The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

6 Email Marketing Secrets from Marketo

Posted on
December 16, 2014
by

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.

With this in mind, I’ve taken an extensive look at Marketo’s Email Lookbook 2014 with the goals of pulling secrets, tips, and email marketing best practices from each section of the report and sharing them in an easily digestible way. (To read the whole report, click here!)

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5 Top Trends Emerging From CMI’s 60 Content Marketing Predictions for 2015 eBook

Posted on
December 15, 2014
by

It’s time for our annual eBook of content marketing predictions. Read on to see what big trends, changes, and advances experts see on the horizon for our industry in the upcoming year.

Source: contentmarketinginstitute.com

What are the content marketing trends for next year? The Content Marketing Institute asked thought leaders around the world for their predictions and compiled that in this ebook. 

You can read mine above but there I encourage you to read the ebook for others as well. 

Jay Baer’s (slide 10) is particularly interesting:

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Scoop.it’s CEO speaks about algorithms, features, and the future

Posted on
December 10, 2014
by

Today, we hosted our first Ask Me Anything with Scoop.it’s CEO Guillaume Decugis via Google Hangout and TweetChat at #ScoopitAMA.

As we recently introduced the new Smart Suggestion Engine (see http://sco.lt/9N7CV7), we had many questions focusing on this new feature including:

– What are the two coolest features of the new Scoop.it Suggestion Engine?
– Why did you decide to focus on improving the discovery tool?
– What was the progress of the suggestion like from the beginning?
– What does the algorithm behind the gold & silver badges look like?
– What’s the future of Scoop.it?

For those of you who missed it, check out the video:


Have more questions? Tweet them to us @scoopit #ScoopitAMA so we can address them next time.

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Posted in
Events, Team

Content Marketing Hubs Will Take The Lead in 2015

Posted on
December 9, 2014
by


SEO expert Jayson DeMers nails it with his content marketing predictions for the upcoming year.

In case you were wondering whether or not to take these predictions seriously, check out the post Jayson wrote last year around this time predicting the trends for 2014. Almost all of them proved to be true, with the small exception of the importance of Google+ due to SEO things like Authorship (which was discontinued a few months ago).

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Posted in
Uncategorized

#ScoopitAMA: Ask Me Anything, Scoop.it CEO Edition

Posted on
December 5, 2014
by

Did you ever wish you could get inside the brains behind Scoop.it? Now’s your opportunity! Next Wednesday, December 10th at 10am PST, we’ll be hosting a live Google Hangout with Scoop.it’s CEO, Guillaume Decugis and myself to answer all of your questions and provide a look under the hood of Scoop.it.

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Posted in
Events

Winning content marketing strategies for SMBs

Posted on
December 3, 2014
by

Content marketing continues to grow in importance for both B2B and B2C organizations, and as more and more businesses come to realize the importance of establishing thought leadership in their fields, those same businesses are finding that a disciplined, intelligent, and focused content marketing strategy is one of the best mechanisms by which to achieve their objectives.

But while we’ve all marveled at the publicity stunts of RedBull and other major brands with huge marketing budgets, we wanted to recap why and how content marketing applied to SMBs which, by definition, dont’ have as deep pockets.

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5 Signs you highly need a content curation diet in your marketing mix

Posted on
December 2, 2014
by

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.

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How the right influencer strategy can amplify your content marketing

Posted on
November 24, 2014
by

 

To rise above the noise, convey a message and mobilize buyers, content marketers are turning to influencers.

Source: www.slideshare.net

Scaling Content Marketing is the key area of focus for many marketers these days. A number of strategies are being offered by experts, social networks or distribution platforms including the most natural one to them: pay for play. As Mark Schaefer wrote earlier this year, Content Marketing could be the victim of its own success if content strategists don’t put in place strategies to overcome the content abundance that results in diminishing returns. Earlier this year, Facebook for instance admitted to de-prioritize the organic reach of content from Facebook pages as users are more and more publishing content to more and more friends. The solution, they say? Buy ads to boost your post. And as LinkedIn and Twitter are also massively dependent on advertising revenue, this trend is here for good.

As mentioned in my reply to Mark, I believe there are ways to overcome content shock and scale Content Marketing through Lean Content. Interest-based content curation is an answer in the broad sense as it’s about leveraging existing content rather than adding to it but the team at Traackr puts it in a more specific context: influencer amplification.

Their point is a clear one: rather than paying for distribution, getting influencers to amplify your reach is a much more efficient approach.

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Introducing The New Scoop.it Suggestion Engine: Bringing You More Relevant Content

Posted on
November 20, 2014
by

Every business’s marketing objectives require awesome content. Whether you’re focused on building thought leadership, increasing brand awareness, boosting SEO, engaging with an audience, or generating leads, it’s no longer a question that content marketing is the answer.

You create content, you outsource content, you curate content. Content curation has indeed proven its efficiency as a potent element of your editorial line, especially in terms of inbound marketing.

Now, the question remains: how do we turn this into a simple, scalable process?

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Posted in
Product News

Content curation on WordPress: how to do it right.

Posted on
November 14, 2014
by

Content Curation on Wordpress - how to do it right - compared benefits of the various solutions

One of the main ways to to leverage content curation for business is to add curated content to your website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors – a good objective in itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benefits:

  • Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email newsletters.

  • SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benefits of content curation here).

  • Social Traffic as your readers can share content they like while directing traffic to your site (more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).

  • Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product (more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).

So how do you integrate curated content to Wordpress in the right way, to reach these objectives?

Not all integrations are created equal, and some integrations will not deliver the above benefits in an optimal way. Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:

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Report: SMBs Turn to Content Curation for Increased ROI

Posted on
November 13, 2014
by


As the beginning of the end of 2014 approaches, marketers are likely reflecting upon the last year, the trends that have caught on, and the trends that haven’t. At this time in 2013, the digital marketing world was abuzz about content marketing and content curation. Over the last year or so, marketing experts have been debating how much importance content curation should have within a content marketing strategy.

With over 1.5 million freemium users on our platform, we decided to take a closer look at what the data says for small businesses who have been using curation over the last year. The findings were quite interesting, especially when comparing the returns of content creation vs. the returns of content curation with respect to how much investment is put into them.

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3 Things To Begin With To Build A Strong Personal Brand

Posted on
November 13, 2014
by

what to focus your personal branding efforts on

Ever Googled yourself? What did you see? Did you like digital you? Are you visible in an Internet century? Here are the steps to creating a personal brand.

Source: www.jeffbullas.com

Five years ago, I didn’t think much of the concept of personal brand: it felt artificial and vain. I had a reputation of course and I felt strongly about it. But a brand? I also had opinions and felt I had some expertise. But did that make me a thought leader?

Since then, Web 2.0 has changed the way we are perceived by others. It gave us an opportunity to exist which became an obligation to maintain our online presence: whether we like it or not, we are the content we publish.

Jeff Bullas has built a strong personal brand through his blog and he articulates in this post the 10 principles he’s prescribing to develop your personal brand.

10 is a lot. And this list might sound overwhelming… So here’s my take on it:

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SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

Posted on
November 10, 2014
by

SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

With Panda, Penguin and all the other Google updates, SEO has changed over the years. What used to work doesn’t anymore.

Source: www.quicksprout.com

As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?

This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:

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The Desert Island: the future is the curated Web for Steve Rosenbaum in Curate This!

Posted on
November 7, 2014
by

Curate this! by Steve Rosenbaum

Three and half years ago, my friend Steve Rosenbaum came out with a book that had a huge impact: Curation Nation. He described perhaps better than anyone else how much content curation was needed and how important a trend it will be. His latest book Curate This! just got published and it’s a fantastic read: not only is it a curation jewel in itself but he also introduces a new concept that paints the future of what the Web could eventually become: the desert island.

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Be Human in Your Content Marketing

Posted on
November 6, 2014
by

Don't be a robot content marketer

Here’s one of the most significant tenets of content marketing: People like to do business with other people. They don’t like to do business with faceless, anonymous, inhuman brands or big corporations.

Source: www.business2community.com

Occasionally people ask us how they could fully automate their content publishing. They’d like to not only get content suggestions automatically but also that this content be published automatically. They’d want to set up once and then forget their content marketing while just reaping the benefits of it. I don’t blame them and I even understand them. But content simply doesn’t work that way for the precise reason Amanda Clark from Grammar Chic introduces this post we’ve curated.

Communication is fundamentally human.

It’s not just an ethical question but it’s also a matter of efficiency

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Inbound Marketing: the power of content curation

Posted on
November 5, 2014
by

Inbound marketing is definitely more efficient and appealing to the sophisticated modern customer than traditional interruptive outbound techniques. But for inbound marketing to work, you need to have its lifeblood: content.

Source: www.slideshare.net

This Slideshare is from a talk @Marc Rougier recently gave on how content curation helps to solve inbound marketing #1 pain point: scaling the content you publish to feed your landing pages and conversion loops.

Content curation has played an important role in content marketing for some time now. And as content Marketing and inbound marketing are converging – especially for B2B marketers who are looking for ROI – we wanted to look specifically at what it brought to inbound marketers specifically.

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Turning 3: How Scoop.it Grew To 3,000 SMB And Enterprise Clients In The Past Year

Posted on
November 4, 2014
by

When I became an entrepreneur, I was told by some friends that the odds of my startup turning 3 were practically non existent. I’m not sure if that statistic is really true but it stayed with me as some kind of magic number – a bit like turning 18 was fascinating to me as a teenager, imagining I would suddenly become a grown-up overnight. Somehow we beat the odds back then with Musiwave (my former startup) and today I’m excited to announce we’re doing it again with the Scoop.it team and community: it’s now been officially 3 years since we launched Scoop.it!

Here are some of the milestones we’ve achieved in the past year thanks to your support.

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Posted in
Product News

Are you using Lego blocks to make your Content Marketing lean?

Posted on
October 30, 2014
by

Creating original content on an ongoing basis can be a challenge, so most marketers practice the fine art of content repurposing.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I’m a geek…). As a father, I’ve been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids’ favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build. This is what this post by Leed Odden made me think about so here’s a good question for all content marketers:

Are you thinking of your content as modular lego-type building blocks?

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3 Practical Ideas To Make Content Marketing Everybody’s Job

Posted on
October 29, 2014
by

content marketing should be team work

“The need for content has moved beyond a traditional marketing department’s ability to create and is now everyone’s job.”

Source: www.ducttapemarketing.com

Or why Content Marketing needs to grow beyond the marketing team (as I also wrote about in that post). Now, where I disagree with John Jantsch is when he uses the word “creation”. I talk to hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and even VP Marketing at larger companies which all tell me how incredibly hard it is to get non-marketers to create content.

Don’t fool yourself: you won’t get everybody to create content.

But here’s what you can do very easily.

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Your Business Blog Sucks. Here are 6 Reasons Why.

Posted on
October 28, 2014
by

“Content is king!”

“Content is the new SEO!”

“Content is the new PR!”

What isn’t content these days? You hear about it all the time, you know you have to do it, you might even be doing it. But, are you doing it right? Just because you’ve started a blog, doesn’t mean you’re a content marketer. Don’t worry, though, I’m here with a few reasons why your blog might suck and some tips to change that

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Content Curation (but were afraid to ask)

Posted on
October 22, 2014
by

“What can content curation do for you? Who is it for? What are interesting case studies? How does content curation help SEO? What’s the ROI of content marketing in general and how does content curation help improve it? What features does Scoop.it have? How do they work?”

These are just some of the questions you’ll find answers for in our newly revamped resource center as well as in our brand new product tour page

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3 Key Take-Aways for Content Marketers From the 2015 CMI/MarketingProfs Benchmark

Posted on
October 10, 2014
by

“This is the fifth year that MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute have put together this report on how marketers use content in their marketing mix. With changes in the industry, the report may look a little different than you remember.”

Source: www.slideshare.net

Content Marketing is being adopted very quickly, especially by B2B Marketers. The Content Marketing Institute together with MarketingProfs published this great report that gives many enlightening facts about the key challenges they face and how they resolve them.

Among other great findings, here’s what I found particularly interesting:

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6 Ways to Enrich Content and Media Online

Posted on
October 9, 2014
by

Media richness is defined as a reduction of ambiguity. Whereas text can be misinterpreted, images and videos provide more concise delivery of information.

In an era when the average person skims content for the juiciest and most useful bits, companies have to say more with less and be very direct with content. Your web-using customer base prefers websites that specifically limit content length to six-second videos or 140-character posts, so your content should achieve brevity.

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Community feedback: asking is just the beginning

Posted on
October 8, 2014
by

This morning in the always fast-paced tweet chat run by Buffer, an interesting topic came up that I feel is often overlooked by community builders and brands. The subject of the conversation was Nir Eyal‘s Hook Model, which essentially helps brands build habit-forming products.

A question was raised concerning how to figure out the current pain points of users of a platform or product, and the number one answer, of course, was to “ASK!!!”

Asking is, of course, the first part of the answer to this question, but it certainly isn’t the only one; and I don’t even think it’s the most important one. Having led community input efforts for Scoop.it’s redesign last year, I learned the importance of the next two steps of the community feedback loop.

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Posted in
Best Practices, Opinion

Why even IBM needs SMB marketing software

Posted on
September 25, 2014
by

“Employees at the brand at IBM. How about at your company?”

Marketers used to buy ads, PR and creative work. Now they also buy software. This is new and this is a big change. A clear example of that trend, Marketo‘s massive success is 100% built on marketing software – a category which didn’t exist 10 years ago. Beyond Marketo, an entire ecosystem has developed ranking from marketing automation to inbound marketing and content marketing. Some say this space is crowded but the fact is no one denies anymore that software tools have proven useful to understand “which 50% of my marketing spending is efficient“.

The success of these tools has been to be designed for marketers by marketers. The same way Salesforce.com used the language of the VP Sales and not the language of CFO’s, marketing software vendors owe a big part of their success to speaking the language of marketers. Demand generation, campaigns, leads, funnel, nurturing, editorial calendars, brand assets, landing pages, open rates, click-through rates… The jargon is undoubtably omnipresent in these tools because they’re focused on being understood and used by one unique user category: marketers.

This needs to change.

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10 Scoop.it Hacks You Might Have Been Overlooking

Posted on
September 23, 2014
by


Building a product is fun. Building a dynamic platform is even more fun. Did you know that Scoop.it has the best engineering team in the entire world, and that they put out a new release of the platform almost every week?

In each of these releases, there are little new features and hacks that aren’t always announced. Some are data-backed and meant to help our team figure out what works and what doesn’t within the platform, but others are little gifts to you, the curators, and I’ve compiled a few so that you can all get up to date on what you might have been missing.

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