Models, tools and tips to help with content curation
Online spaces like your website, blog, Facebook page and Twitter accounts need recent and relevant content to retain readers.
To stay ahead, your social footprint needs a regular supply of content. You can create original material or you can ‘curate’ content.
What is content curation?
The definition of the art of content curation is where the publisher (in our case a business looking to use content curation as part of content marketing) researches and gathers the best content on a niche topic that is aimed at a certain audience, all of which is relevant to their business, and then adds to this content personal opinions and expertise thus enhancing it.
Note that curation is not just repeating earlier information, but it’s about re-interpreting, re-telling or re-shaping earlier stories or images.
The personalisation makes…
Repurposing with a purpose
Content marketing is a large investment both financially and strategically for any business. This post is designed on the principles that if you are investing a lot into content creation it makes sense to be creative in how you use your content in order to get the most out of it.
Advantages of re-purposing content
There are always loads of things we don’t do simply because we ‘don’t have the time’. I can’t suggest how to find more time, but I do have suggestions about how you can save time and improve your content marketing.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can repurpose content? In an era when content marketing is essential, it is time to start thinking outside the box about how to use your existing content effectively as well as how to create new material. Maximising the usefulness of one piece of content will save you time and…
A practical approach to creating more effective content
Whether you are running a large scale publishing website, ecommerce site or simply a blog, today's marketing has a common theme; the requirement for amazing content to encourage engagement and sharing leading to sales.
Utilising members from your marketing, PR & editorial team to form ideas for your site or client requires effective use of a meeting or thought shower as some people would say [a new term for the editor, apparently a politically correct version of brainstorm]. As with all meetings without the right structure they can quickly become a waste of time, hopefully the steps below will help you achieve a productive thought shower.
Thought shower prerequisites - understand current content marketing
Any meeting requires preparation, but equally this doesn’t need to be over engineered. Insights are key to empowering people in this thought shower. Answering the following questions about your existing content marketing…
This infographic shows why Wordpress wins "hands down"
I'm often asked this question by marketers taking their first steps into blogging as an individual or for their companies. These days I always answer without hesitation "Wordpress"!
My justification is based around the experience you can create (Wordpress has great themes or is readily tailored); ease-of-use (as easy as Word or Pages); extensibility (plug-ins?); scalability (can it grow with us?); support (many agencies and freelance developers support it) and cost (it's open source, you only have hosting costs).
This infographic provides a more qualitative assessment to support these arguments. The market share figures really show how Wordpress dominates. The average day sees an average 500,000 new posts on Wordpress.com, not to mention the many sites, like Smart Insights that run a bespoke hosted version for their blog or full content management system.
If you're a…
Orientate content around people at different stages of purchase intent
Since I'm always pushing the importance of content marketing and creating infographics about how to use content marketing, it's interesting to see the questions marketers ask about them. This week a client asked me a great and simple question this week...
"I understand creating content, but where do I put all this content… what kind of content goes where"?
That's a fair question that I think many will have.
The short answer is there are no rules, but there is some common sense if you can step back and look at your marketing process ended to end. Here's how we'd recommend that you approach it… plan your content rather than just creating it en masse, orientate your content around people at different buyer stages, simplify it by focussing on what matters to them at those…
Customer over corporate-led communications
We're currently hiring at First 10. A friend asked me what kind of roles we're looking to fill. My response was, "two brand journalists". She was puzzled, "do you mean PRs", she said? "...aren't there loads of people in marketing who can write?" My response: "Not really, it's a different blend of skill-sets and a totally different motivation."
I embraced the whole idea of "brand journalism" via a book by David Meerman-Scott, I read 3-4 years ago, it's made increasing sense since. The way a journalist approaches an article is simply different from the way that somebody who is good at writing approaches an article. A brand journalist works inside the company across all content formats, writing and producing videos, blog posts, photos, webinars, articles, e-books and podcasts. It's about producing the content that is relevant to, that engages prospects and customers, which is something that Marketing Profs…
5 ideas for creating effective content on your website
We talk a lot in our posts about the importance of content and inbound marketing, that being central to success and a how blog is the key for building a central repository of useful, insightful or entertaining content for your website visitors.
A blog really does have the potential to be 'the hub' in regards to content marketing. But what are the other options on your site, assuming that you have a blog section already and you feel that you're doing it well enough, what's next?
Well, a question in my inbox this morning from a Smart Insights Expert member got me thinking on this. Subject to the realities of your website, its flexibility, ability to scale and of course your access to people or budget resources, there's tonnes that you can now consider beyond a blog.
Our 5 ideas: Think sales first
Think of the…
Six top tips for ensuring a harmonious agency:client relationship
Getting an agency or freelancer in to take care of your content marketing strategy can bean excellent way to get fresh ideas and expertise for your marketing strategy, as well as freeing-up your internal team. However, relationships between clients and their external partners often require careful management and mutual understanding.
Here are six absolute musts to achieving a harmonious working agency: client relationship:
1. Determine what you need and set clear objectives
One of the biggest challenges for any content agency or freelancer arises when a client doesn’t really know what they want, but has a very clear idea of what they don’t want.
To some extent, freelancers will be familiar with this and many have honed a technique to get the right information out of their clients. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can rely…
An infographic showing how to use content marketing to grow your business
What do you do at a time when paid-for media is neither reliable nor scalable, earned media is super-competitve and owned media properties require constant investment to engage your visitors? We believe you should do one thing, first and foremost; invest in the very best branded content that you can afford to create, seed and syndicate. This is particularly true if you're a small business or startup who can't afford substantial media investment, but many large brands are also profiting from content marketing.
I've written before about marketing with using content to add the human factor to your brand, and Chris Soames post last week showed the contuining rise of content marketing.
Spurred by the feedback and popularity of our inbound and content marketing blueprint, we wanted to share our ideas on using content with specific stages of the buyer process…
A new infographic to help you create content people want to share
Content marketing facts from the infographic
26% + of B2B marketing budgets are invested in content
79% of marketers use article publication as a tactic
52% use video
62% of companies outsource their content marketing
Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the two main goals of content marketing
Blueglass Interactive's new infographic combines tips on the type of content that works and features examples from brands who are making it work.
…
