If you’ve spent any time learning about and carrying out online marketing then you’ve probably heard how important content creation is. After all, you need to crate original content for your social networking presence and your website if you want to bring people in, and search engines even penalise websites if they constantly publish duplicate content instead of providing something new.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for content curation. Curated content is content that you didn’t actually create yourself, but that you’ve instead gathered to share with your followers. For example, if we were to write an article which gathered Twitter users’ responses to the upcoming GDPR implementation, that would fall under curation and not creation. And the same is true if we were to list off a bunch of our favourite B2B marketing blogs.
As you can probably imagine, content curation has its place. In fact, the same concepts largely apply to both content creation and content curation. Either way, it’s your job to provide something of value to your followers, whether that’s in the form of truly original content or whether you’re simply acting as the middleman between your followers and some curated content.
Content curation for sales teams
Content curation can come in super useful for marketing teams because it basically gives them an alternative way of sourcing content. But what many people don’t realise is that content curation can also come in super useful for sales teams, and arguably more so. After all, marketers have access to graphic designers, copywriters, digital strategists and more. That’s not necessarily true for sales teams.
What they can do, though, is get to know their clients and find out what their pain points are. Then you can go out and source some content that might be able to help them. Let’s say you’re a B2B accountancy firm and a prospect wants to know about the different types of business financing options that are out there. Why not take some time to look around online for a resource that you can link them to which will explain everything they need to know?
Of course, it goes without saying that you should avoid linking to resources by a direct competitor unless you want to run the risk of losing that customer or prospect to them. Instead, try to link to authoritative sources such as news outlets, non-profits and governmental organisations. These are likely to be the most influential organisations in your niche to begin with and so it shouldn’t be too hard to find them.
Conclusion
Content curation isn’t going to do you much good if it’s your only strategy, but it can be used to great effect if deployed alongside content creation and distribution as part of a wider marketing strategy. As with most things, you should use it in moderation. Just don’t rule it out completely.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.