To increase your brand’s organic visibility, you’ll need to develop content that keeps visitors on your site. The search funnel for many brands, especially purpose-driven ones, can begin with educational and informative content.
In our recent Fire&Spark Fireside Chat, we spoke with Nancy Youssef, founder of Curves with Purpose, about content marketing and how it’s helped her launch and evolve her local brick-and-mortar pop-up shop into a successful eCommerce brand.
The Shift from Ad Spend to Content
Nancy Youssef started Curves with Purpose to improve the accessibility of larger sizes in clothing for women. When launching the brand, she discovered that her paid marketing wasn’t working without a foundation of compelling content.
That’s not to say that Youssef and her team did not actively use paid marketing at all; in fact, they built small pop-up shops in local areas and then based their advertising efforts around that.
They were surprised to find success with this strategy because customers could interact with real people who understood their pain points and could provide solutions. Additionally, customers could physically interact with the products themselves before purchasing them online.
This frequent interaction between customers, employees, and the store’s products allowed Youssef and her team to hear the feedback they needed to create personalized content specific to their audience when they eventually transitioned to an eCommerce platform.
The brand only wanted to use real people and real stories in their content to showcase the kind of work the business was doing with its clothing line—and using this strategy paid off. It wasn’t long before they started attracting influencers that promoted the products, which exponentially increased brand awareness and sales.
Creating Purpose-Driven Content
Youssef envisioned Curves with Purpose as a way to give back to the community, partnering with other organizations such as Soles4Souls. However, as the brand began to grow, so did its other purpose: to create a community where people could be themselves and express themselves through clothing.
The online store soon started creating content that centered around these values. They first worked with influencers to share stories about their experiences with their products. Eventually, they started offering incentives—such as gifted clothing—for everyday consumers to share their own stories. The brand encouraged honest feedback, good and bad, so that they could learn and adapt their products according to what their customers needed.
Through this, the business eventually created a product that most of their customers loved—so much so that they were making unboxing videos for the item online without the brand’s incentive.
Ultimately, Curves with Purpose continued to grow through word-of-mouth among consumers and PR product placement, such as in newspapers and national magazines. Youssef credits this to her brand’s purpose, products, and—as is the case with every successful startup—luck.
However, the most significant factor that drove the business’s growth is authenticity. Without it, customers and PR organizations wouldn’t be interested in hearing or sharing the brand’s story.
After Curves with Purpose established authority and credibility in the industry with mission-driven content, the brand tried paid advertising again. This time, they were much more successful—all because they chose to build their brand with compelling content first. Creating engaging content is an integral part of SEO, one of the pillars of Authority First SEO.
