Engage Your Prospects with Content Curation

For those partners focused on inbound marketing -- drawing prospects to your Web site with valuable content -- the creation of that content is the biggest challenge. The functional and technical experts in your organization are the ones who have the information worth sharing with prospects, but they don't have the time to write it down. Which is the reason why a new method of building content, called content curation, is gaining popularity.

The idea behind content curation is that there is more information being produced and made available on the Internet than any one person can monitor. By helping to filter and highlight valuable content, you save time for your prospects and build your status as an industry expert.

Most commonly, content curation comes in the form of blog posts that summarize and link to articles posted on the Web. Additional commentary on the original post provides industry context. To promote the curated content, a newsletter with a one- to two-sentence summary of each blog post is sent to prospects.

Focus on the Prospect Profile
Full Quota, an inbound marketing agency serving technology companies, uses content curation to help partners build relationships with prospects. Katheryn Huff, managing editor at Full Quota, described the foundation of content curation this way: "It's all about targeting your buyer. We do the research to define the buyers' issues and then we select content around those topics."

The Full Quota process involves gathering articles, reviewing those articles with the partner's subject-matter expert and writing the curated blog posts. Using Trapit, a site dedicated to searching for articles by topic, the Full Quota team selects a group of articles that will be of interest to the defined prospects. Writers interview the partner subject-matter expert to add industry or technical perspective and then write a blog post to summarize.

Prospect awareness is driven through a program of social media and a weekly newsletter sent to a target list -- all driving to the blog which is hosted on the partner's industry-specific mini-site.

Advice for a Content Curation Program
For partners who take on content curation internally, Huff offered some advice:

• Be really clear on your target buyer.
• Content curation takes time and effort. Commit to keeping the cadence and the rhythm going. 
• Use your technology tools to do the heavy lifting in finding articles to review.

"This is an exciting new field. We're seeing great results," Huff added. "Content curation is a great way for companies to differentiate themselves in the market and build relationships with clients."

A Realistic Approach
Inbound marketing takes commitment to consistently create valuable content. For most partners, committing the resources needed to deliver that consistency is unrealistic. While there is still a significant time commitment involved, content curation is a way to spread the responsibility across limited resources.

How do you find the time to build content? Add a comment below or e-mail me and let's share the knowledge.

Posted by Barb Levisay on November 01, 2012