3 No-Brainer Reasons To Curate Content

Content Curation To The Rescue!

Reasons to curate contentAs Gartner’s Jake Sorofman points out: “Content is the grist for the social marketing mill. Without compelling, insightful, inspiring content, social engagement simply fails to happen.”

Yet, creating sufficient new, tailored content to distribute across social media and owned platforms on a regular basis is overwhelming. Content curation to the rescue!

DEFINITION: Content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject. (BTW–Here’s the ultimate content curation glossary.)

3 No-brainer reasons to curate content

Here are the 3 reasons to curate content that you can use to make the case to your boss.Reasons to curate content

1. Promotion doesn’t yield great results.

Face it, consumers just aren’t that into promotion unless they’re seeking a deal before buying. They can smell an ad a mile away. They’re blind and deaf to most ads regardless of where they appear.

As an Argyle Social analysis of over 150,000 social shares presented via Convince and Convert showed, self promotion on social media by itself yielded a fraction of the clicks with so-so conversions. By contrast, a combination of original and curated content yields twice the clicks and better conversion!need to curate content

Intuitively this makes sense since you’re not continually saying ME, ME, ME.

Social media is about contributing to the community. Self promotion is seen for what it is and as a result, participants don’t pay attention.

Content curation enables you to talk about issues key to your business and brand while providing your prospects with information they need. It’s even better if you can get influencers involved in the process.

Case study: Orbit Media’s Blogger Survey

Orbit Media’s Andy Crestodina developed, executed and analyzed an 11 question survey, a form of user generated content curation. In Survey of 1,000+ Bloggers: How To Be In The Top 5%, he got 11 top bloggers to contribute their input on a specific survey question.Need to curate content-survey and influencers case stude

Results:

  • 1,800+ social shares
  • 170+ links including Copyblogger and Jeff Bullas. (Invaluable for search results!!!)
  • 40+ email registrations (Note: A lot for their agency.)
  • Case study and blog post. (Check out the details on how to run a survey.)

Actionable Content Curation Tips:

  • Get your employees, customers and influencers involved in your curated content. This eliminates effort by getting others involved. It’s not just creating content because that still takes work. The bigger payoff comes from other people’s investment in sharing and distributing your content!
  • Provide information that your audience finds valuable. Unless you give your customers useful information, they’re not going to pay attention.

2. Marketing resources are limited.

If you’re like most marketers, you don’t have sufficient budget to continually create new original content without having maximized the reach and longevity of your existing information.

The top 4 challenges on 2014 B2B Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs Research got down to a lack of people and budget. Specifically, they were:

  • A Lack of time.
  • An inability to produce enough content.
  • An inability to produce enough of the right kind of content.
  • The lack of budget.

Reason to curate content is limited resources

Content curation enables you to give new life to existing content through good categorization and referencing.  (BTW: Here’s the argument for Original Content VS Curated Content. Check it out, you’ll be surprised by the results!!!)

Case study: Razor Social email newsletters

Razor Social’s Ian Cleary does a great job of this in his emailings. He doesn’t use a preformatted excerpt. Cleary writes a tailored note in his fun Irish style linking to at least 1 past article. Content Marketing Trick

Result:

  • Drives traffic to articles readers may have missed. 

Actionable Content Curation Tips:

  • Audit all of your own content. Don’t limit yourself to information in the marketing department! Think holistically about content management across your entire organization. The objective is to re-promote information that’s still relevant and to re-imagine older content to make it fresh again. Actually this is golden, free content.
  • Add metadata to ensure you can find your older content when you need it. Having 10 articles related to Valentine’s Day is useless unless you can locate them and make sure they’re up-to-date and social friendly.
  • Provide context for other people’s content. Extend your reach by adding your context and brand to other people’s information. Even better work with influencers where possible.

3. Prospects actively seek purchase information on their own.

Regardless of whether the product is consumer or business oriented, customers do their purchasing homework online first.

In fact, they’re 57% of the way through the process before marketers realize that they’re even in market.Best Lead Generation Tips

Extend your content offering with curation to provide the 5 basic types of content customers seek.

Case study: Ravelry

Ravelry allows members to see other knitters’ creations based on a specific pattern. This form of content aggregation brings all of the information about a pattern together encouraging knitters to create more user generated content.

This in turn can help sell the pattern. Here’s an example of Enchanted Mesa by Stephen West. (Note: Ravelry allows knitwear designers to sell their patterns for a small fee.)Ravelry-Enchanted Mesa-Curated Content-1

Community curated content

Actionable Content Curation Tips:

  • Curate content across relevant platforms. This includes places like Amazon and TripAdvisor.

To meet the challenges of not being able to generating enough quality content, use content curation and interweave your brand into a combination of your own and other people’s content. Then share it across different social media platforms.

Remember that your company can’t just toot its own horn on social networks because your participants, including your target market, just don’t care.

Want to find out more about how to curate content? Here are a few suggestions:

What has your experience been with curated content?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen


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