Across social-media platforms, marketers can use owned, curated or promotional content to reach audiences. The first section of “What’s The ROI of Content Creation?”, a recent white paper from OpenTopic, offers five reasons marketers should focus on using curated content:
- Provide value to customers
- Create opportunities to interact more frequently with prospects
- Showcase expertise in a given area
- Earn attention from industry influencers by sharing their work
- Stretch a content marketing budget
Provide value. Reliable, high-quality resources are always in demand, but they need not be created from scratch. Using some of your time and budget to find and share good content saves customers from having to do it on their own. Ultimately, that improves their perception of what you offer.
Interact with prospects. The marketing “rule of seven” – that you have to send a marketing message multiple times before it sticks with your prospects – may be only a rough guide, but it is a useful one. Appropriately frequent interactions with prospective buyers increases the likelihood that they’ll think of you when the time comes to buy.
Showcase expertise. Curation requires decisions about what to share. It can be enhanced by framing it for an audience. Retweeting links is one option, but a more effective approach involves linking curated content to topics or interests where you can demonstrate expertise.
Influence the influencers. As the OpenTopic paper notes, “By frequently promoting the work of influential writers and businesses within industries related to your own, you’ll be able to get your company onto these influencers’ radar in turn.” Being visible can lead to additional coverage, authentic endorsements and other business opportunities.
Stretch a budget. Creating your own content takes time and money. Coverage of news and breaking events, even in a narrow industry, can get pretty expensive. Curation lets you bring useful information to your customers and prospects without “breaking the bank”.
Consumers value content providers who can gather information and share recommended links or resources. Bundling the work of others can be an effective way to build a provide value, interact with prospects, showcase expertise, gain visibility and stretch a budget.
