Ask any marketer, and they’ll say it without a moment’s hesitation. Content marketing is all the rage. It’s safe to guess that the internet is filled with an overabundance of content, to a point where content given with a strategy has become essential to marketing success .
But while interest in creating content is high, deciding how a business develop a strategy for curation should be equally high. Curation is important in sharing content relevant to your strategy or purpose online.
What’s the difference between curation and content strategy? To answer, let’s look at how curation and content are created differently to understand how they are managed differently.
First let's look at how curation differs from content marketing. The difference lies in the details behind where the content is sourced. Those details dictate the value that the content provides for a digital strategy.
Content marketing is media created to generate brand awareness as the media is shared online. Each article written, every picture taken, or every video recorded is meant to implicitly support a topic of interest related to a business. Much of the value comes from the effort in creating a volume of content to create an impact for SEO.
For example long tail content is created based on constant analysis of a website against search patterns. The end result is that the media can draw links for SEO purposes, as well as creating new topic ideas that can leverage long tail discoveries when potential customers research on keywords of interest to your business.
Curation differs in where the content is sourced. It involves sharing content from other sources that have similar interest to that of your business.
Flipboard, Reverb, Networked Blog and Paper.li, are all tools which permit curation planning and execution. They are designed to share content automatically on your feed, be it social media or a blog. Because these tools share automatically, you must be meticulous in selecting content for quality related to the subjects of interest.
To be meticulous and to build an audience that makes your analytics worth measuring, keep your target audience in mind - know and appreciate the details about their interests. Content is a general term, but its sources do not have to be general. Using curation and content marketing techniques together will tie the effort around the subjects that are important to potential customers - and subjects which will establish your business as a resource worth doing business with.
For more ideas on refreshing content, take a look at this Zimana post on developing evergreen content.
You can also check out this DMNews post on planning content using Google Analytics reports.
