Three Ways Reverb.com Creates Relevant Content (and How Your Music Brand Can Too)

Using customer data to create better content.

Reverb.com, a site that enables users to buy and sell music gear online, is giving huge online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon a run for their money. The music brand does it by creating highly relevant content that is aligned with user interests.

What your music brand can learn from Reverb.com, and how it creates relevant content:

1. Maintain Control of Customer Data

Reverb.com has full control of its own analytics, giving it access to powerful insights that ensure its content will resonate. But it wasn’t always that way.

In a post from the company’s blog Fretboards and Motherboards, Joe Levering recalls the difficulties they had when too many analytics services handled their customer data:

“With data spread all over the place, it became difficult to get a big-picture view of our analytics. The services we used allowed us to answer most of our smaller, more feature-focused questions, but we wanted to start consolidating our data to derive deeper insights.”

Takeaway: Managing your customer data in one place ensures your music brand can get a complete view of customer behavior and preferences, making it easier to create relevant content.

2. View Every Customer in Multiple Ways

To create highly relevant content, you have to understand your customers’ lifestyles, not just their likes and dislikes. Reverb.com works hard to up the personalization-ante by looking at more than buying history. Reverb also looks at customer behaviors, demonstrated preferences and specific musical interests. The approach gets very granular: For instance, a blues guitarist may have a vastly different buying experience on Reverb.com than a jazz guitarist. Likewise, two dealers, both selling amps, may see the site content in completely different ways. That granular approach is what gives Reverb.com the edge.

Takeaway: Don’t limit your brand to “You might also like” recommendations. Data allows you to anticipate the interests of every customer and provide the most personalized messages and relevant products possible. Be creative with how you use it.

3. Create Original Content

Reverb.com creates original content for its website and YouTube.com to personalize the customer experience in a variety of ways. Reverb.com also creates articles that answer questions customers commonly search for, such as, “What are the five best small tube amps?”

In an interview with Music & Sound Retailer, Pete Schu, former Managing Director of Content at Reverb.com, explains why:

“Even with all the search engine optimization (SEO) tips and tricks, and all the back-end keyword information you can work on, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have compelling original content.”

Takeaway: Creating original content will enhance your inbound marketing strategy while also helping your music brand connect with customers in meaningful ways.

At the end of the day, Reverb.com creates relevant content to make buying and selling easier for every customer. Your music brand’s customers expect and deserve the same level of personalization. Serving up content that lets each customer know you see them as an individual will help you pull ahead of the competition.

You can read Levering’s complete blogpost here and the Music & Sound Retailer interview here.