By Michael Gerard, CMO, Curata
Marketing’s desire to increase the quantity and quality of sales-ready leads has never been stronger than it is right now. However, the days of relying solely upon outbound marketing (e.g., traditional advertising channels, cold calls, snail mail) are long gone.
By Michael Gerard, CMO, Curata
Marketing’s desire to increase the quantity and quality of sales-ready leads has never been stronger than it is right now. However, the days of relying solely upon outbound marketing (e.g., traditional advertising channels, cold calls, snail mail) are long gone.
Today’s “enlightened marketers” are slowly beginning to develop a deeper relationship and level of engagement with their buyers through content marketing. The vast majority (87%) of marketers, in fact, have content marketing as a key part of their strategy, according to Curata’s Annual Marketing Trend Survey.
The proposition is — at the surface — highly attractive to your average marketer. Create great content that is relevant to your buyer, and use marketing automation (refer to Marketo’s recent Demanding Views post) to measure and optimize the impact and ROI of this process.
There’s one big problem: Few marketing organizations have the budget or the talent to support a sustainable stream of high-quality content. And as good as your own created content may be, your audience wants to be exposed to other expert opinions that will inevitably offer different perspectives on topics that interest them. What’s a marketer to do?
There are two options available to boost your content marketing engine and help supplement your created content: Aggregated content and curated content.
Content aggregation is the act of bringing together articles and other types of content on a similar topic, and grouping them together with no additional commentary or annotation. A tool like Google Alerts provides this type of service. Aggregation is done primarily by software and may or may not take into account any quality of sourcing. Aggregation is a great way to get real-time updates in an automated manner. However, there is a high risk of providing low-quality and irrelevant content to your audience.
The second option is content curation, defined as “when an expert consistently finds, curates and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.”
There are a few key parts of this definition worth highlighting.
- A content curator is an “expert.” Content curation cannot be performed solely by an algorithm. It involves a person who is a domain expert on a specific topic; understands their audience; is selective in choosing relevant content; and increases value by creating content as part of the curation process.
- Content curation is something that needs to done “consistently.” Other forms of offline curation can be performed once, such as curating an art gallery. But when it comes to online curation, a good content curator is continually and consistently staying on top of a topic area as a trusted resource for their audience.
- A curator is not simply regurgitating any content that they come across, but they are very discerning, discriminative and selective in only sharing the “most relevant and highest quality” content in an ethical manner.
- A curator focuses on the needs of their “target market.” They do not curate on all topics under the sun, or solely on the trendiest topics. Instead, they specialize on a “specific topic” of importance to their audience, and over time the content marketer becomes an authority and perhaps even a thought leader on that topic.
As marketers, whether we realize it or not, most of us have been curating content for quite some time now. Examples include: Tweets that provide short commentary and a link to an article of interest to your readers; a blog post where you quoted a couple of comments from other experts on a specific topic and then offered your own insight and guidance; or an infographic where you gathered data from multiple sources, with attribution, to provide value for your readers. However, only the most advanced content marketers are fully leveraging curation to improve their inbound marketing strategy with great success.
Michael Gerard is the CMO of Curata, a provider of content curation software that enables marketers to improve their content marketing strategy. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelgerard and on Curata’s Blog.
