Content marketing platform RootsRated Media has re-branded to better reflect its focused vision to empower small and mid-sized business’s marketing teams. The newly-named Matcha, headquartered in Atlanta, will continue to grow its team in sales, marketing, success, product and engineering.
RootsRated was founded in 2012 as a media business focused on the outdoor sports and adventure travel market. RootsRated.com became the leading outdoor content website on the Internet, and the team began thinking about how they could help other companies in their space create content.
“We started seeing a broader opportunity around helping brands in that industry with content marketing,” Fynn Glover, the startup’s founder and CEO, told Hypepotamus in an interview earlier this year. “In 2015 we made a decision as a company to start to transition the business away from its original concept as a publishing business, and towards the opportunity around tech-enabled services for content marketers at small-to-medium sized businesses.”
Glover identified a gap faced by marketing teams at smaller companies. As it becomes easier and easier to set up an e-commerce shop, more brands than ever before are attempting to capture a segment of online shoppers. In the last four years, entrepreneurs launched 800,000 new e-commerce companies — most of them categorized as small businesses.
To build a brand presence, generate traffic and convert users, every business needs content — for websites, social media and blogs. But content takes time, something every small business is short on.
RootsRated launched its Compass tool in 2016 to help solve the problem. The platform was seeded with thousands of articles about traveling, the outdoors, wilderness, sports and other relevant topics, which marketing teams could license for their own sharing purposes. They also provided access to a database of freelancers that marketers could employ to create custom content.
In years following, RootsRated added data analytics tools to the platform so marketers could also measure the success of the content they chose to use.
“We typically start working with an organization that has a content supply problem,” explained Glover. “When they buy Compass, they’re solving that supply problem. Then they’re integrating that content directly into tools that they use — WordPress, their blog, driving that content through different channels and then using the platform to measure the success of that content.”
Compass grew increasingly popular, and RootsRated focused more energy and resources on building out the platform. In spring 2018, they raised a $6.5 Series A capital round led by Atlanta firm TechOperators. They also announced a headquarters move from Chattanooga to Atlanta, primarily to take advantage of the talent market, according to Glover at the time.
Since moving to Atlanta, RootsRated has added 10 team members to their original 20. They will continue to “hire aggressively” on the heels of this re-brand, according to a company representative.
Though RootsRated.com will remain populated with content, the whole team is really focusing on Matcha, according to company representatives. The expanded content marketing platform functions in much the same way as Compass — it contains 10,000 articles available for licensing, the freelancers network, paid social media planning and management, and data analytics on content performance.
“Just as Matcha tea provides lasting energy to the drinker, we believe our content, insights and services act as fuel to boost marketing efforts and drive sustainable growth for small and medium size businesses,” said Glover in a statement.
Matcha still serves a niche industry market — largely businesses related to its original verticals of outdoor apparel and travel — but the re-brand also serves to position them in the larger market of what they call “the E-Commerce Revolution 2.0.”
Glover told Hypepotamus that their ideal industries are markets that sell products direct-to-consumer, see a lot of fragmentation (so there are many smaller competitors), and sell a product that is “experiential in nature.”
“Imagine a backpack or a hiking boot — it’s really sold through experience,” he said.
Featured photo provided by Matcha
