How to use Curation in Content Marketing

In the fight for thought leadership and organic SEO rankings, B2B businesses across the country are implementing exciting, engaging, and sometimes off-color content campaigns. But there’s just one problem: to run a successful, engaging content marketing campaign, you need content. And a lot of it.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy (or time-effective) to create original content 100% of the time. The trick is to blend both content creation and content curation — but like most things in life, the two need to be balanced properly for maximum effectiveness.

Content Curation Versus Creation

Content curation refers to organizing and sharing other business’s content for your own clients. Instead of developing original content, you simply find what’s hot and share it — satisfying your follower-base while contributing to the overall conversation.

However, similarly to how a website redesign is about more than pretty graphics, a content marketing campaign is about more than just frequent updates, and should not rely soley on curation. The winner here is not the business with the most updated profile — it’s the business that updates with the most genuine, creative, and useful content out there.

Although this includes using BOTH original and curated content — original content should outweigh curated. In other words, more you, and less them.

Don’t freak out just yet — here are some tips to combine a strategic stream of content curation with content creation:

• Retweet and share strategically
  It’s perfectly fine to share and promote posts by other companies, but it’s vital that you include your business’s unique opinion or dissent. This is the perfect opportunity to show your clients why you’re different and how you fit into the market — not as a megaphone for another business’s content, but as a participant in the conversation.

• One post, multiple shares
  A good content marketing strategy includes getting more than just a tweet or two out of each post. Instead, share each post in different ways throughout the week: once with a quote from the post, once with a few strategic hashtags, and once with the title. Get creative and share the link often to give everyone enough opportunity to see it, with enough variety that it isn’t overwhelming.

• Promote specifically
  Don’t send your hard-written post out in the world alone — promote it as part of your social media promotion strategy and company website as well as your email newsletter, personal social media outlets, and contacts. Try composing an email to specific people you think would enjoy the post and ask them to share it if they like it.

So, what are your next steps in balancing original content with curation? Contact Us today to discuss your unique B2B content marketing situation.