If you want your brand to succeed, you need content marketing in your overall strategy. However, 91 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, and a further 86 percent use it for B2C marketing. This means your audience is bombarded with a lot of content online, making it a challenge to stand out.
It’s no question that audiences want quality content. But it can be difficult to come up with useful content repeatedly, especially for specialized industries. For example, the audience of accountants have questions they want answered, making content marketing for them a bit more challenging than, say, a company that sells skincare products.
But all is not lost. With the help of content curation, you can fill your editorial calendar with ideas for content. Here’s how to do it effectively:
1. Highlight the most relevant news of the week
Think of this as content aggregation but personalized and tailored to what your audience loves or finds valuable. No one wants their feed filled with garbage, so merely sharing content for the sake of it is a bad idea. Instead, get the latest news within your industry and share them with your audience. Include insights on how the report relates to their needs or your brand.
2. Get your audience (and staff) involved
Ideas do not just come from you or the content marketers you have; you might be surprised what insights you can get from your audience, as well as your staff. By letting your readers in on the content curation process, you will be able to create user-generated content. You may collect suggestions by asking your social media followers to submit entries, which you can then review, and present as organized content.
As for your staff, you may incorporate content curation while brainstorming during your meetings and huddles. They can share something they’re passionate about that relates to your industry, or you can highlight their expertise in a way that’s relevant to your audience. This method of content curation not only generates unique pieces of content, but it also fosters interaction within your organization and among your audience.
3. Add commentary to a relevant third-party content
Brands like BuzzFeed and several online magazines have succeeded in this type of content curation. Much like the first one, it involves being updated on current happenings and rehashing the content in a new way to make it more relevant to your audience. This is a great way to associate your brand with the trends and conversations within your industry.
4. Get experts to contribute
Another reliable way to generate content is by talking to experts in their fields. You can take a current topic, look at it from an angle, and lend credibility to your take by having experts support it, or at least give their insights on it. You can talk to one and ask several questions or ask one question and see what several experts have to say about it. Since you’re reaching out to experts, this is a sure way of creating original, insightful content.
In a content-driven world, you don’t want your readers to think you’re publishing dull content that has no value to them, or that you’re not publishing content at all. With the content curation techniques above, you now have several ways to generate content that will fulfill your brand’s marketing needs.
