Sainsbury’s customers to become Tu customers, but to do that we need to build numbers and interest,” Doherty explains. “We track a range of different online measures: reach, engagement and propensity to purchase. And in addition to site analytics, we use online surveys and focus groups to delve deeper into what kind of content our customers would like to see on the site, as well as watching market trends.

“We know the approach works, as in research we recently ran 43 per cent of Tu customers said that they thought the brand had improved as a result of seeing our new content.”

Nokia is another brand that has used content in an attempt to improve credibility rather than to drive direct sales – a strategy that has so far continued to be employed since Microsoft announced its purchase of the manufacturer’s smartphone division on 3 September. According to Craig Hepburn, Nokia’s global director of digital and social media, the company adopted a content-led approach in the spring of 2012 to address the fact that the brand was no longer seen as cool like competitors Apple and Samsung.

“It’s all about social media,” explains Hepburn, speaking to Marketing Week before the acquisition was announced. “When you buy an expensive item, you want the validation from your social network that you’ve made the right decision. We can’t say we’re cool or trendy; we need our advocates to say that.”

For this reason, Nokia concentrated on curating external content, such as reviews, rather than creating its own.

“We started working with a company in New York called Percolate, which curates content from the web specifically for you,” Hepburn says. “It was really successful, and we found that rather than us writing content, it was curated content that helped bring people in.”

As a result Nokia developed a website it called Switch Hub to pull together content about its products from around the web using hashtags and keywords.

“We called it Switch Hub because it’s all about getting people to switch their decisions,” Hepburn says. It might be argued that the effort has failed to change behaviour at sufficient scale or speed to save Nokia’s business, but he argues that the marketing activity has succeeded in shifting opinions of phones such as the Lumia, even if the generally good reviews and user feedback haven’t yet translated into a high market share.

He also makes the case that Nokia’s approach to online content, curating it on key web pages to assist customers’ browsing, has had a demonstrable effect all the way through their journey of clicks, from discovering links on sites such as Facebook. “Instead of taking them to a product page, they go to a specific, socially determined landing page. As a result, we’re seeing a 30 per cent increase in time on site and a click-through rate to the product pages four times higher than we were getting with the previous landing pages.”

As with Tu and ToTheTops, the human element of the curation is crucial, but in Nokia’s case it is supported by computers selecting relevant content from other sites.

“Content capture is automated, choice of what to publish is human,” Hepburn says. “We use a social media content management system called EngageSciences across all our sites. When the content managers come in, they see a massive list of content and they choose what to publish.”

A key point for Hepburn is to show both positive and negative comments on the brand’s sites. If people just saw positive comments then it wouldn’t work because people wouldn’t believe it, he says. “When people see a balance of comments, that’s a good thing, although we do take out things like swearing.”

Nokia’s key metric for its content strategy is engagement. The brand has developed a framework that breaks this down into four sections: ‘learn more’, ‘buy more’, ‘do more’ and ‘share more’. Learning takes place pre-purchase, while the last two elements relate to consumers’ actual usage of the products and how they discuss it with peers.

“Against each of these we have key performance indicators (KPIs), so, for example, in social media it’s the number of ‘shares’,” Hepburn explains. “The framework defines the KPIs and the KPIs define what content we curate on the site.”

Hepburn points out that most companies used to spend 90 per cent of their marketing budgets on the equivalent of Nokia’s ‘buy more’ phase. The new framework, with its recognition that people are at different phases of ownership of a product through the year, has changed Nokia’s approach.

All these brands have their own take on take on curating content – where Nokia’s revelation was that they didn’t need to create it because it was already out there, ToTheTops leans heavily on its trusted experts – but all are now relying on it to guide consumers towards the products and information they want and need.

As Hepburn summarises, “more and more companies are looking at the curation of content as a tool.”