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Content Curation for Inbound Marketing

September 18, 2013

Content is key when it comes to inbound marketing and that is because it is the main reason for your audience to turn to you compared to others. It’s what drives your vision, goals through your products and services. However, creating lots of extensive content is hard when there are so many other assets to your business. That’s where content curation comes into play.

Creating a steady flow of relevant content isn’t easy and many companies know this. Therefore, the consistency is a challenge. Here are some ways that brands dealt with content curation along with the pros and cons of each situation:

1. Hiring a Dedicated Content Curator allows you to depend on one person whose sole purpose is to create content for you. This is great for ensuring a consistent brand voice and a steady flow of content for your organization. However, the approach is very expensive as you are just paying that person to write for you. Also, you need to keep in mind that you need to train this employee to learn about your brand and company so that their writing reflects upon you.

2. Internal Crowdsourcing brings a diverse source of voices with different areas of expertise to your blog. It allows people that have a deeper knowledge of each field to express what they know about each situation so that you know the audience is well-informed in all aspects rather than from a person who knows a little bit about everything. This may seem like a great way to go but it can also create inconsistency within your blog. The many different voices may agree to disagree on many topics and your audience will be confused in such manner.

3. Outsourcing Externally turns to other companies that are experts in the field of content curation. With this method, you will hire the person that can speak of your blog to the best of their ability in regards to your topic. These people will be much more professional and understand what your company is about better than if you just hired a dedicated content curator yourself. Outsourcing through an organization made for content curation will give you the best possible content. However, sometimes these people may not understand your company well enough and just like if you hired a dedicated content curator, you’d need to spend a lot of time and money to sustain this tactic.

4. Collecting User-Generated Content is very popular among business to customer (B2C) brands. By relating to your customer base, you will have a happier audience that is more likely to understand and respond to you. Customer voices give proof that your brand is “real” and relatable to others. It makes a much stronger connection between your business and your audience. However, for business to business (B2B) brands, there would be a need to conduct surveys and have case studies to understand the other perspective. This would take a lot of time in this aspect.

5. Licensing Content gives you the ability to use other articles in its entirety. It is for those who have money but don’t have time or resources to create content. This should be the last possible choice for you as the opportunities through this isn’t very practical. Yes, you save a lot of money but you are also using very broad information. Also, search engines do not index licensed content as you paid to use and publish it and they don’t have any rights. Without a great SEO backend for your blog, it is difficult to get the word out there about each entry.

Curation is a difficult task when it comes to a business in the long-run. These are several ways to get past that bump in the road for your business. There are pros and cons to each of them but each are good for your brand based on what your needs are and how much time, money and resources you have already. It’s important to compare all the different possibilities you have to get the best possible outcome for you. Inbound marketing relies on a steady flow of strong and relatable content and if you are lacking in this situation, curation just might be what you need.