Are You Curating Yet?!?

Boost your Content Marketing Strategy with Content Curation NOW
“Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy.” Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire

Content curation has been described as a major content marketing trend for 2011. By gathering and sharing the most relevant content for your audience on your website, your company may experience the following benefits:

• Build thought leadership – By providing your audience with information that solves their pain points and peaks their interest, you are already on the way to improving customer engagement. Soon your company will become the go-to resource on cloud computing or collaboration. What CEO or marketer wouldn’t want that?
• Boost Web Traffic – If the content you are curating is properly optimized for the search engines, you should eventually see a pickup in the amount of traffic coming from Google and Bing. Similarly, your marketing team has a larger quantity of valuable content they can promote to your followers when driving customers and prospects to your site.
• Meet your content marketing goals more effectively – Many CEOs now understand that they ought to step away from simply touting their companies and products and instead truly engage with their customers. This is no easy task. Content development can suck up a lot of time and money. Content curation can be an easy tactic to adopt in order to get into the content marketing way of life without draining resources.

I work with the entire OpenView Labs team to ensure our curation efforts are top-notch on the OpenView Labs website. Each week, my teammates scour the net to find interesting, useful content for senior managers in all areas of the business.

Here are 3 quick steps to get your curation efforts started:

1. Set guidelines for your curation strategy. What audience are you targeting? Do you have a specific content type you are interested in sharing with your audience? How will you define valuable content? Answering these questions will ensure that any content you curate will be consumed by your audience.
2. Determine your curation model. Will you use a tool like Curata or Google Alerts and RSS feeds? How many employees will participate in the identification of content? How will you organize the content? Answer these questions beforehand to ensure your process is thought out.
3. Pick your resource. What is the budget? How often will you curate? What are the expectations? Will the curation efforts fall on someone’s plate internally or will you use a freelancer to summarize found content? Answer these questions to determine if curation can be folded into someone’s existing responsibilities.

Now get started!