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Discover the potentialities of a well-done Content Curation strategy on IMA to make your fashion business stand out among the crowd.

Content Curation is that form of content marketing that consists of discovering and sharing content that surrounds a valuable subject to your target audience.

Have you ever wondered whether it can be advantageous to share relevant content with your customers through an Instant Messaging App (IMA) or software? Yes, it is!

As a matter of fact, even if Messaging Marketing stems from social networks, it’s already passed the engagement levels of any other social media.

Simply put, people prefer to communicate in real-time, also with the brands they love!

Numbers in hand, you should take into consideration that:

  • 56% of people prefer to write messages than to contact a company by phone;
  • 2 billion messages are sent monthly through IMA between companies and their customers.

Stunning, isn’t it?

That’s why you can no longer ignore doing content curation through apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Snapchat, Kik or Telegram, which allow you to share various kind of written and visual content in real-time.

The IM (Instant Messaging) Content Curation’s benefits stand for themselves:

  • It’ll allow you to turn a one-way communication into a real conversation with your customer;
  • You’ll be able to better identify and reach your niche target or buyer personas, connecting the right readers with the right information;
  • It’d increase your brand awareness and trust, as well as boosting your SEO;
  • You’d establish yourself as an expert of your fashion sector, acting as a hub, an aggregator of the best content available on some specific topics;
  • You’d show your work to those who are interested in what you do, building loyalty and exploiting a more direct channel of communication.

Content Curation: what’s it exactly?

content_curation

“People need curation, they need someone who finds the best content they actually want to consume. Regardless of your niche, your buyer personas are starving for someone to make sense of the most informative content for them.”

Don’t get me wrong: doing content curation doesn’t simply mean collecting content on the Internet.

Rather, it means taking the time to filter, organize, and select only the resources that really fit your business and your target audience, by adding a comment that shows your own perspective on the subject through your own brand voice.

Unlike content marketing, content curation doesn’t include generating content, but gathering content from a variety of sources and delivering it in an organized way.

Yet, in the same way as content marketing, a curation strategy uses content to create awareness, generate leads, and convert them into real customers.

So, in short, curation means sharing stories, articles, blog posts, infographics or videos with a crowd who is excited about consuming them, whether they’ve been shared on social media, websites, or IMA!

Why should it be so important to your fashion business?

Simple. Because, nowadays, people want to find and read influential pieces of digital content, and – as you surely know – they aren’t always so simple to be found on the Internet. Basically, they need you – as an expert – to find those material for them.

Just see this process as a two-way street: curating well would give you traffic and authority among your target audiences, while they will receive reliable answers and entertainment.

Effective content curation isn’t easy, but the more practice you get, the less time it will take you to find valuable content, develop your own message, and share it with your customers!

IM Content Curation: a four-step process

4_step

In the specific, the main steps to achieve an IM content curation strategy are basically four.

So, let’s dig into the process itself!

Step 1: Identify your buyer persona

Naturally, the first thing to do is identifying your business’ buyer persona.

If you want to be successful and don’t waste your time, you should choose those customers that may be really interested in the content you’d like to deliver on IMA!

«A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers»

How to find them?

Just in the same way as you’d do for any other social media or content strategy, by:

  • Looking at the data and insights you already have, going from Facebook Pixel to Google Analytics;
  • Giving a look at your contacts database or sale department information;
  • Producing some new data through qualitative or quantitative surveys. 

Step 2: Strive to find content your buyer persona cares about

Curating good content isn’t enough, if they aren’t exactly what your target audiences are looking for.

Never forget that your IM curation strategy’s goal should be to steal your buyer persona’s attention in a few seconds!

To do so, start asking yourself these questions:

  • Why do you want your buyer persona to connect with your company?
  • Why should they pay attention to your curated content?
  • What’s your target audience’s main needs and problems they’d like to find answers about?

When you’ll have found out the answers, you’d be ready to start your content research, that can be done in several ways, like:

  • Subscribing to some valuable newsletters or RSS feeds in your market niche, to get updates from influential websites;
  • Taking a cue from other curation platforms;
  • Finding interesting visual material on social media.

Step 3: Add your comment and share it through your IMA

As already said, doing content curation doesn’t simply mean finding interesting content, but also including your thoughts to create an added value for your audience.

Good commentary on IMA in quite similar to the social media copywriting process and should consist of:

  • A short summary of the curated content itself;
  • Your own commentary and thoughts about the subject;
  • A valuable CTA (call-to-action) to make your buyer persona react or share it.

Step 4: Share frequently through a planned schedule

If you want your target audience to become addicted to your curated content, you need to be consistent and publish regularly, according to the hours and days when your audience is active the most.

«The user who really loves engaging with your curated content, will want them more and more»

You should also vary the kind of fashion content you share, and some samples may be:

  • Infographics
  • Memes
  • Videos
  • Fashion news
  • Articles
  • Animated Gifs

3 Fashion Brands that bet on IM content curation

burberry

In the current fashion industry, the digital transformation is pushing the entire economic sector towards a new dimension that’s entirely focused on the direct relationship.

In fact, the main global fashion players are concentrating their investments on the relationship with a new digitized customer, who’s no longer limited to a passive reception of the product.

So, be ready to face out a new complex customer journey, where the customers are digital before, during and after their purchase!

Let’s see some meaningful samples of it!

1. Burberry x WeChat: an international content curation

The Burberry Group is well-known for its several digital partnerships and the adoption of different platforms to market its products.

Burberry has decided to bet on WeChat for their international content strategy, namely the Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent, which has already taken hold worldwide with its 1.1 billion monthly active users.

burberry_content_curationThe company has created its own WeChat news feed, where they inform the customers about new arrivals, the latest fashion trends, and various other links or curated content whose CTAs lead back to the brand’s official website, achieving meaningful traffic from the strategy.

2. Chanel x WeChat: frequency is the key

Also Chanel adopted WeChat, quite for the same reasons and goals.

Yet, they don’t run a service account like Burberry, but instead they chose the WeChat Subscription account, which allows a brand to post content more frequently.

chanel_wechat_content_curationWith that account, Chanel has created a few mini-sites to provide its followers with product information, brand history, fashion tests, events, make-up tips and content news, in the form of both text-based articles and video content.

3. Sephora x Kik: a specific buyer persona

Sephora, on the other side, has become the first beauty retailer to use a messaging app for its customers, in this case Kik and its chatbot, namely the most loved IMA by teens that counts 9.17 million monthly users in the US.

sephora_kik_content_curation

A singular choice, which is the result of a meticulous analysis on a specific buyer persona: in this case, people between 14 and 20 y/o that mostly love Kik.

On Kik, Sephora offers makeup tips, product recommendations, item reviews, video tutorials, and curated articles.

Conclusions

Those were just a few samples of fashion companies and brands using IMA to do content curation: in fact, you can decide to adopt any other app that better suits your strategy, including SnapChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

The choice is up to you, and now you surely have some more weapons to do it right.

So, what are you waiting for?

 

Want to build your first buyer persona but you don’t know exactly how? Download our free template and discover the 20 questions that will make you find your potential customers!

IPad_mockup_template_buyer_persona_EN

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