Marketing

Captivate Your Audience with Content Curation

April 13, 2011

I’ve preached from content marketing’s pulpit for a while now. I believe, if done well, it allows a company to promote thought leadership, provide relevant information to specific market segments, and boost customer engagement.

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And while I still think that unique content development is a worthwhile initiative to pursue, there’s a new fad gaining momentum that might be more useful for resource-strapped startup and expansion stage businesses: content curation.

BtoB Magazine’s Paul Gillin argues that curation is the new creation when it comes to content development. Quite simply, content curation is a great way to develop thought leadership, ramp up your customer engagement, and provide valuable insight to your customers and prospects — all without having to commit the significant resources needed to develop unique content on your own. And, according to Mashable, curation is here to stay.

So, what is content curation and why should you be curating?

According to Pawan Deshpande, the CEO of content curation company HiveFire, it’s the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. MarketingProfs describes content curation as a resource that “allows customers to receive a manageable amount of relevant content from trusted sources.”

In that sense, content curation is a win-win for businesses and their consumers. It’s much simpler than content development (since you are not creating something from scratch) and, with the wealth of information available on the web right now, it provides companies the opportunity to become a resource library for their customers.

That’s especially important for expansion stage companies that may lack the resources to produce the mass quantity of unique content that’s necessary to compete with current experts or thought leaders. It allows them to instead search for and share the best new ideas in their industry.

Proof is in the Pudding

Content curation has already been described as a major content marketing trend for 2011 by Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi.

If you’re still not convinced that it will work for you, consider that company’s that succeed with content curation can experience the following benefits:

  • Build Thought Leadership: By providing your audience with information that solves their pain points and piques their interest, you are already on the way to improving customer engagement. In short order your company could become the go-to resource on cloud computing or collaboration. What CEO or marketer wouldn’t want that?
  • Boost Web Traffic: If the content you are curating is properly optimized for search engines, you should eventually see a pickup in the amount of traffic coming from Google and Bing. Similarly, your marketing team has a larger quantity of valuable content that they can promote to your followers to drive customers and prospects to your site.
  • Meet Your Goals: By now, CEOs understand that they can’t simply tout their companies and products. They must also truly engage with their customers. Of course, that’s not always easy. Content development can suck up a lot of time and money. Conversely, content curation is an easy way to adopt the content marketing way of life without draining resources.

Late last year, I wrote about OpenView’s content curation process for the Content Marketing Institute. The article goes into great detail about the steps marketers need to take to get started and I recommend reading it through if you’re considering content curation.

In summary, there are three basic steps that companies need to take: identify content, summarize or repackage it, and ensure quality control. Here are a few other measures to follow:

Set guidelines for your curation strategy

What audience are you targeting? Do you have a specific content type that you’re interested in sharing with your audience? How will you define valuable content? Answering those questions will ensure that any content you curate will be consumed by your audience.

Determine your curation model

Will you use a tool like Curata or Google Alerts and RSS feeds? How many employees will participate in the identification of content? How will you organize the content? It’s important to answer those questions beforehand to ensure a well thought-out process.

Pick your resource

What is the budget? How often will you curate? What are your expectations? Will the curation efforts fall on someone’s plate internally or will you use a freelancer to summarize found content? Make sure to answer those questions to determine if curation can be folded into someone’s existing responsibilities.

Is 2011 the Year You Begin Curating?

Ideally, content curation will be supplemental to your own content development efforts. But, if your company isn’t on board with a full-blown content marketing strategy, that’s OK.

My suggestion? Start with content curation and show its value. If you’re having trouble getting coworkers and employees to contribute, set up an email thread that encourages them to share any interesting, relevant content that they stumble upon throughout the day.

Another great tool is Paper.li. Earlier this year, I discovered it after receiving a notification that blogger extraordinaire Darren Rowse included one of my posts in his “daily issue.” Immediately intrigued, I set up The Open Marketer Daily Issue.

I’ve been really impressed with how easy it was to set up and curate my own daily “newspaper.” By  syncing my Twitter stream with Paper.li, I had a customized newspaper that was populated with blurbs from my own tweets and tweets from the people I follow. Be careful with Paper.li, though. You may not always agree with the content it chooses, so keep an eye on it.

Here are a few quick tips to get started with Paper.li and encourage content curation through your employees’ Twitter accounts:

  • In order for your daily issue to be relevant to your target audience, it’s important to ensure that your employees are only following the “right” set of people or companies on Twitter.
  • Encourage your employees to create a Paper.li account or, with their permission, create one for them.
  • Monitor and watch your Daily Issue to ensure all of the content is appropriate. If it isn’t, consider “unfollowing” people who seem to tweet content outside of your topic areas.

That should get you started with Paper.li. But don’t stop there. Just because you may not have the time or resources to commit to a full-blown content development effort, doesn’t mean you have to shy away from content curation, too.

Remember, it’s inexpensive, relatively easy to execute, and the rewards certainly justify the investment. So, what are you waiting for?

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.