With the holidays fast approaching, marketers are focused on finding ways to break through the noise and get heard. We’ve put together a list of 12 content marketing tips to help you stay focused this holiday season. Read the full post to see the tips and enjoy the infographic.
12 Drummers Drumming = Creating a consistent beat with your distribution channels. Publishing consistent, relevant and timely content will create trust in your audience by getting them the best stuff when they need it. Creating an editorial calendar with a few weeks worth of content planned will allow you to meet that goal.
11 Pipers Piping = Like piping frosting on a holiday cookie, piping your content through an editorial team is a key step. Ensuring that the t’s are crossed, i’s are dotted, links are checked and the content is edited. Don’t forget this important step in the process when publishing your content.
10 Lords-a-Leaping and 9 Ladies Dancing = Target audience is always top of mind with every marketer. Lords, Ladies, lads and maids – who is your content for? Whether its curated, created or syndicated, knowing your prospects and customers allows you to create content that will resonate with them. Have you thought about surveying your readers on what they would like to see more of? Even as a brand, getting this type of feedback can help tweak your editorial calendar to be more effective. This information trickles into your nurture and other ongoing marketing campaigns as well.
8 Maids-a-Milking = There’s no harm in milking the most out of the content you have on hand. Use facts from a webinar to create a Twitter campaign, driving traffic to the recorded webinar. Use an eBook to create blog posts that dive deeper into a particular category. Applying the content marketing pyramid in your content organization will help organize your steps in re-purposing what you have.
7 Swans-a-Swimming = Swans are always hungry. Like any animal, wild or domestic, they need to eat. This is not unlike your organization’s content beast. It needs to be well fed with the right content to satisfy its appetite. I’d like to recommend a great eBook that provides tactics tips and tricks on how to keep your beast satiated. Download How to Feed the Content Beast (without getting eaten alive).
6 Geese-a-Laying = Every year, geese are driven by their DNA to fly south for the winter, following a similar path year over year. Marketers don’t always follow the same path to engage with their customers, but they do follow a standard of content marketing. Curating ethically by providing clear attribution to the original source of the article, retitling the article in your curated post and checking all images for copyright issues are three important steps. To read more check out our eBook, Content Marketing Done Right, which provides a more in depth look into how to ensure you’re following best practices in your content marketing programs.
5 Gold Rings = 5 gold rings would be a great adornment for any aspiring rockstar. Following 5 simple tips (identify, follow, organize, create and share) to becoming a content curation rockstar will also help an aspiring content marketer push his or her brand to best in class status. These tips can be found in 5 Simple Steps to Becoming a Content Curation Rockstar.
4 Calling Birds = Calling birds, or colly birds? The original lyrics aren’t clear, but what is clear is how often marketers share content. In our recent Content Marketing Tactics Survey, Best-in-Class marketers are sharing anywhere from once a day to three times a week. How often are you sharing your content?
3 French Hens = Whether you speak French or English, it’s important to know the differences between curated, created and syndicated content before making decisions on what will work for your organization.
2 Turtle Doves = Content marketing success isn’t always through creating a large quantity of content; it’s working smarter with what you already have. An article by Arnie Kuenn on Content Marketing Institute discusses Google’s latest iteration, Hummingbird, and how “…creating content that is a match for a specific question may outperform content that doesn’t.”
And a Partridge in a Pear Tree = A partridge in a pear tree is like knowing your audience. While partridges are primarily ground dwelling birds, they occasionally perch in pear trees. With content marketing, as we’ve mentioned throughout this article, knowing your audience is the first step to success. If it doesn’t resonate with your audience, then it’s not relevant.
Click to Tweet this Infographic!
We’ve gone through a wide range of tips and tricks to help your content marketing strategy this season. Now it’s your turn. What’s one tip you use to provide your organization with Best-in-Class marketing? Please comment below.
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Content Curation Marketing (CCM) is the one-stop online destination for all things curation. Our mission is to answer all our readers’ questions, provide new insight, and collaborate with industry thought leaders to provide the best and most relevant content available.
We follow our own best practices when curating. Choosing the most appropriate and diverse articles, annotating with our own insights, and giving credit to the original author so that you, the reader, know who wrote the piece and where to follow up for more information. For more on how to annotate curated content, check out this blog post.
Here are five curated examples on our favorite subject. They help provide information not only on the topic, but insight into what curation looks like as well.
1. Content Curation Tools a Must-Have for Content Marketers
Find out what industry experts are saying about content marketing tools in this piece.
Original Article on Content Marketing Institute
2. Content Marketing’s Secret Weapon: Content Curation
Want to know more about how you can benefit from curation and what tools to consider? Check out this one!
Original Article on Crowd Content
3. A View into Content Marketing in 2014: Q&A with Michael Brenner
VP of Global Marketing at SAP, Michael Brenner, offers insight into his content marketing tactics.
Original Article on B2B Marketing Insider
4. Storytelling With Content Curation
Still don’t see the difference between curation and aggregation? This article dives into how curation is more like storytelling, and provides more examples of curated sites.
Original Article by Nancy Pekala
5. How a Software Company Increased their List 130% With Content Curation
This case study provides detail on the steps for launching a content curation campaign, and how to get major results.
Original Article on Marketing Sherpa
Are there articles you find helpful? Drop us a comment below with links to your curated content and we’d be happy to share!
Need more information or just want to learn more about content curation? Download Curata’s eBook: Stop Egocentric Marketing.
]]>Identifying Challenges
Several of the experts we talked to cited sustaining content creation over the long haul as a key challenge. Jeannine Rossignol, VP marketing communications at Xerox, says the initial challenge was understanding their brand’s target audience and what was important to that audience. Then came the task of maintaining the flow of content. “How are we going to sustain it so it’s relevant, engaging, and targeted?” she points out.
Often, content creation is delegated to only one or two employees who many burn out over time due to the constant need to feed the content beast, points out Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. “Folks can feel like they’ve run out of ideas,” he says.
Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and cofounder at Marketo, echoes this point, adding that it’s also challenging to create compelling thought leadership that says something new to elevate your brand. He also mentions the difficulty of “creating enough variety and types of content to engage broad audiences at different stages of the buying cycle.” This relates directly to how marketers focus too much on talking about themselves and their own brands, supporting the notion to stop egocentric marketing.
Developing Solutions
But while these companies face similar challenges, their marketing pros have different approaches to overcoming them. Rob Yoegel, Content Marketing Director at Monetate, stresses the importance of hiring someone with writing abilities and subject matter knowledge rather than simply hiring a journalist to tackle content marketing.
Rossignol says when Xerox examined the company’s case studies, they realized that they weren’t telling them from the customers’ perspective. Instead of writing up case studies in a challenge/solutions/results template, they started interviewing customers more and inviting them to blog about the issues they’re facing. The result? Now it’s completely from their perspective. This approach is a great content marketing technique to provide different opinions, and to market your brand through the voice of your customer. Combining both the company perspective and the customer prospective allow the buyer to understand the full breadth of your offering.
Miller suggests approaching content marketing from multiple angles: creating your own content, reaching out to third-party writers through online marketplaces, and curating content. “Go out and find really good content, and curate it with your own commentary to create a holistic view of all the different kinds of content you might want,” he says.
Of course, “any content a brand publishes should be aligned with its customers”, as Odden points out. “Tap into the stories that will connect with solving problems for customers and at the same time communicate the value you bring as a brand,” he says. Communities can be “never-ending sources of ideas to fuel your content marketing efforts.”
Using Curation to Address Content Marketing Challenges
Several of these experts stressed the importance of content curation as part of a best-in-class content marketing program. Miller says it’s especially useful during the relationship-nurturing phase. As an example, he mentions someone he’s known for a couple of years who periodically sends links to articles in the New York Times or the Economist and adds a little bit of his own commentary. “It’s an incredibly powerful way to maintain the relationship,” Miller says. Curation is also helpful in reaching multiple customer personas at multiple stages of the buying process.
Curation plays a critical part in content marketing’s goal to become a publisher in your target market, according to Yoegel. “Your can’t do it all,” he says. “You have to curate the best content from different websites and publishers and put that out to your customers.”
When Xerox began publishing a new magazine around the theme of optimism, Rossignol says the company partnered with Forbes to “help tell the story and give us permission to play with our targeted audience.” She says the combination of the original and curated content “gives our prospective clients a fuller picture” of the topics they read about.
Are you faced with similar challenges at your organization? We’d love to hear from you and learn how you overcame your content marketing challenges. Please post a comment below or drop us a line at [email protected] and we may feature you in an upcoming post.
Who doesn’t love a little content marketing coverage?
]]>“Marketers are realizing they can’t just create a one and done content campaign,” Handley says. “It becomes a lifelong effort creating the kind of content that’s going to engage your customers, that’s going to delight them.”
While advertisers can take a set it and forget it approach, content marketing requires ongoing work. “The biggest challenge is finding the time and doing the work,” Volpe says.
Savvy organizations are meeting these challenges in a few different ways. Volpe mentions the importance of choosing a few effective content marketing tools to streamline your time instead of taking the duct tape approach, while Handley stresses the growth of staff roles like chief content officer, director of publications, or editorial director. “They’re hiring people to drive that bus, to create engaging content, and to build audiences,” she says. “They’re finally putting the systems in place that are allowing them to create engaging content.”
Moyle takes a purposeful and disciplined approach to content strategy where he sits down with keywords and cranks out 30 blog titles to work on in the coming weeks. “There’s no such thing as writer’s block,” he says. “You just have to do it.”
Not surprising, the three marketers see content curation as an increasingly vital part of content marketing. “It’s hard to create enough of your own original content to be able to tweet 15-20 times a day,” Volpe says. “Having curated content that you can publish helps because it’s things that they’re going be interested in. I think curation can be a really important part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.”
But as Moyle points out, curation is not about aggregating other people’s content. Curation is about adding value for your own readers by identifying the best and most relevant content for your audience, selecting main points from the content you’re curating, and wrapping own insight and guidance around that. “The smarter we get, the better our tools are, the more we can do that in a regular and ethical and respectful way,” he says.
Handley uses curation not only to share content but also to get a pulse on emerging conversations and trends. “I use it to listen … to see what else other people are publishing,” she says. “What are the hot buttons for marketers? It’s a way to prospect socially through your content to create more content that’s engaging.”
Do you agree? Do you have similar challenges? We want to hear from you – leave us a comment and let us know.
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Digital business demands innovative digital marketing content. How are you marshaling your content to survive and thrive? This session will discuss what it takes to create a replenishing and sustainable supply chain of content through content creation, curation and cultivation efforts.
When: Tuesday, September 17th, 6:00pm to 8:30pm
Where: Grill 23, 161 Berkeley Street (at Stuart Street), Boston Ma
David Quinn from EMC on Agile Marketing: David Quinn, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at EMC will describe the way he entered the Agile world and some of the trials, learning’s and advice he acquired while EMC defined and deployed agile marketing.
When: Thursday, September 19, 2013, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Where: 410 Totten Pond Road Suite 350, Waltham, MA
At B2B Forum, you’ll gain insight from professionals who understand that while every business may face the same choices there’s no one right choice that suits every business. You’ll learn what new ideas are out there and how to choose the best options for your marketing programs. Plus, you’ll learn how to move from decision to implementation to inspired sensation.
When: October 9–11, 2013
Where: The Westin Copley Place, 10 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02116
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Content Marketing World 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio has wrapped up for the year and we’ve spent the past several days soaking up all the great information on mobile content, digital marketing, and more. In case you missed this epic marketing event, you can follow along all the tweets by searching the hashtag #CMWorld. Here’s a look at 15 of the great tweets that caught our eye
- @posull78: Remember your customer is on a learning journey & story & content must be relevant for each stage of that journey @marketingbuddy #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @MarketingProfs: This is the bar your content has to clear on social: “Are you more interesting to me than my wife?” @jaybaer #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @kateeidam: 4 archetypes of content creation: promoter, poet, preacher, professor; the magic is in the mixing of these models @Robert_Rose #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @RepCleveland: Cut your copy in half and then cut in half again. That’s probably the right amount of copy. #conversionoptimization (#cmworld) Click to Tweet
- @jeffreylcohen: Marketers are a rare breed of human species that trust their gut feeling over scientific testing @chrisgoward #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @hgaynor: Think about if customers are seekers, considerers or in active solution phase and tailor your content accordingly. #CMWorld Click to Tweet
- @getcurata: don’t forget writing about your customers – interviews, case studies, creative stories – they can provide great blog #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @brandcontent “Worry less about selling better and more about teaching better” @jaybaer #CMWorld Click to Tweet
- @PamDidner “We’re all looking for a happy ending, but when you look at data, there’s no ending, it’s continuous” at #CMWorld Click to Tweet
- @Jen_L_Watson Adopt a newsroom mentality to surface timely content opportunities for your brand. #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @RobYoegel “Story-doers” do much better than “Storytellers,” says @wilsonraj. Don’t try to look at data or insights w/o action. #CMWorld Click to Tweet
- @MarketingProfs Comedy is pain. Start with a customer pain point & heighten it. Solve the problem. Rinse. Repeat. @timwasher #CMWorld Click to Tweet
- @morgancarrie RT @lkircher: “Most content strategies are content focused, not audience focused” Damn, true! #cmworld Click to Tweet
- @copyblogger 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that delivers custom content … http://copy.bz/1e03xHf Click to Tweet
- @CarlaJohnson People share content that makes them feel good about themselves #CMWorld #CMIcontent Click to Tweet
Choosing a topic is one of the first key steps to becoming a content curation rockstar, yet all too often marketers rush through this crucial step without giving it much thought. Finding the right intersection between what you’re audience is interested in, what your current content landscape looks like and what your competitors are doing can be challenge for some when getting started with curation. For this post, we’re going back to basics, looking at strategies for choosing a topic that will set you on the path to content curation success.
Here are five tips for choosing the right topic to curate.
1. Describe your brand.
What does your brand want to be known for? What are the keywords that you want to incorporate into your curated content? What is your brand’s voice and point of view? Is it edgy with bits of sarcastic humor? More straightforward and newsy? Clever and colloquial? The answers to these questions will inform the topic you ultimately choose. To give you a few examples, American Express caters to business owners with OpenForum. IBM’s Smarter Planet educates technology professionals about smarter systems. Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project tells the stories of socially responsible businesses and examines key social issues. All three have carefully defined their brand and the brand’s objectives.
2. Know your audience.
Who do you want to attract? What are your readers’ goals? What are their pain points? Defining who your current or target readers are can help you appeal to that audience and their needs. A few very successful websites curate for a mass audience, but they’ve had years to build up their following. If you’re starting from scratch, you’re likely to have greater success by choosing an audience that’s more specific and delivering content that speaks directly to their interests and needs.
3. Consider the landscape.
If you choose a curation topic that’s too niche, you may discover a shortage of material to curate and not many people interested in reading your curation. If you go too broad, your curation may feel too unfocused to attract the kind of engaged, targeted readers you want. For instance, curating an entire blog about the color of the next iPhone 5S might be too specific, not to mention the fact that the topic has a built-in expiration date once the product is announced. However, style-conscious readers may be interested in reading curated content about a variety of smartphone trends, what’s hot and what’s not on an ongoing basis. Shoot for that sweet spot where you have enough material to curate several times a week for the foreseeable future and still have something new to say. Also make sure you’re staying focused on a particular topic or industry so your curation isn’t too scattered. Readers will be more likely to subscribe to your RSS or social media feeds if they know what topics to expect.
4. Factor in your expertise.
What are the topics where you have a genuine interest and a knowledge base so that you can credibly curate? Good curation goes beyond summary and adds original commentary to the conversation. Annotation adds value for the reader and also allows you to differentiate yourself by incorporating your brand’s voice. If you choose a topic where you aren’t very knowledgeable, you might not have the expertise to go deeper and formulate your own opinions.
5. Follow the bigshots.
Once you’ve identified a few potential topics for curation, find the thought leaders in those areas. Start following them and figure out what you can offer that’s different from their coverage. If you find that your topic is already oversaturated with content and voices, it may be hard for you to stand out from the noise. In that case, may want to refine your topic so you’ll have a better shot at standing out.
For more tips on content curation including choosing a topic and finding sources to follow, check out our ebook: 5 Simple Steps to Becoming a Content Curation Rockstar.
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Time: August 20th, 1pm Eastern, 12pm Central, 11am Mountain, 10am Pacific
Registration: Free, click to register
Topic: As popular as marketing automation and content management systems are, few companies have succeeded in leveraging all that they have to offer. Two key reasons for this failure, technology aside, include: 1) Insufficient data on leads in our marketing databases, reducing the effectiveness of our segmentation and targeting strategies; and 2) Lack of resources to support the consistent delivery of fresh, relevant content as part of our content marketing strategies to these segments.
During this webcast, marketing experts Pawan Deshpande and Brian Kelly will provide answers to the following questions to help you better leverage marketing automation and content marketing to generate more sales-ready leads:
- What are the key components that every marketer should have across their marketing technology roadmap, in addition to the more traditional marketing automation applications?
- How can marketers improve the quality of their lead information for more accurate scoring and targeting?
- What are the key components of a high performing content marketing strategy?
- How can marketers better leverage content curation in addition to content creation to bring more value to their audience? (including tactical tips to be an efficient, effective and ethical content curation rockstar)
- What are specific examples and case studies of best-in-class companies that have executed these recommendations?
Register and reserve your spot Sign-up >>
Speakers:
Pawan Deshpande, CEO, Curata
Pawan Deshpande is the CEO and visionary behind Curata. Curata, is an easy-to-use marketing solution for content curation and content marketing. Pawan has spoken at leading events including Content Marketing World, SXSW Interactive, Online Media Summit, Social Media Breakfast and multiple AMA webinars, and was named to Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list of influential business leaders in 2010 due in part to his contributions to the burgeoning online marketing community in greater Boston.
Prior to founding Curata, Deshpande held positions at both Microsoft and Google. Pawan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for both his graduate and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science. Follow Pawan on Twitter @GetCurata or @TweetsfromPawan
Brian Kelly, CMO, InsideView
Brian Kelly is responsible for the company’s overall marketing strategy, product marketing and management, and marketing communications. Brian brings an extensive career in enterprise software marketing for both CRM and big-data analytic solutions. Prior to joining, he co-founded and was the CEO of Stampt, developer of an innovative mobile customer loyalty application.
Prior to Stampt, Brian was CEO of Quantivo Corporation, a successful provider of cloud-based big-data analytics. Additionally, Brian has served as Executive Vice President of Products at Kana, and Executive Vice President of Products at Broadbase.
What are you waiting for? Sign-up and Reserve your spot >>
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Similar to having your content in the right place at the right time (like Oreo during the Superbowl), creating an integrated experience is a great way to keep an engaged audience. A combination of online, TV, and live-response social media curating allows a level of real-time, content-driven interaction with the potential to truly excite audiences.
Shark week has done something different for a TV program to engage its audience, using online, interactive content. They ask directly for viewers to tweet their responses to calls-to-action, with the chance for their tweet to show up on TV.
Each program has a specific hashtag creating a unique set of content for each show (in the above tweet it’s #Sharkzilla.) Content producers are curating real-time through the relevant responses, and picking the best tweets to showcase.
This is a unique approach to content curation from a medium that historically has low engagement in online spaces. Trends in recent years have shown that with the rise of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, buzz created online for TV can directly impact a show’s ratings. Shark Week has taken it to the next level, from live tweeting to live curating.
How can we take this a step further? It’s easy to overlook the importance of the content pyramid. Shark Week has a great opportunity to reach many more folks by taking the curated content they are generating through the pyramid. Why not take those tweeted suggestions and create a blog post, incorporating an additional call-to-action for more suggestions? Or your brand could take the curated tweets and create a coloring book online, allowing Twitter followers to generate their own creation, and provide an online vote with the winner receiving a prize. It’s all about generating more buzz, resulting in more content. And it all begins with a few curated tweets.
Now, you may be saying – what great creative ideas, but how does this affect our marketing and our curation efforts? Glad you asked! Again, I’ll reference the content pyramid. In a B2B environment, a popular strategy is to produce a webinar. The webinar, in a small way, relates to the TV experience from Shark Week. It’s a program you opt-in to engage with. You’re asking questions, and hopefully getting answers. Webinars allow attendees to ask direct questions. Why not curate those questions, and create a blog post answering the most popular ones? In addition, you could curate content from across to the web to support your answers, and create a follow-up newsletter to webinar attendees, referencing those answers along with curated content that supports your message.
Curation is not just a key marketing strategy to drive thought leadership and own industry conversations (similar to how Discovery owns Shark Week). It also allows companies to flesh out a more robust story they are trying to tell. Check out Curata’s Content Curation Look Book for case studies of real-world companies like Adobe and Intel who use curation successfully.
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