Even with 71% of organizations increasing their investment in content marketing this year, only marketers with well-planned content strategies will achieve positive ROI. Having the right content marketing mix and using curation to complement created content will be a key part of that success. Content curation is a growing trend for businesses seeking to provide their customers with the best, and most relevant, information on the web. Curation is implemented in content marketing strategies to support brand messaging, build awareness, provide added value for readers and ultimately drive leads.

Curata defines content curation as an individual (or team) consistently finding, organizing, annotating and sharing the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market. Today, the best content marketers are only creating 65% of content, with the rest being 25% curated and 10% syndicated. These content marketers are using the power of curation to support their creation strategies and content campaigns as a whole.

One example of a leader in the content marketing and curation space is Alcatel-Lucent.  With over 150 years of experience, Alcatel-Lucent is established in the field of communications technology, products and services.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise group serves over 500,000 customers in over 130 countries to deliver mobile, fixed access, IP technologies and other various applications. Consistently at the forefront of innovation, the Enterprise group seeks to provide the highest quality content for their readers in order to drive success within their organization.

Content Marketing Challenges

Ed Youngblood, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s Director of Content Strategy, and his communications team know that in order to support their mission to discover the potential of a world connected world, they need to provide the most up-to-date, relevant and innovative information for their readers. To become a go-to resource for an executive level audience, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise must provide thought-leadership with consistent brand messaging from diverse sources.

The Enterprise group needs to publish on the latest in the IT industry, consistently. Even with a communications team, this can be difficult – especially when it comes to finding a variety of credible sources.

“Significant opportunity exists for enterprises to better leverage communications and networking technologies”, states Ed. “However, it is very difficult for enterprise professionals to find the best insights from across the Internet to help with their strategic decisions.”

Alcatel-Lucent is certainly an excellent source of knowledge for IT consumers. However, these professionals want to keep track of various thought-leaders in the space to learn from their diverse perspectives and opinions. These readers are more likely to trust information from their peers and other industry professionals than the sole insights of one organization.

As Ed indicates, “we needed to develop a destination on the web that, in addition to our own research and insights, would provide our audience with a direct link to the highest quality and most relevant content to help them be more successful in their organizations as well as throughout their career.”

Thousands of articles surrounding IT are published on the web every day. This makes it incredibly difficult to sort through these pieces of information and hand-pick the best and most relevant articles to publish for readers in real-time.

As a leader in IT innovation, the Enterprise group knew it was crucial to find a way to provide readers with not only topic-specific material, but thought-leadership driven information from the best sources.

Curation in Action

In response to their need to find and publish diverse information for readers, the Enterprise group implemented curation as part of their content marketing strategy. The group launched the IT Strategist, a curated microsite, as a destination for their customers and buyers seeking information on the IT industry.

“This site, built on Curata’s content curation platform, is enabling us to amplify our content marketing strategy, extending our reach and validating our messaging in the context of the market,” Youngblood said. “In addition, Curata has allowed us to scale our content curation efforts using fewer marketing resources in a more connected manner.”

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise uses content curation technology to find topic-specific information and publish multiple articles per day, in real-time, to keep up with the industry. Their goal is to provide as much value possible by reporting on actionable, strategic pieces that readers can implement into their own strategies, rather than publishing product-centric information.

With Curata, the Enterprise group has been able to report on the most valuable knowledge on the web for readers; from how executives can improve their business models, to information on up-and-coming technologies.

Curation Results

Ed and his team have measured increased web traffic on the Alcatel-Lucent corporate website as a direct result of their curation efforts. In addition, “We find a lot of value across marketing just to be able to monitor the industry chatter using Curata. This in of itself provides a lot of internal value,” he continued.

Curated content has also influenced other content tactics within the group. “The content Curata discovers for us gives us new ideas for created content and inspiration for new stories and editorials. Curata helps me readjust my editorial calendar based on the trending content that comes in from my sources. I see a ramp up of information on the cloud or some other topic we should be covering. The curated news feed also gives us great Twitter fodder.”

Enterprise plans to continue their curation efforts to supply their readers with fresh, relevant content in one central hub. They’ve also utilized Curata’s bookmarklet tool, giving everyone on the communications team the ability to easily curate articles they come across on the web. Crowdsourcing ideas and content from across your organization is an excellent way to publish more information as well as fulfill the ideation and creation needs of your content strategy. As of today, the team produces between 5 to 30 articles per week from various sources, providing thought-leadership and building credibility as a go-to source for IT information.

Alcatel-Lucent is once again leading a new innovative shift in technology, this time with the elimination of egocentric content marketing by curating content from other reputable sources. The information they publish for their CIO/executive level audience consists of their own research and opinions in parallel with the most relevant pieces on IT strategy and new technologies from across the Internet. This benefits not only their own organization, but their buyers and customers who want to learn from various expert perspectives.

Interested in driving results with content curation? Check out the the Content Curation Look Book or register for a free demo of Curata.