One of my first jobs after university was working for a nonprofit arts organization. The organization had a small gallery where local artists displayed their work. The artists would create shows around specific themes and only hang pieces that related to each other and made sense in the context of the show. Then, people who were interested in these themes would come to the opening and buy the artists’ work.
Curating content is much like putting together an art exhibition. Instead of randomly sharing whatever you think is interesting, you need to think about how it all blends together. In a business sense, you also must consider whether the content will attract your target audience and get them to take the next step in working with you.
This means that instead of simply retweeting an interesting article, you must also discuss it and explain why your target audience should find it valuable. Just as an artistic work can be a commentary on society, your curated content should include your own unique commentary.
When you do this, you can see a number of benefits from content curation, including:
1. Produce more content, faster.
According to the B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report, the biggest challenges that B2B content marketers face are finding time to create content and producing enough content. Content curation can help with this, as it’s not as time-intensive as creating original content from scratch.
2. Bring more targeted leads to your website.
One of the biggest objections to content curation is the belief that you will drive your target audience to others – such as your competitors. After all, your competitors would be the most likely to create content that is of interest to your target audience.
However, content curation doesn’t mean sending people to your competitors. While you should always cite your sources and include links to the original content, you should also host the content on your site to bring people back to you. A great example of this is Upworthy, as this site finds videos that already exist on the Internet, comments on them and shares them.
3. Increase your conversions.
Some savvy B2B marketers are starting to use curated content as bait pieces to get more leads to opt in to their lists.
One example is a recent DigitalSherpa webinar called “Curating High Conversion Content Without a Single Original Thought”. If you look through the slide deck for this webinar, you will see that it is made up entirely of curated content.
MarketingSherpa also ran a case study about Aternity, a B2B software company that used content curation to increase its newsletter subscribers by 130%. The case study is worth a read.
Many people believe that curating content enhances your thought leadership. I think this can work to a degree. Commenting on others’ content can help you get your name out there, but in my opinion, you must also create plenty of original content if you want to be seen as an expert in your industry.
When it comes to generating more B2B leads, you’ll get the best results when you use original content and curated content in tandem.
Join the 2014 Content Sharing and Curation Challenge!
I’ve started a Google+ community for B2B marketers who want to achieve better content marketing results without spending all of their time developing content. To take part, simply join the 2014 Content Sharing and Curation Challenge community. I’ll post lots of resources throughout the month. We can also share ideas and help each other become better content marketers in 2014.
One of my resolutions for 2014 is to put the ‘social’ back into my social media presence, and that means not just pushing out content — but also interacting with others’ content. This article points up the need to curate content as well, which is part of being ‘social.’ I agree that curating content is a good way to be helpful, but that it’s important to add value — by proving your own perspective. Do you think it’s always important to add value, so it’s like a MT instead of a straight RT, or is it okay just to put the content out to one’s network (with attribution, of course) without adding much to it?
Hi Carl,
Thanks for the comment! Yes, when curating content, it’s critical to put your own spin on what others are saying. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time positioning yourself as a thought leader. However, it can be hard to add much commentary to a tweet, as you don’t have the room. You have more opportunities to add your own opinions if you curate content in the form of a blog post, video, webinar or podcast.
It’s also OK just to share content without adding your commentary. However, this isn’t true content curation.
I generally like to do three things – create original content, share content (without commenting on it) and curating content. All three are good and serve different purposes.
I hope this helps!
Rachel