How Wauwaa is creating valuable content to grow a community passionate about its brand
Tell me a story. Use evocative language, inspiring graphics, beautiful imagery and original sound. Tell me a story which draws me in and keeps me with you and prompts me to tell you how I feel about it. Tell me a story which I want to share with the world, and come back to you tomorrow for more of. Tell me a story. This, you see, is how we do things at Wauwaa.
Our business is e-commerce retail, that’s where we make our money. Our income is made from the sale of baby and nursery items online. But our content marketing is an essential facet of our overall marketing activity, and it feeds directly into our digital marketing strategy. As a result, our brand is about more than just commerce. It’s about content and it’s about community. Let me explain.
Telling stories to address content marketing challenges
At Wauwaa, we recognise that great content drives digital traffic and we accept that consumers are turning away from traditional marketing. That’s why we create high quality, valued and relevant content to reach outwards and grow our community. It enables us to develop brand loyalty within a family of smart, engaged consumers. This community serves as our call to action – in fact, it does our calls to action for us. For yes, it is this ever-growing group of followers who give leads to new consumers, introduce them to our trusted brand, and in turn help generate conversions.
So what are we doing?
We believe that content marketing is more than an art form – it’s also the age-old profession of publishing. With that in mind, we are committed to the regular creation of high quality content tailored to the desires, tastes and demands of our target demographic.
It is largely parents who engage with our content. They find us through our community reaching outwards and sharing, or they find us through searches, because part of our content strategy is to create informative resources for new parents seeking answers.
This does not mean we seek above all to seed our content with search-optimised keywords and other such crude search ranking tactics. We have confidence in our content naturally arriving with those who seek it, because it is well-designed and researched to meet the needs of our target audience.
Our audience, on finding good content, shares this good content and engages with it. The stories we tell become important to our consumers, they trust us, they grow with us, they become passionate about our stories and what we stand for, and they share our excitement for parenting. Through content marketing, the Wauwaa community becomes larger, dedicated, and loyal.
It is clear then to see that our community grows organically because our content is tailored to its needs. It isn’t only informative either. It is there to entertain, to encourage and to support. It is there for enjoyment, for distraction, and for reassurance. It is there to nurture a parenting community who in turn nurtures our business because we are a brand who is trusted.
Our content also then, of course, supports our business. Our target audience is expectant parents and parents of young children. Our content strategy is based around the topics they are interested in – breastfeeding, weaning, safe sleeping – for example. And this content gives us the opportunity to point readers towards our products.
We don’t go overboard with this. We are clear about it when we do it. We are upfront about the associations we make between themes and products. Crucially, there is no trickery. There is no attempt to lead content consumers to where they don’t want to go. But we do give them options. And we believe they will convert their engagement with our content into purchases on our site. This is because they know our stories, we’ve engaged them, we’ve talked to them, we’ve entertained and encouraged them, we’ve gained their trust and we’ve nurtured them as parents too.
As the e-commerce side of our business continues to grow, so will the content creation arm. We will continue to develop quality video content, and this will take the form of longer, possibly serialised webisodes. Our community will, more and more, feed into this content too – and we will expand our platforms for user-generated content so that the stories told at Wauwaa come not just from within the company. The content will also continue to inform. The commercial side of our company, Wauwaa.biz, will continue to publish content which educates and draws on our experiences, and we invite the wider business community to join us in telling their stories.
How do we measure the success of content marketing?
We don’t judge the results of our content marketing on immediate conversions – we know growing communities takes time. We do, however, measure our growing rates of engagement through social and digital channels. We want to take our community on a journey with us, we want them to be involved in our brand story and to be excited about our future. We show our community the stories of our own lives to this end – they see the individuals behind our brand, and they see that we too have stories to tell. Ultimately, we have confidence that engagement will continue to result in conversions, calls to action to wider communities, and assistance towards up-selling.
At Wauwaa, we don’t believe that content marketing needs to be a competition between businesses within industries. We don’t believe that, on this front, businesses must outdo their rivals to win the attention of consumers. Content marketing is more subtle than that. Being ahead of the game, so to speak, doesn’t necessarily mean outdoing your closest competitors for conversions. Not immediately, anyway. Content marketing is instead about following a longer process.
Our consumers come from a community in love with good content. And that’s why we’ll keep telling them our stories.
Ivan Lopez will discuss the Content Marketing approach used by Wauwaa at the Smart Insights conference taking place in London on the 17th September.
Thanks to Ivan Lopez for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Ivan is CEO and Co-founder of Wauwaa You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
A Retail Content Marketing Case Study: Wauwaa
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