Top Eight Reasons B2B Marketers Use Content Curation

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Author Sue McKittrick offers these reasons…

Reason 1:  Many of the marketers who have stepped into curation on an enterprise basis are thinking about getting closer to their customers by providing an information service that draws people with similar interests and keeps them coming back. Marketers view content curation as a social as well as a content initiative.

Reason 2: Because curated sites draw search engine traffic, they aid SEO strategies. True, the search traffic often goes to the microsite used to feature the curated content (which of course also includes your company’s best work). Visitors often click through to the company website.

Reason 3: Developing a reputation as a thought leader drives many curation initiatives. Building that kind of reputation means going beyond publishing top-notch content from third parties. Thought leadership requires showing the best of what others have created, publishing high-quality original content, and communicating a clear point of view.

Reason 4: Some marketers start curating content to enable regular, valuable communication with customers, delivered through the customers’ preferred channels. Content curation can make you tremendously more productive as you interact on the web. After all, the good systems present you with a quality collection of relevant documents from which to select the ones most interesting to your customers. And they make publishing to multiple channels easy.

Reason 5: Marketers also start curating so they can stay up to date on competitor activities, issues facing their customers, brand commentary, and discussions in social media. This, in fact, may become major use of content curation systems because the really good systems yield relevant content with far less noise than encountered in the listening systems available today.

Reason 6: Marketers who are good at tracking how web visitors move through the pipeline can track leads and revenue that originate from the audience of a curated site or newsletter. For instance, when visitors referred from the curated site download white papers at the company site, they become a lead, which marketers can track through the sales funnel.

Reason 7:  Marketers can also capitalize on the “publisher” aspect of their curated site. Industry influencers want to publish articles. Customers like being a featured case study. One marketer explained to me that, in the old days, he’d have to beg sales to help him get a customer case study. Now customers are asking to be featured.

Reason 8: Marketers also gain insight from their customers’ article choices and social media engagement enabled by content curation. Most marketers I’ve talked with don’t think they are tapping into the insight they will eventually be able to garner from their communities. They are feeling their way slowly and building an asset.

Top Eight Reasons B2B Marketers Use Content Curation « Marketing to Business Executives Blog

Reasons 2 & 3 most resonate with me. How about you? Contact me if you’re interested in knowing more about a ‘practical, tactical’ workflow around curation for ‘thought leadership’ marketing…

Related articles

• 5 Steps for Curating B2B Content (hubspot.com)
• Is Content Curation Stealing or a Shrewd B2B Marketing Practice? (business2community.com)
• Curation the whole story! (kauthor.com)
• Curation: How to Act on This Not-So-Overlooked Content Marketing Opportunity (e1evation.com)
• A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (hubspot.com)