The concept of content marketing is not novel, however it has undoubtedly spread like wildfire. While the awareness and application of content marketing continue to rise, the need for content curation becomes even more apparent.
When a brand or marketing person begins any content marketing initiative, they’ll quickly recognize how difficult it is to churn out relevant and user-friendly content regularly.
How Do They Solve That Enigma?
The solution is Content Curation.
The term “Curation” traces its origin to the verb “curate” or noun “curator”. A curator is traditionally responsible for overseeing tangible assets in a museum. Their responsibilities include gathering pieces of art that are of high quality and relevant to the museum’s collection and theme.
Now this is exactly what marketing teams and/or thought leaders do with content curation – they collect and organize high-quality content that relates to their target audience, augment their unique insights, and put it on display for their audience.
How Does Content Curation Fit Into a Lead Nurturing Strategy?
Nurturing leads with relevant content can be an arduous task in some industries. Finding high-quality and relevant content to curate can prove challenging especially if the company serves a niche market. Marketers in broader industries face a different, but related problem: finding relevant content is like finding a needle in the haystack.
Companies can create original content, of course, however nearly all marketing teams face several limitations on staff resources and time. Curation supports, however sifting through the millions of pages of content available on nearly every topic today can take just as long as writing original material.
Lead nurturing is the process of initiating and creating bridges with qualified prospects irrespective of their timing to buy. The primary objective of lead nurturing is getting the prospects when they are ready to buy. Today, fresh prospects are usually not ready to talk with sales team when they first meet them. This is more prevalent in industry segments where the buyer is a tech savvy, digitally empowered buyer and uses easy access to information to make his/her buying decision. However by aptly nurturing the prospects, the marketing person can stay in touch and increase the probability of getting the buyer to come to them when they are ready to buy.
A nurture interaction doesn’t need to be a whitepaper or a detailed blog post or for that it doesn’t even have to be something originally written by the marketing person! Habitually, the best nurturing is going to be about interesting, relevant content that other people wrote. This is called Content Curation. I have read and listened to a number of debates on the role of curated content versus original content. And not for a moment, I’m arguing that curation should be the pivot of any content marketing strategy. If the marketing purpose is to build awareness and trust and generate leads, then I will choose content generation and original thought leadership over content curation any day. That being said, content curation can play an important role in the broad content mix and for the objective of lead nurturing.
The only rule is that the content MUST BE RELEVANT.
