How to find your content marketing gold mine

Content is king. You know what it means to your business and to your marketing strategy. Content is your weapon of choice in the attention war. Content is about quality. You need to publish when and where it matters to your audience. You need content that speaks to the concerns and values of your ecosystem. You need rich and varied content formats and media. Most importantly, your content needs to be credible, useful, entertaining and relevant. You need smart firepower. Content is also about quantity. If you don’t publish on your blog twice a week, you don’t have a blog: Google and your audience will forget you. If you don’t regularly feed the conversation on social media, you don’t exist.  Even the old newsletters beg for quantity: you need to out-publish spammers that fight for your audience attention. You need massive firepower. There are several well known answers to these qualitative and quantitative firepower requirements: create, buy, crowd-source or curate content; or any mix thereof, depending on your style, objectives and of course, budget. The one answer that’s often overlooked is clever publishing. You’re sitting on a content gold mine that you’re probably not leveraging properly; in fact, you’re might not even be conscious of it! You might be able to increase your firepower, both in quality and quantity, with just a minor change in your procedures. You might be one step away from increasing your content ROI – measurably. How could such a content gold mine hide in your business in full oblivion? As far as content goes, you are first and foremost a reader: under all likelihood, you read more than you publish. You spend valuable time discovering, digesting and filtering tons of content throughout your working day – sometime purposely, sometime serendipitously. Which measurable benefits do you draw from this investment? You acquire knowledge; you become a better person and a better professional: there is ROI in knowledge. But how does this translate into your content strategy? Curation is the process of discovering, enriching and publishing existing content. It’s a proven, effective contributor to any content strategy; it brings credibility, firepower and ROI. Clever publishing consists in streamlining your content consumption into content curation. (Tweet this!) When engaged in a content strategy, curators invest time to hunt for content when they need to publish. You can complement this attitude with an opportunistic approach: capture relevant content when you find it! Don’t wait until you need it! Add this simple process to your reader routine. How can you do this efficiently? This can be achieved with the proper tool (the purpose of which being simply to save you time) such as the Scoop.it bookmarklet. Then, whenever you meet content relevant to your editorial line, capture it by a simple click on this bookmarklet. By adding this curation reflex to your reading routine, you’ve cleverly – and substantially – increased your publishing firepower. You can go one step further: leverage your team. You are a reader and so are your colleagues, partners, collaborators and associates. They can all be part of your clever publishing process. Share your publishing prerogatives with experts and passionate people in your team, beyond the communication or marketing silos. People in R&D, customer support, and sales, for example, can be valuable voices for your company. They too spend time reading; they too can leverage this time to capture relevant content and therefore contribute to the content effort. You might well discover that the reading time and the motivation of a handful of people in your organization could well cover most of your content need if it was properly used; and this time would be spent reading, irrespective of your publishing agenda: that’s resource waiting for you. Scoop.it makes this team curation really easy and effective, by enabling the curator in chief –from the management or the marketing teams – to allocate co-curation rights to selected team members (based on your required level of control, such roles can be content suggestors, publishers, or co-administrators; all roles being flexibly allocated as needed). Content is needed. The time to create content is cut down by curation. The time to search for content is further cut down by clever curation: by opportunistic recycling the content you read. Need more content? Streamline smart reading into team clever publishing.

Want to work smarter and start generating real results from your content marketing? Find out how to use the new Scoop.it Content Director to help you become a smarter marketer!