Feeling hungover after the holiday? You’ll get over it. But how about your content strategy? Just like eating healthy largely depends on mixing diverse types of food, content marketing experts such as Heidi Cohen say you won’t achieve optimal results if you’re relying 100% on your own content for your marketing efforts. Don’t believe it? Read our own survey results on the ROI of content curation in the marketing mix.
So does your content marketing strategy need a detox program? Here are 5 signs you might need a content curation diet in your content marketing mix. And perhaps more importantly what you can do about it.
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Your “latest” blog post is more than 2 weeks old.
Gone are the days where you could only publish an epic piece of content once a year and be done with your content marketing. Markets are evolving fast which trigger constant new questions from your potential customers. In such a real-time paced world, having a blog with no recent updates is like putting a “Sorry we’re closed” sign on your website.
What you can do about it:
Don’t feel guilty: writing good content takes time and talent. And if you have a business to run at the same time or if you have other campaigns to optimize, chances are your week is running too fast already. A key to overcoming this is to lower the cost of publishing content by leveraging content curation. Turning existing content into curated posts will not only help feed your blog but also provide inspiration for the next posts. Adding a short insight to a piece you found educational to your audience will take 15’ instead of a couple of hours but it might also inspire you to add a couple more paragraphs or even a longer post later on in the week.
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You regularly miss deadlines on the content you plan in your editorial calendar.
Every Monday, you start the week full of optimism and ambition. You plan to produce various blog posts based on previously noted ideas or what’s going on in your industry this week.
Great.
But then the following Monday, you realize a hundred urgent things happened and you didn’t have time to finish half of what you committed yourself to do.
What you can do about it:
Plan ahead by scheduling content in advance. Using tools like Scoop.it’s scheduling feature not only lets you curate content to your blog but also plan this ahead of time. So you can group all of your content activity into “content sprints” and have an entire week’s worth of content programmed in a couple of hours.
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More than 1 post out of 3 is about your company or your products.
It’s also about building trust. Do your readers find your content credible? According to studies, third-party content is 4x to 7x more credible than vendor-created content (of course this stat is from a third-party so you can trust us about it).
What you can do about it:
Customers who don’t know your brand yet don’t google it but sure enough, they ask their favorite search engine for answers to their questions. This is precisely where the opportunity is: publish on what matters to them and not just on you. Focus on their keywords to discover, curate and publish content on their areas of interest. By doing so, you’ll not just be discovered by people who don’t know about your brand yet but you’ll also add credibility to your content, build trust and become a respected thought leader in your industry.
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You’re spending hours desperately looking for good content to share.
You’re convinced of adding content curation to your mix so you’ve decided to share other people’s content to engage your audience. The problem is th
at you quickly realized you needed more than just an occasional piece: you need several pieces to share every day. Sure, there’s plenty of content out there, actually coming from al
l over the place: social media streams, email, mobile apps, etc… But not everything is good, not everything is on topic so it’s not clear what is the needle and what is the haystack. So you end up losing a lot of time finding the perfect gem to tweet.
What you can do about it:
A bit of organization with your keywords should do the trick. List the ones your audience is interested in and use content discovery tools such as Scoop.it’s new Smart Suggestion Engine to automate your quest for awesome content. Having trouble defining your keyword? Define customer persona to help or – better yet – talk to your prospects or existing customers to understand what their pain points and interests are.
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Your blog rarely links back to content from influencers in your space.
What you can do about it:
Lee Odden published a great guide on how to tackle influencer marketing. The results from his case studies are simply amazing and the ROI is staggering. One thing he recommends is “thoughtful content curation” to engage with influencers. By curating their content, you‘ll be giving before you can get:
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by bringing them your audience,
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by entering their radar as they get notified you’ve shared their content,
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by showing your expertise while adding insights to the discussion.
And if you’re worried you might drive your audience away from your site, don’t. Customers want answers to their questions and they’ll find a way to the content they want somehow: by curating influencers content, you’ll make both customers and influencers happy.
So before we end the year with yet more food and well-deserved breaks, we have time to plan our good resolutions for our 2015 content strategy. We have our tips: what will be yours?
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