In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I proposed a few scenarios on how you could create content needed to attract customers to, and convert customers on your website.
Content marketing is a large part of the modern day business strategy, but the creation process is so long and expensive, that many business owners are ready to give up after their first attempt. You have to hang in there because the process gets easier over time.
Businesses with aggressive marketing approaches should create at least one form of new content marketing every week; if that's too much then you can do it every other week, or at least once per month.
Even though your busy schedule might not allow for continual content creation, your customers are still out there; they're watching you on social media and finding you in search results. Wouldn't you want them to always find something interesting and new on your website and social accounts?
But how do you keep your customers satisfied when you don't have the ability to create the content that engages them?
The answer is Content Curation. Similar to how a museum curator will carefully choose appropriate artifacts that their patrons are interested in; with content curation you are carefully selecting and showcasing the content that other people have created. You can showcase them on your own website, build newsletters with them, or simply share them socially.
While it might take you a few hours to produce your own content, the curation process can be done in less than an hour every day, or it can be completely automated through different curation services.
Here's how content curation works:
- 1. Choose topic phrases, keywords, and hashtags that relate to the content you want to look for.
- 2. Search for those phrases and topics in Google search to look for newly published information, usually blog posts.
- 3. Search through Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for your chosen keywords and hashtags.
- 4. Read through what you find and evaluate if your audience will appreciate it.
- 5. Add it to your curation list.
Some businesses will curate content every day and publish a newsletter with simple titles and links to what they find. This is a good strategy to follow if you can set up a fully automated process. The website http://paper.li/ provides a fully automated curation service after spending some time to set it up.
Another curation approach is to take some of that content you find and schedule it sporadically over the following few days. When you individually share content like this you can also add your own commentary. Both Facebook and Google+ give you plenty of space to add your comments next to the preview of the link you're sharing.
Your commentary can be a full summary of the content, or simply a sentence explaining why your audience will be interested in reading it.
There are several ways you can schedule curated content like this. I often find interesting things to read while I'm using my smartphone. I use the Pulse app (https://www.pulse.me/), Klout app (https://klout.com), and Buffer (https://bufferapp.com/) to schedule the random things I find. I use the same three systems on my desktop computer too. Each one of them allows me to add my comments to the content I wish to share.
It might take you a while to identify the keywords and hashtags you want to curate. Don't choose too many. The goal of content curation is to establish yourself as a source for the information that your audience is interested in. It will seem unusual if you curate content about sports and politics if your audience is expecting you to be their source for content about jewelry and fashion trends.
You could also set up a content curation schedule whereby you share content about a specific topic on specific days of every week. This strategy will help you maintain focus of the type of content you need to find.
You can hire a freelancer to maintain a curation channel on your website or a specific social account. Simply give them the keywords and hashtags to look for and socially share every day. You could have them summarize the content they find as they share it. This would be a low cost approach to the process.
Content curation should not replace the creation of your own original content. This is a supplement, not a replacement.
Millennial generation customers will judge you, and choose to do business with you based on your social activity and availability. Curation certainly will make you appear very active.
One last important note about curation is that the people who find and follow you will often comment on the stuff you share. You can't ignore their comments; you must socially engage with them. Customers aren't stupid and they will recognize the difference between someone who's always shouting their message without listening vs. those who share valuable information in the hopes of starting a conversation.
