In a recent Smart Insights poll, 29.6 percent of digital marketers said content marketing was the single technique that would make the biggest commercial impact on their business in 2015, topping big data at 14.6 percent. This ascendance of big content over big data bears out the 2013 forecast of the Gartner research director Jake Sorofman, and it helps account for Contently’s finding that over 23 percent of marketers have earmarked over half of their budgets for content marketing in 2015.
Although content is more crucial than ever, it can be time-consuming and expensive, making an efficient curation system a key to optimizing your marketing strategy and gaining a competitive edge.
Automate Your Content Collection
A fundamental way to streamline your curation strategy is to automate your content collection process. Trapit is a good example of an application that uses analytics criteria to pull content from text and video sources and schedule publication across multiple social channels. This approach is an improvement over manual curation because it uses filters to ensure that pulled content is relevant to the publisher’s preferences and target audience. Tech Cocktail provides a review of other top content curation tools if necessary.
Coordinate Your Content Management
Sorofman recommends that content marketers improve their efficiency by organizing their team like a newsroom. He suggests that a content management team can be headed up by the equivalent of an editor-in-chief and other core team members can include in-house reporters, specialist freelance writers, branding specialists tasked with content for specific niches, graphic designers and a social marketing manager responsible for syndicating content and generating engagement.
To implement this strategy effectively, it will help your team to have a good cloud storage system such as Dropbox for file sharing and collaboration. For more information, Top 10 Cloud Storage provides reviews of the best cloud storage options.
Find Promotional Partners
Another way teamwork can enhance content curation efficiency is by teaming up with branded content partners, claims Forrester senior analyst Ryan Skinner. He follows this statement with the example of Volkswagen Golf and Target, two non-competing brands who share a common demographic. The two companies teamed up to produce a humorous video about a Volkswagen zooming around a Target store, and because the two brands share consumers but do not compete, it was in their mutual best interests to collaborate in producing content.
One benefit of this type of collaboration is that it enables companies to pool creative talent. In a similar way, digital marketers can curate content created by their promotional partners. For example, a financial services provider might curate content generated by a credit card company’s poll of its consumers.
To make this type of partnership work, Skinner stresses the need for both partners to be on the same page. For example, your sales team may need a reminder to stay focused on content geared towards reader engagement rather than selling the product. Both partners also need to be clear about communicating their goals such as brand awareness or lead generation.