The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Content Marketing

Is content marketing hard? 7 lessons learned +1 (curation)

In this article, Mike Huber rightly says “more is what you need when it comes to content marketing”, and then points out in 6. that “your team needs to be all in”.  And since “the best time to start a content marketing program is 5 years ago and the second best time is today”, you’d better start publishing content regularly now.
Our experience adds one lesson to this post: “curation helps you publish more”. And not just more, also better.

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5 Content Marketing Rules for Google’s New Algorithm

5 Content Marketing Rules for Google ’s New Algorithm

On April 21, 2015, Google made a massive update to their SEO algorithm and was clear that they’d be handing out manual penalties to websites that didn’t abide by mobile best practices. Don’t panic just yet—Google doesn’t expect every website to run out and develop and app or otherwise become their “best” mobile ready self. In order to appease Google’s algorithm and avoid a penalty, consider these your new content marketing rules for a very mobile ready world (and marketing campaign).

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How to efficiently measure the impact of content marketing on lead generation

How many leads does your content generate

Sooner or later, especially for B2B companies, you’re going to be asked how much of an impact your content marketing efforts had on the #1 metric of all: revenue.

Lead generation is already a key objective for 83% of B2B content marketers and the trend is going up.

So how do you effectively measure the impact of your content marketing on lead generation for your company?

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How to adapt your content marketing to the rise of big content

Are you ready to adapt to the Rise of Big Content

“According to Gartner surveys, content is the most important thing marketers can do and yet they’re unequipped to take it on from a skills and sourcing level.”

Source: www.gartner.com

Last week, Gartner released the results of their study around the 5 top emerging trends in digital marketing, and one of the big 5 is around the “rise of big content”.

Most marketers understand how important content is for their audience and their overall marketing strategy, but they critically lack resources/skills to either create good content or source good content to curate.

The choice of words Gartner used was very wise: we all know “marketers understanding that” does not mean “CEOs understanding that. So just like most marketers, you might be facing a situation where you and anyone within your company who can and would write has millions of other things to do with deadlines that can’t be pushed.  

In my opinion there are three answers you can bring to scale your content marketing and address the challenges created by the rise of big content:

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Don’t Limit Your Content Marketing Team: Grow Your Content Production and Reach with Contributors

You Can’t Do it All on Your Own- Extend Your Content Marketing Team

Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:

“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.

“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.

“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.

“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.

Rings a bell? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.

First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.

I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.

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Influencer Activation – The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

Influencer Activation - The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

We’ve said it before: 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past 2 years, and content marketing is approaching mass adoption. How can you break through the noise and get your message to the right people at the right time?

Many marketers are turning to influencers for content marketing amplification – in fact, a recent poll of 125 marketers shows 59% plan to increase their influencer marketing budget over the next 12 months. This means more marketing departments are devoting time and resources to creating authentic relationships with the people who matter most to their business – influencers who shape the industry as trusted resources.

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How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

Obviously, one of the best ways to stay exciting is to look to what’s new—read up on industry news, check out your competitors’ blogs, and listen to what your customers are talking about, and use that information to generate some fresh, new material. However, this isn’t always possible. When it isn’t, you’ll have to look back at some of the older topics you’ve covered and find a way to present them as if they’re new—in a fresh, exciting way.

There are several strategies you can use to accomplish this.

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Introducing Workflows, Drag and Drop Newsletters and Lead Analytics to Improve Content Marketing ROI

ROI is just around the corner with Scoop it Content Director

The launch of Sccop.it Content Director in February was a huge success and a number of you already love the product! We wanted to thank you for the continuous feedback to help us improve it, and are happy to announce the release of a new version of Scoop.it Content Director that takes into account the many enhancements you asked for and that will help you generate more ROI with your Content Marketing.

This new release is centered on three main areas:

– Scale your content marketing with contributors,

– Create engaging newsletters in minutes with a new drag-and-drop editor,

– Measure What Matters – improve and prove the ROI of your content with the new analytics.

We will host a webinar on May 20th to show you how you can leverage Scoop.it Content Director to improve your Content Marketing strategy and ROI. You can register here.

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How to Build a Content Marketing System to Amplify your Blogging Efforts

How to Build a Content Marketing System to Amplify your Blogging Efforts

Content marketing has been the most successful method of acquiring users for our startup Process Street. A number of people ask me about my process (no pun) for creating and marketing content that drives users to our product, so I wanted to give the Scoop.it readers the inside scoop.

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Winning with Authority: an integrated framework for online marketing, by 15 experts

“15 thought leaders presenting at the Authority Rainmaker conference share integrated marketing advice on Design, Content, Traffic and Conversion.”

Source: www.slideshare.net

Do Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, Demand Generation, Community Management and other marketing practices work in silos?

Not if you want to win.

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How to convince your boss you need content marketing software

How To Convince Your Boss You Need a Content Marketing Software

Most of us who practice content marketing rely on at least some kind of content marketing software. We’re software people by nature, so it’s only natural we’ve got a thing for digital tools. Of course, it is possible to stay on top of your content marketing work with just Excel and Google calendar. But at a certain point you’ll want to graduate to something more robust.

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Why Content Curation + Content Creation Is A Winning Content Strategy

Content. Content. Content. There’s no denying the fact that content is the leader of the online marketing pact right now. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s important. But the truth of the matter is that content has always been what great marketing was built on. Package it up. Call it something new. Do what you want. But when it comes to succeeding online, your content is the cornerstone of your strategy.

Content Creation vs Curation

Cast your net out there and ask around. Some will tell you that you need to curate content. Others will tell you that you need to create content. Ask me and I’ll tell you that a solid content marketing strategy combines both creation and curation. And I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s look at the benefits of them individually.

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11 Effective Lean Content Marketing Practices To Generate ROI

11 Effective Lean Content Marketing Practices To Generate ROI

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs yearly survey on the state of content marketing, lack of time and lack of budget are among the top challenges B2B content marketers face. The other 2 challenges in the Top 4 are “producing enough content” and “producing the type of content that engages”.

In short: most B2B content marketers don’t have enough resources to both scale their content volume and maintain the required quality to generate ROI.

For the past 3 years, we’ve worked with top marketers, influencers, marketing software founders as well as our customers and users to define Lean Content Marketing as a set of best practices that make it possible for SMB marketers to generate positive ROI with limited resources and budgets. We’ve compiled our findings, experiment results, advice and best practices in the Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs and today, I’d like to focus on the most effective practices that generate ROI.

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Can You Afford The 10 Creative Types Needed To Build A Killer Content Marketing Team?

Creating content, especially in a lean marketing team, is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. Having a dream team in place to create not only the social posts, blog pieces, and video snippets, but the strategy, big picture campaigns and creative long-term vision should be a top priority for marketers in 2015.

Source: www.b2bmarketinginsider.com

Michael Brenner makes an interesting list of all the various creative talents you would need in an ideal Content Marketing team. But while there’s no denying that this would be a dream team, it’s anything but lean.

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5 Top Marketing Experts, 15 Ideas and 2 ROI Analysis on Repurposing Content

Repurposing is a key strategy of the lean content marketing methodology. Megan Marrs has 11 interesting best practices and ideas on how to repurpose content efficiently in this great post which made me want to elaborate on this topic.

So here’s the take of several other content marketing experts on the value of repurposing content, a cheat sheet that summarizes key ideas to repurpose content (Megan’s 11 plus 4 others I added) as well as the ROI analysis of two of our own experiment with content repurposing.

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4 Great things I learned as a community & content marketer

By this point, as a reader of this blog, it’s not unlikely that you’re familiar with my story. I was hired straight out of college as a community manager by Scoop.it and have spent the last few years diving into the worlds of community and content marketing on behalf of this awesome brand. As I prepare to move on to my life’s next adventure, I’d like to share some of my key learnings about community management and content marketing with you.

A majority of my day-to-day responsibilities at Scoop.it could fall under the umbrella of “non-traditional” marketing, which means that I put forth a lot of effort to learn about the space I had been thrown into. Today, I’ll share four key learnings and observations on community management and content marketing and I’d love to hear how you feel about them as well.

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5 Ways to make time for content marketing when you don’t have any

Who has time for content marketing?

Who has time for content marketing?

While small businesses are called the backbone of the American economy, they are also challenged with smaller budgets and less employees, which can make things like marketing and advertising very challenging. Content marketing is more than a valuable addition to a successful advertising strategy, it can also help:

  • With brand reputation, management and awareness

  • Connect better with existing and potential customers

  • Increase website traffic and gain new leads

  • Increase visibility for the brand and business

But for our struggling small business owner, who has the time for content marketing these days? The answer to this question is, make the time. Here are some tips on how to have a successful online content marketing strategy without spending an inordinate amount of time or money:

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Toward On-Demand Marketing

The rapid incorporation of digital approaches has made marketing an industry of silos. It’s time to rethink the way we build our teams and our skill sets to break those walls apart.

Source: moz.com

How is Marketing structured in your company? 

I’ve been thinking about how this translates to SMBs as obviously not every company has to do “government relations”. But whether the Marketing team is big or small, there are interesting distinctions made in this slide in terms of the skills they represent.

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Content is the fuel of email marketing: here’s how to ignite it

This post contains excerpts of our recently published ebook: “ROI or RIP: the lean content marketing handbook for SMBs” that you can download for free here.

According to research performed earlier in 2014 by Gigaom and reported by eMarketer, email marketing is still the most commonly used method of digital marketing, with a whopping 86% of respondents claiming to use it. If that’s not enough, though, over half (59%) of B2B marketers surveyed by HubSpot say that email marketing is the most effective channel for generating revenue.

Email marketing needs content and content marketing needs email

Why are email marketing and content marketing such a great match? And what does it mean for your marketing strategy?

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