Content Marketing Today

When It Comes to Great Content Marketing,The Blue Water Bistro Puts Simon Properties to Shame

By taking a look at the content marketing of one national giant and one small local company, you learn quickly that a big-budget has very little to do with great content marketing.  In fact, we can learn what not to do by looking at a Simon Property Mall site.  On the other hand, we can get a very good idea of what we should be doing by looking at the Blue Water Bistro site.

Bad online content marketing makes a beautiful mall bland and boring

You sure would think that a company as smart as Simon would do a brilliant job of showcasing its malls on the web.  You would especially think that a brand-new mall, like the Coconut point Mall in Estero Florida, would deserve special treatment.  But if that’s what you thought,  you’d be wrong.  This is what you find when you look up the Coconut Point Mall on the Internet. Yikes!

Interestingly, they ask the apparently rhetorical question,”Want to mark this as your preferred mall?” Needless to say, based on this lame web page, I can’t imagine anybody marking it as their preferred mall. For starters, there is  supposed to be an image–and presumably a good one– on this page of the mall itself.  Instead , you see the universal image for a missing graphic.  Apparently, nobody cares enough to check to see if the image is coming up. Thinking that this might be a momentary glitch, I waited three days and came back to see if it had been fixed.  But no,it had not.

A nice picture of the mall that you won’t find on their website

In fact a new local law firm, Estero Law, did a much better job publicizing its opening with a nice-looking web page that included this image of the mall.They even used a color scheme that complemented the Tuscan color scheme adopted by the mall.
As you can see, the mall is very nice-looking indeed. But there would have been no way to know that from the Simon Coconut Point page.

Drilling down doesn’t get much better

When you search for more information about restaurants and shops, they do provide varying degrees of detail.  But they offer text only, with no graphics to showcase any of the individual retailers or restaurants. For example, when you look up “The Blue Water Bistro,” you see a really bland boring page with a bunch of text.There is a link to a map at the bottom of the page.  But that link doesn’t actually show you where the restaurant is on the mall property.

Here is what you don’t see on the Simon website

Actually, there is also a link to the Blue Water  Bistro website , but that requires an extra step to reach the kind of powerful graphical images that would inspire potential diners to consider the restaurant.  How hard would it have been to include a nice photograph that would illustrate what a wonderful restaurant it is? Once you get to their website, then you’re motivated.  Then you’re hungry. Then you’re ready to make a reservation. But you won’t be inspired by the lifeless way the Simon website conveys the information.  

Why online content marketing is so important for this mall

Southwest Florida welcomes millions of tourists each year. Many of these tourists will become future residents. These tourists are actively searching on the web to figure out what to do and where to go. If they have heard about the Coconut Point Mall, they’re going to be very disappointed once they get to the website. And, if they are looking for restaurant,they’re also going to be disappointed because they will not get the flavor of the many fine restaurants they can sample at Coconut Point.

With just a little extra effort, Simon could have fashioned a website that accurately reflected  the colorful and charming nature of the mall. Instead, we find a bland and boring site that is full of text and absent of graphics.

The Blue Water Bistro–now that’s great content marketing

Again, this is a case for even a small budget could have created a much more interesting website.It’s not about the money.  It’s about the mindset.

This is proven by the incredibly creative folks who run the Blue Water Bistro as well as several other local restaurants. It’s not a big company. But it’s smart and creative. And they do a much better job of content marketing than the folks at Simon Properties.

In fact, I’m hungry already.