Welcome back to our Viral Solutions series on creating authority content. Last week we discussed how to develop high-quality original content as a way to establish yourself as an authority in your field. However, not all of the content you share has to be original. You can position yourself as an expert through strategic sharing of pre-existing content created by other respected businesses and entrepreneurs in your field in a process known as content curation.
Even if you make content marketing a priority at your company, you’re going find it difficult to create enough content quickly enough to meet all of your marketing needs. In fact, of the biggest challenges facing B2B marketers, the ones at the top of the list are typically a lack of time, an inability to produce enough content, having a hard time producing content that engages an audience and a lack of budget for creating that content.
Content curation solves all of those issues, making it extremely beneficial for your company.
Here are just a few of the reasons why you should make content curation a part of your authority content marketing campaign, and how it can help you to continue to position yourself as a thought leader in your field:
- It gives you additional perspectives: By offering more diverse points of view, you are able to enhance your credibility. Even if you’re regularly producing high-quality content, it can come off as selfish and overly self-promotional to only share your own content via social media platforms. A willingness to share outside voices indicates to your audience that you are finding the best content available to share, which builds greater trust.
- It allows you to expand the content you offer: You need a whole lot of time and resources at your disposal to produce a huge volume of content yourself. Spare yourself some of the time and expense by sharing high-quality content already created by others. This content can fill in the gaps that exist in your current content offerings, providing additional depth of information or expertise that might otherwise be lacking in your current content library.
- It helps you create more engagement: Not only does content curation simply give you more you can share on your social media pages outside of promotions and your own content, but it also helps to increase engagement overall. For example, you can look at great content produced by other people in your field and see which blog posts have been most liked, shared and commented on social media channels. Chances are, if a post has done really well at creating engagement on one social media channel, it will do the same on yours.
- It can connect you with other experts in your industry: By not only creating but also sharing great content related to your field, you will instantly be seen as someone with whom other people in your industry want to associate. You will be able to get access to other authorities in your industry, making you seen as more of an authority by association.
- It can help you tap into new audiences: By sharing content created by others, you are more likely to bring those audiences into your fold, increasing your readership and the amount of people who have eyes on your brand and your products or services.
- It can help you spread your content to other audiences: If you share content created by others, they will likely be amenable to returning the favor. This also gives you another opportunity to reach out to new audiences in that people who might not otherwise have been exposed to your content will see it posted by authorities or brands they are already following, which will lead them back to you.
- It helps gives you time to create high-quality content: Because you are saving time and resources by focusing at least a chunk of your authority content campaign on content curation, you can take the time you need to create high-quality content of which you are proud, and that you are sure will resonate with your audience.
What tactics ensure your efforts get noticed?
Leverage ‘underground’ content. “Effective content curation highlights amazing content that readers have never seen in a way that adds value and impresses the original source. Share valuable content that people haven’t seen so you become the go-to place to find the best content. To build brand awareness and grow a following, you want to be a trend finder, a trend analyst. My curated content with the most engagement is not content found in the most obvious places for my industry. Anybody can take articles from popular sites and share them. It doesn’t stand out. True value comes from frequenting locations that are abstractly relevant – the places that publish content strongly relevant to your audience 10 to 20% of the time. When the content is relevant, it resonates because it’s fresh, new, and otherwise unseen by those in your space. They aren’t willing to dig to find that content, that’s why they need you.” ~ Ross Hudgens at Content Marketing Institute
Content Curation Should Offset Promotional Content. “Customers grow tired of brands ceaselessly promoting their own wares. Which is why today’s progressive brands think beyond products or features. Successful brands understand that the relationship customers have with brands today transcends the product itself. A product may initially attract you to a specific brand, but it’s what the brand offers after the purchase that will keep you around (and make you a fan).” ~ Patrick Armitage at HubSpot
Share curated content on your social networks. “Social media is one of the channels where content curation is key to staying relevant to your followers and growing your following. Follow the Social Media Rule of Thirds, put your pride aside and share other people’s content. Why is it important to share outsider content by other businesses or thought leaders? It shows your audience that you know the industry well, that you’re collegial and are aware of competition. It shows that you’re collaborative and confident enough in your own brand to share another’s content. It also doubles your exposure by potentially connecting you to another brand’s audience or online community.” ~ Kristina Cisnero at Hootsuite
The Three S’s of Content Curation: Seek, Sense, Share. “Content curation is a three-part process: Seek, Sense, and Share. Finding the information or “seeking” is only one third of the task as Mari Smith points out in this video about why curation is important and some tools for doing it. Making sense of the information is just as important. Sense making can be a simple as how you annotate the links your share, the presentation, or what you’ve left out. Sensemaking can be writing a blog post using the links (like this post) or summarizing the key points in a presentation. However you create meaning, but it has to support your organization’s communications objectives or your professional learning goals.” ~ Beth Kanter
While content curation might not take as much planning and effort as creating your own original high-quality content, you should keep in mind that it still requires a strong editorial commitment. You must carefully consider what forms of content you are willing to share, and what sources you do and do not want to support.
Stay tuned next week for the next strategy you can use to help establish yourself as an authority figure in your field through content marketing.
Queen of the Machine for Viral Solutions LLC
“If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.” ~ Simon Mainwaring
