Content creation is adding your voice and value to handpicked content that you know will help your target audience and then sharing it with them.
It is often a super easy tactic to execute and can be executed for no additional budget … yet have amazing results!
Content curation is a great approach because it is so much easy than creating original content; you simply have to curate it for your audience and provide some context.
The reason it is considered part of your content marketing is not because what you are sharing is content, of course it is, but because content marketing is all about demonstrating your expertise to build trust and be seen as an authority or expert.
So, you can’t simply cut and paste links and flick them on. That’s why it is called ‘curation’ and not simply ‘sharing’.
In this episode, hear about two great examples of content curation that I’ve used to help boost businesses’ marketing.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
As part of the service, I have had this episode transcribed. Transcribing, proofing, and editing a podcast episode is A LOT of work. That’s why I use a service called REV who provide professional freelance transcriptionists who are vetted for quality. While they offer a 99% accuracy guarantee, I do not proof-read their work extensively. Instead, I simply copy and paste below and, as such, please note that this is not a verbatim transcript of the episode and I have trimmed things like the intro, close, and mid-show ad.
Content marketing is clearly an extremely effective marketing strategy for a lot of businesses, especially those with small budgets, because they can create content without any outside assistance. So, they spend time instead of money on content. That’s the thing about marketing – if you want something done, you have to spend time and/or money on it.
The pretty stock-standard approach for a lot of businesses is to blog once a week or once a fortnight and make sure that goes up on the website, a link gets posted to their social channels, and it goes out in some sort of email newsletter.
Like I said, pretty straight forward.
There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that approach but many people realise it is a pretty thin approach and wish they could do more. The challenge is, they don’t have time to create more content and, often, there is no budget either.
Of course, I’ve spoken in the past about creating marquee pieces or content and repurposing them into smaller pieces of content but, even still that might be a stretch for some.
One content approach that is super easy to execute is content curation.
Content curation is a great approach because it is so much easy than creating original content, you simply have to curate it for your audience and provide some context.
It is the same as what an art gallery does. An art gallery doesn’t create the art they show. They either buy it or it is curated from artists. The galleries job is to take the art, the content, and bring it together in a valuable way for visitors and this includes things like descriptions, how it is hung, where it sits in a journey, how it is lit, what other artwork is nearby etc. They certainly don’t just stick up the next piece that comes along.
I suppose we should define ‘what’ content curation is before we go any further. Content creation is adding your voice and value to handpicked content that you know will help your target audience and then sharing it with them.
The reason it is considered part of your content marketing is not because what you are sharing is content, of course it is, but because content marketing is all about demonstrating your expertise to build trust and be seen as an authority or expert.
So, you can’t simply cut and paste links and flick them on.
Instead, you need to provide the context and added value, otherwise, your audience can go straight to the source. It doesn’t need to be 1,000 words of value but, you should add some context to help your audience i.e. how does this apply to them, and/or flesh the content out more and maybe even outline what parts might be missing or what might need to be adapted by your audience to their industry. Or, it could just be your expert opinion on why they should consume the content.
If I had to tie content marketing back to one or more of our 8 marketing objectives, I’d say that brand awareness would be a key one because, if you syphon off content curation and share it independently of your other content i.e. in standalone comms, not buried in an existing email newsletter, then there are more opportunities for your brand to be front of mind and get or maintain awareness.
There are also some links to relationship building as you continue to enhance your reputation as someone helpful and that leads back into the trust and authority I spoke about before.
OK, so you are on board with curating content? Great. Once you figure out how and when you are going to distribute it, you are going to have to set up some consistent good sources of content to fill your funnel.
For me, when I curate content, I have a few key sources, about 15, where I get emails with content links but, also, as I go about my day, if I come across something interesting, I’ll make sure I send myself a link. Whether it is an email link or I’ve sent myself a link, I simply have a word document where I dump them all. You might want to be more organsied and systematic, that’s up to you, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be a consistent and workable source of content and housing ready for use when you go looking.
There are plenty of other tools, basic through to pro, and free through to subscription based, but simply Google content curation tools and you’ll find plenty to work with.
However, I’d suggest that some easy ones to get started with would be signing up for email newsletters, setting up Google Alerts for key phrases and following Twitter lists where others are sharing content.
After the break, I’m going to share two examples of content curation – one I used to use and one I use now.
As I mentioned earlier, content creation is adding your voice and value to handpicked content that you know will help your target audience and then sharing it with them.
The reason it is considered part of your content marketing is not because what you are sharing is content, of course it is, but because content marketing is all about demonstrating your expertise to build trust and be seen as an authority or expert.
So, you can’t simply cut and paste links and flick them on. Instead, you need to provide the context and added value, otherwise, your audience can go straight to the source.
Before the break, I promised to share some examples of content curation that I’ve used.
The first was one I used to use at SponServe. SponServe was the world’s first cloud-based, SAS, sponsorship platform that sports teams and brands use to manage their sponsorships.
When we first started the business we have xero brand awareness and that was on the back of a completely new to market solution for people. So not only did we not have brand awareness, we didn’t even have brand credibility in terms of having runs on the board.
To get runs on the board, we needed to sell licenses but we didn’t want to be the pushy sales guys. So, one thing we added to our marketing was content curation. What I used to do, each week, was send an email to our database of industry contacts which collated all of the sponsorship jobs, at teams, brands, and agencies.
It was pretty simple, just well formatted text and links to the advertised jobs, so, I had a bunch of job alerts set up to help me gather all of that.
However, the adding our value part wasn’t just limited to collating all of the jobs into a handy resource. No, I also used to reach out to those who were looking to fill roles and just touch base, introduce myself, and let them know that we’d done something helpful and shared their role with the exact people who work in the industry.
In that engagement, I also used to provide a like to a free eBook titled ‘The First 30 Days In Your New Sponsorship Role’ which was a playbook to help people settle into any new sponsorship role.
Interestingly, while we were just looking for an excuse to be relevant and have our brand in people’s inboxes, and then use that sharing to show we were being helpful, two very interesting things came out of it all.
One, people started asking us to share the jobs they had in their organisation, so, we had another opportunity to help and two, by looking at the stats from the email campaign, we could see those who were actively looking at links and that could indicate the person was looking to move on from their role.
For example, if I noticed Mary at ABC Sports, had been clicking on job links in her area, consistently, for a few weeks, that told me she could be looking to move. The cool thing was, if Mary was a client, there was a chance she would move to someone who wasn’t a client and hopefully we could then piggyback our platform into her new organisation off the back of her recommendation.
As you can see, with a little thought and application, doing something as small as sharing jobs in our industry became a pretty cool little marketing tactic and it cost us no money.
The second example is a current one and that is the email I send each week, on a Friday afternoon, which has my selected read of the week.
My read of the week is simply me sharing an article that I read during the week and which I think my database, who are mainly small and medium businesses, would find value in.
However, in the body of the email, I write about 300 words or so and outline why I think it is worth their time and what they’ll get out of it. That may be in the form of relating it to SMEs or maybe how they might apply the information in their business.
I also share that Read of the Week on LinkedIn for some added brand awareness and social media engagement.
The purpose of the Read of the Week is to keep my brand in the awareness of my target market and demonstrate my expertise and position myself as helpful.
Interestingly, one small thing I do is add a list of jobs and clients I have worked with that week. The idea there is that I have a few people in my network who don’t understand the breadth of my skills and so, by sharing with them that I might have been doing some graphic design, web development, running a social media workshop, podcasting, writing content for websites, blogging, writing articles, working on SEO, or sorting Google Ads, then maybe when they need something like that they’ll remember I can do it.
Also, because I am in Canberra, a town with only about 400, 000 people, a lot of the brands I work with are known by others in the business community and so that subtly adds weight to my work.
By the way, if you aren’t getting my read of the week, just let me know and I’ll make sure I add you to the database.
So, as you can see, executed properly, content curation isn’t just about flicking a link onto your database and saying “Read this”. However, not does a lot more effort need to go into the curation to really add value you it.