CURATION FOR B2B CONTENT MARKETING Using Curation Effectively for Demand Generation | by Greg Bardwell
Curation for B2B Content Marketing
TABLE OF CONTENTS Why an eBook on B2B Content Curation? .........................................................................4 Why is Curation a Hot topic? ............................................................................................5 Search Engines and SEO ..............................................................................................5 Efficiency ................................................................................................................5 Long Tail Effects.....................................................................................................5 Authority ................................................................................................................6 Timeliness ..............................................................................................................6 Social Media Sharing ....................................................................................................6 Blogging ......................................................................................................................8 Why is Curation important for B2B Content Marketers? ..................................................8 Is Curation Right for Your Business? .................................................................................9 What is Content Curation? ............................................................................................. 10 Curation is Not… ........................................................................................................ 12 Common Curation Questions .......................................................................................... 13 Is Curation Stealing? .................................................................................................. 13 What are the Copyright Issues? .................................................................................. 13 Sending Traffic by Linking to Other Sites – Is this Bad? ................................................ 13 Giving Knowledge Away – How do I Sell my Services?.................................................. 14 Do I share Content from a Competitor? ....................................................................... 14 Curation and B2B Content Marketing – Why? .................................................................. 16 Driving Traffic ...................................................................................................... 16 Lead Nurturing ..................................................................................................... 17 Sales ..................................................................................................................... 17 Opportunities ....................................................................................................... 17 Customers ............................................................................................................ 18 Consistency .......................................................................................................... 18 Saving Money ............................................................................................................ 18 Faster Results ............................................................................................................ 19 Brand & Thought Leadership ...................................................................................... 19 Source for Original Content ........................................................................................ 21 Curation Sweet Spots ................................................................................................. 22 Driving Traffic ...................................................................................................... 22 Thought Leadership ............................................................................................. 22 Nurturing Leads & Customers ............................................................................. 22 Curation Strategy .......................................................................................................... 23 Company Blog ........................................................................................................... 25 Yes, If… ................................................................................................................ 25 No, If… ................................................................................................................. 26 Sometimes! .......................................................................................................... 26 Curated Industry Site ................................................................................................. 27 Own Your Niche! .................................................................................................. 27 Newsletters ............................................................................................................... 28
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Social Media Sharing .................................................................................................. 28 Nurture Leads ......................................................................................................... 29 Putting It All Together ................................................................................................ 30 Integrating Curation with your Content Marketing ........................................................ 31 Frequency ................................................................................................................. 31 How to Do Content Curation .......................................................................................... 32 Finding Content to Curate .......................................................................................... 32 Discovering RSS Feeds ........................................................................................... 33 What Content to Share ............................................................................................ 33 Content Curation Standards...................................................................................... 34 Filtering And Selecting................................................................................................ 35 Filter ..................................................................................................................... 35 Select .................................................................................................................... 35 Sorting, Sharing, and Publishing ................................................................................. 35 Niche Portal............................................................................................................. 37 Blog ........................................................................................................................ 37 Social Media ............................................................................................................ 39 Driving Website Traffic ............................................................................................... 41 Social Media................................................................................................... 41 Niche Portal ................................................................................................... 41 Blog ................................................................................................................ 41 Newsletters ................................................................................................... 41 About the B2B ContentEngine ........................................................................................ 42
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CURATION FOR B2B CONTENT MARKETING
By Greg Bardwell Founder & CEO of the B2B ContentEngine Follow on Twitter @gregbardwell
Greg Bardwell is an executive and entrepreneur with a focus on curation, research, and educational B2B content marketing. He is the founder and current CEO of his second software company, which focuses on B2B content marketing – flipping his knowledge discovery and education expertise on its head for content marketing automation. He has spent decades focusing on educational content creation, marketing, and technology. The B2B ContentEngine is a web-based tool suite to help solve the #1 problem for content marketers: content. It is a curation and content-marketing tool suite designed from the ground up specifically for B2B content marketing agencies and professional marketers. The B2B ContentEngine integrates research and discovery, content creation, curation, social media sharing, planning, and SEO-focused publishing efforts. For agencies, it features tools for managing multiple clients, team content creation, and planning as well as client reporting.
We Help Solve the #1 Problem for Content Marketers: Content.
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W HY AN E B OOK ON B2B C ONTENT C URATION ? So much of what is written on content curation for content marketing is generic, or it only tells you why you should be doing it. But how do you really apply it effectively in your business and marketing program? Where do you start? We are here to help. Take a deep breath; we’ll go one step at a time. This eBook is designed for B2B content marketers who want to use curation as part of their strategy. We will try to be practical, helping you make the best strategic and operational choices. This eBook is both a what-to-do and a
Rohit Bhargava defines a content curator as someone who “CONTINUALLY FINDS, GROUPS, ORGANIZES, AND SHARES THE BEST AND MOST RELEVANT CONTENT ON A SPECIFIC ISSUE
how-to guide on planning and executing your curation strategy for content marketing. It contains many individual sections that can be read independently or in the order presented. There are many worksheets and templates to get you started.
ONLINE.”
“THOSE WHO FOCUS ARE THOSE WHO WIN!”
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W HY IS C URATION A H OT TOPIC ? Rather than relying on a search or their own sifting powers, visitors to a content-curated site borrow the time and expertise of a human curator. For content consumers and producers, curation is a time saver and accelerator. Sharing and highlighting the most useful content, curators help cut through the mounds of fluff and irrelevance cluttering the web. Ultimately, that is why it is a hot topic and important to B2B content marketing.
S EARCH E NGINES
AND
SEO As a content marketer, you have probably already heard the continued buzz around search engine changes, particularly at Google, which focus on quality content or, more specifically, providing value to their search users, which is their bread and butter and often overlooked. Content curation has therefore become a powerful tool for search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons: EFFICIENCY: Lists of relevant resources coupled with
brief descriptions allow you to provide mountains of content with a lot less time and cost investment than creating it yourselves, and adding your own unique perspective helps make you an expert and thought leader. LONG TAIL EFFECTS: By providing links to targeted content and less-popular websites, you increase your visibility to those running low-probability searches.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing AUTHORITY: Providing targeted content-curation pages signals that you are an expert in a subject. By pointing to an industry niche and evaluating their content, you imply that you are qualified to judge their content. Over time, this, in turn, generates links to your original content as an authority. Inbound links are SEO gold. VISIBILITY: When you add a content-curation page to your site, in addition to the SEO benefits, you will begin exporting your traffic to other sites to help answer visitor questions. The owners of these sites will notice that you are feeding them page views, and they may link to your site in exchange, increasing your authority! TIMELINESS: Google is now ranking “freshness” as part of its search rank algorithm. Curation allows a steady stream of fresh content – a marketer’s biggest challenge!
S OCIAL M EDIA S HARING Have you heard of Pinterest and Twitter? I sure hope you, as a content marketer, have. Social media is still growing, is becoming entrenched in our lives, and is a hotbed for curation. Social sharing is a POPULAR form of content curation.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Pinterest is a content What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a virtual
curation site, which is
pinboard. Pinterest lets you organize
largely about sharing images and of limited
and share all the beautiful things you
value for many B2B content marketers. But as of this writing, Pinterest is hot! It is a great
find on the web.
place to put infographics and curating them.
Twitter, the 140-character microblogging platform is also growing fast. Just go to Pinterest and type in “twitter growth” in the search bar – you will get some great data. On Twitter, 15% to 25% of tweets contain web links, and 56% of retweets do. I have no doubt that if you are
VALUE OF SOCIAL CURATION 21% of B2B buyers use social media at some point in the buying
process.
searching for a service or product recommendations it is much higher, and people do share these. Link sharing is content curation. And these links are driving traffic to web sites. The world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn, has web links built in to their user updates. LinkedIn is arguably the best social network for B2B marketing. Do not forget Facebook; it too uses link sharing as a major part of both user and company updates. Finally, Google is getting into the picture more and more with Google+. There are more social sharing sites, online magazines, story-creation and clipping services coming online all the time (Storify, Flipboard, and Paper.li, etc.). Everyone is sharing, and sharing is a core component of curation.
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B LOGGING Blogs and news are often just another form of content curation. The Huffington Post, now owned by AOL, is an online newspaper and is read by almost 30 million people per month. Curation is widely credited with the Huffington Post success, leading to its sale to AOL for $315 million. In addition, a recent survey by Curata, the Content Curation Adoption Survey, shows that 95% of marketers are curating in some form. With a figure like that, content curation must be providing some value. However, I would argue that the figure is a bit unfocused in that it defines
95% OF MARKETERS ARE
curation any social sharing rather than a strategic,
CURATING – IN SOME FORM!
consistent, planned part of the B2B content-marketing process that we are trying to help you implement here.
W HY
IS
C URATION
IMPORTANT FOR
B2B C ONTENT M ARKETERS ?
One look at social media growth and search benefits, combined with one of the fundamental tenants of marketing—“fish where the fish are“—makes it easy to see curation’s importance. Content marketing is all about education prospects to generate leads and sales. But there is no rule that states all the education content has to come from your company. As you will see, a well-designed curation strategy can generate web traffic, produce thought leadership, be used as a “top-of-mind” marketing tactic, nurture leads, and keep your customers engaged and informed. It can expand your resources and accelerate your effectiveness as a marketer.
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I S C URATION R IGHT FOR Y OUR B USINESS ? Chances are if you are a B2B company that is doing content marketing at all, curation is right for your business. Here are some questions:
Do you focus on a specific industry niche or profession? Does your industry have any sources of news, blogging, or discussion on the internet? Do your customers do web research when choosing your solution or services? Do you need to educate your customers as part of the sales cycle? Do you provide a professional service? Do you have competitors, and are they talking about your industry? Do you want to be recognized as a thought leader in your profession? If you answered yes to more than one of these questions, then chances are that content curation will help your business in its marketing efforts. Here are more:
Do you have a limit on your budget and time? Do you want to increase your marketing effectiveness? Do you want to improve your brand? Of course, you answered yes to all of these questions. If you answered yes to the above questions and these, then, YES, curation is right for your B2B content-marketing efforts!
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W HAT IS C ONTENT C URATION ? From a marketer’s perspective, content curation is collecting content relevant to your targeted audience(s) that is organized and presented to make it findable and useful. It could be an industry website or, better yet, a targeted subset of the industry that is related to your product or service. This entails finding, selecting, adding, and organizing content (articles, blogs, infographics, websites, photos, podcasts, videos, etc.) on a website, following copyright and common attribution rules. There, people can learn about the topic and associate the site with your business, driving traffic and targeted leads while generating brand and thought leadership.
Find Content Targeted to Your Audience
Collect, Organize, and Add Value
Publish and Share
For example, say you are marketing for a law firm that specializes in drug patent law. The ideal clients are in-house council for medium-sized drug development companies. The firm will benefit from creating and promoting a topic portal around all the issues of this niche: current news and legal and business issues. Curating and organizing industry news in this area would allow you to drive highly targeted traffic to your
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing website and build a newsletter subscriber list composed entirely of potential customers or influencers. From the perspective of a B2B content marketer, content curation is: 1. Finding third-party content of interest to your target market and influencers. This could be: a. A blog post, article, video, infographic, or other content source. b. A snippet or quote pulled from one of these sources. 2. Organizing the content and add your unique perspective and value by way of: a. Commentary targeting your niche – your thought leadership. b. Categorizing and organizing – making it findable. c. Collecting related quotes and snippets to make a new piece of content with your commentary – content creation. 3. Sharing the content via: a. Social media. b. A topic portal or blog. c. An email newsletter. All of which should be as targeted as possible.
4. Repeat Continuously!
It is the “repeat continuously” part that usually presents the biggest challenge in content marketing – just look at blog-abandonment rates! With a good strategy and professional tools, curation can become a vital part of your B2B content-marketing efforts.
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Curation Tools Built in to the B2B ContentEngine
Along with your own original content, curated content is an essential part of your content-marketing strategy. Your time is important; the B2B ContentEngine can turn this process into just minutes a week. Curation and social sharing is built into the workflows of our ContentEngine.
C URATION
IS
N OT :
Aggregation or regurgitation! Aggregating, collecting, and presenting everything related to a topic is not curation. Piracy! Stealing or republishing other peoples content. Volume-driven! With recent search engine updates, especially at Google and Bing, just creating volumes of thin or keyword-stuffed content will not help your results and may actually harm them.
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C OMMON C URATION Q UESTIONS I S C URATION S TEALING ? Curation is not stealing when done properly. Stealing is not curation – it is plagiarizing or copyright infringement. Curation is publishing an abstract or snippet of content that is relevant to your audience. It could be the opening part of an article, and it is common (and good thought leadership) to add your own comments or notes. You always link to the original article and give the author credit.
W HAT
ARE THE
C OPYRIGHT I SSUES ? If you do abstracts as stated above, you will have no issues. You should never re-publish a whole article without permission. While there are no definite rules or regulations on fair use of content when it comes to curation, there are copyright laws that must be considered, and you should comply with “fair use” laws.
S ENDING T RAFFIC
BY
L INKING
TO
O THER S ITES – I S
THIS
B AD ?
A common concern is that a by linking to other websites you will drive traffic away. However, the SEO benefits are clear: linking to other sites creates repeat visiting and quality inbound links. If you use a branded, curated niche portal such as a topic site or industry news site, then traffic will actually be driven to, not taken away from, your site. Do not forget the benefits these links have in generating thought and brand leadership.
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G IVING K NOWLEDGE A WAY – H OW
DO
I S ELL
MY
S ERVICES ?
This is a common question from professional service providers, who worry that giving too much information will actually solve a potential customer’s problem, making the actual service unnecessary. In the B2B case, this is misguided – we are a world of specialists. If prospects are going to do it themselves, they do not need information from you – they will find it somewhere on the web from someone else. I know how to cut a 2x4 and pound a nail, and I may actually do it to put up a shelf in the garage (maybe), but I will hire a professional to add a room to my house – one recommended by someone I trust who has seen their work. Businesses are the same, just on a larger scale. If a business needs your professional services, they want to know that you know your stuff, that you are the expert. Curation, as we shall see, is perfect for this.
DO I
SHARE
C ONTENT
FROM A
C OMPETITOR ?
Part of almost every B2B buying process includes awareness of the problem needing to be solved, discovery of options and information, compiling a short list of possible solution or service providers to help solve the problem, and then making a decision. Therefore, your prospects are likely going to find your competitors anyway if they wish – you cannot hide them. If their content is valuable, share it – it positions your business as a resource and an industry thought leader.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Curation also gives you the chance to capture traffic or searches for them when your curated content shows up in the search results ahead of the competitor’s content. We do this here at the B2B ContentEngine when it adds value for our customers or prospects. We are more concerned with providing our site visitors with the value they need in educational content. If we do this we, they will keep coming back or subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feed. So if I find a blog or article that would be of value to my audience on a competitors blog I will not hesitate to link to it. I will often add my own perspective or comments summarizing key point that are of interest. We have a unique value proposition that sets us apart from our competitors. If this value proposition is compelling for a prospect, then we win the business.
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C URATION AND B2B C ONTENT M ARKETING – W HY ? Content marketing is about creating leads and customers. To do this, we use content, web sites, and social media to drive targeted traffic, generate leads, nurture leads, upsell, and make customers happy. Curation can be an integral part of just about every stage of that process. DRIVING TRAFFIC: Nearly all B2B content-marketing efforts use a company website as the primary hub for all marketing efforts. You can use curation to drive visitor traffic with social media curation and sharing, curated blog
content, and curated topic portals. If done correctly, these three things, combined with your own original content, can drive a lot of traffic.
Creating an industry topic portal is a great way to generate brand and thought leadership as well as traffic.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing LEAD NURTURING: Lead nurturing is the process of keeping in touch with and educating leads that are not yet sales-ready. You want to maintain top-of-mind status and permission to keep in touch while continuing to educating them along their decision path without getting too pushy until they are ready to move into the buying stage. You need to maintain relevance with these leads, and curated newsletters are a great way to achieve this.
If you can segment and microtarget your lead list, you will do better at closing sales.
SALES: While the sales process itself may not be the best place for curations, keeping the sales people up to speed on the industry and trends is good policy. A carefully curated portal for your sales people that follows trends, competitors, products, people, and more in your industry niche will help your sales people close more sales. Keeping sales people updated on the latest trends, news, and competitors in the industry will enable them to answer questions with confidence and knowledge, thus giving them and your company more creditability. OPPORTUNITIES: Once leads are sales-ready, the sales process in B2B sales can be long. It is good practice to still send them the curated newsletters along with educational content to keep them engaged.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing CUSTOMERS: Once you have a customer, you can keep them happy and maintain thought leadership in their mind with your industry- and topic-focused newsletters. As long as you are adding value and educating them on the latest goings on in your industry, they will be happy. Happy customers are customers who buy more and recommend your product or service to others.
CONSISTENCY: Curation helps you consistently publish content. This is the biggest challenge in B2B content marketing!
S AVING M ONEY As a content marketer, you know that continually publishing high-quality targeted content is the key to success. You probably already know that content and inbound marketing can save 60% per lead, according to Hubspot analysis. But with the tools and procedures in place, you can use curation to save 30% to 75% more on common content-marketing tasks such as writing researched blogs, industry portals, newsletters, and social sharing. In addition to these direct cost savings, you can achieve better results in your content-marketing efforts by increasing your output. Curation helps you have more content for that daily content grind.
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F ASTER R ESULTS More and better traffic creates leads faster. With curation you quickly create more:
Long-tail keyword content – it can take years otherwise
B RAND
AND
Link bait for link building – content attracts links
Social media sharing – sharing drives traffic
T HOUGHT L EADERSHIP
How do you build authority in your niche? The answer is a continuous stream of original and curated content published to your blog or news portal and shared via social media. Curation demonstrates your knowledge and expertise.
By identifying and sharing the most insightful information out of all the noise out there, you demonstrate your expertise. This gives you creditability and authority even if you did not create the content.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Curation and sharing gets you followers – an audience.
It does not matter how great your original content is – if no one sees it, it has little value. Curation helps give you an audience. Finding and sharing regularly on social media will get you followers and an audience for your original content. Curation allows you to become an authoritative reference in you niche industry.
Content is the “coin of the realm” in social media. Sharing valuable content regularly will help you to become one of the most trusted and valued references in your industry. With content curation, you can share and credit the best sources; as a result, people will look at you as a reliable source for relevant information. Also, other content curators you have mentioned are more likely to mention you and refer to your content.
Add your own value to stand out – otherwise you are
just one of the crowd. That is not leadership.
Content Curation + Content Creation = Influence
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S OURCE
FOR
O RIGINAL C ONTENT One habit you get into when you curate content is constantly monitoring your industry and looking to angle the content to your target market. So you find unique relationships between other content areas and your niche – this gives you a unique perspective when creating new and original content.
Create original “List” blog posts by clipping great nuggets of content, organizing them in a blog post, and adding your perspective and insights.
A “wrap up” blog post shows your industry expertise. At the B2B ContentEngine, I try to post a “Best B2B Content Marketing For Week Ending …” most weeks.
Create a newsletter with a weekly best-of list for your niche. o Sneak in a blog post of your own when possible.
Find a great post from a competitor or even another niche and rewrite it from your perspective.
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C URATION S WEET S POTS As with most B2B content marketing, you can see the same tactics can accomplish more than one goal. The goal as content marketers is to both generate awareness of your brand and to educate prospects about your offering. Add your own unique value proposition, and you have a growing business. DRIVING TRAFFIC Blog posts Industry topic sites Social sharing Roundup newsletters and blogs THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Social sharing Blog posts NURTURING LEADS AND CUSTOMERS Targeted email content Industry roundups
“73% of leads in your database are not sales-ready at any given time in complex B2B sales.” — “The Complex Sale: Lead-Scoring Effort Increases Conversion 79%”, Marketing Sherpa, Jan. 25, 2012
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C URATION S TRATEGY You have now seen the “sweet spots” for curation in B2B content marketing. How does it fit into your content-marketing strategy? You do have one, right? So we will not cover strategic contentmarketing issues here; we will just focus on the issues specifically related to “professional” curation. By “professional,” we mean that we are not going to recommend or consider a lot of the free social curation or sharing tools that you cannot effectively use for you own brand. This is not to imply they are not useful, even to B2B content marketers. However, we want to brand your business, not a third-party site. We want to drive traffic to your domains, not a third-party site. This is not to say you should not share your original content on these sites – you most certainly should as part of you content-marketing strategy. We also mean more than just adding widgets to a site that pulls in RSS feeds to add extra content to a page. These are not search-engine indexed, nor are visitors likely to come to the page just for this content. Doing curation marketing fits hand in glove with content marketing. So you are probably engaged in most, if not all, of the tactics that curation is ideal for. You are driving targeted traffic, generating leads, working on brand or thought leadership, and, very likely, directly or indirectly nurturing leads.
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What new strategies are needed to add curation to your content marketing mix?
IF YOU WANT TO:
THEN:
• Blog • Curate Niche Site • Social Sharing • Blog • Social Sharing • Curate Niche Site • Newsletter • Social Sharing
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C OMPANY B LOG You almost certainly have a blog as the center of your content-marketing efforts. Do you curate content directly to this blog, placing content directly alongside your own original content?
YES, IF… Yes, if your own content-creation efforts are stalled or nonexistent, occurring, say, less than once per month. Yes, if your blog posts are short observations on your industry niche, then the post would tend to be of the same value to your audience as the content you curate. You can always highlight these posts to make them stand out, and you should do this. If either of these cases is so, then curating content directly to the company blog may be a good strategy. It will be good for search engines to index – they love constant updates. It will provide a great source for social sharing. However, do not do this if you want to also have a curated industry site. This will just confuse and not add the value you intend for your audience. Adding your own original content, assuming it is very infrequent, can be done by adding it as a new page to your site. This way it will still be indexed by search engines and you can still promote it as you like.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing NO, IF… No, if you create your own content at least once per month. Curation will create a steady stream of content that will drown out your “highervalue” posts. You want these to be highlighted on your blog as they will elevate your brand and drive leads directly. No, if you create your own curated industry site. Again, this will just confuse and not add the intended value for your audience. No, if you already have a very strong brand and web traffic and are already recognized as the best or the thought leader in your field. You do not want to chance diluting this in any way. In this case, a curated industry site would be the way to go – linked to your site, of course.
SOMETIMES! Yes, sometimes. If you are curating and adding significant value, such as ample expert insight, then putting this post on your site along with your original content is appropriate. Collecting multiple related blogs into one post and adding your own insight is a great way to make a high-value post. For example, at the B2B ContentEngine, some of our most commented on and heavily trafficked blog posts are ones where we disagree with another post or industry leader and quote their content or curation. This is especially helpful in generating engagement and elevating your status as a “thought leader.”
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Wrap-up posts, in which you pull together a collection of other people’s posts, are great to put on your blog, adding your own unique value and perspective, of course. These posts – with the attribution links – position you as an expert and demonstrate goodwill for your industry peers.
C URATED I NDUSTRY S ITE Sometimes called microsites, industry news portals, or topic sites, curated industry niche websites are a great way to drive traffic and brand and thought leadership. This is the ultimate in sharing with and organizing for your audience all the benefits of curation we discussed earlier. OWN YOUR NICHE! Becoming a resource for your profession or industry niche makes you the go-to resource when your services or product is needed. Customers and leads are the goals of your B2B content marketing. Hosting your curated content on an industry topic site will increase the authority of your company website as you will link to it as the sponsor and, of course, include your own original content. The curated site will have increasing authority and so will your own site. You will enlarge your SEO footprint faster than your competitors’.
Niche industry sites, newspaper sites, and other sites account for 57% of where people first turn for industry news. —
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New Users 2009 Study, Outsell, Inc.
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N EWSLETTERS I hope, as part of your content-marketing strategy, you have both a reason and mechanism to capture email addresses. It is also a good idea to have the emails of your customers. For both leads and customers, newsletters are a great way to maintain relevance and be top-of-mind with them. Lead nurturing Industry news Best of the week posts and newsletters
S OCIAL M EDIA S HARING Social media, by its nature, tends to be very time sensitive. Therefore, sharing is often a key to rising above the noise and having your content shared. When done correctly, sharing on social networks will not only create awareness but also drive traffic to your website.
90% of retweets are done in the first hour after a tweet. Most retweets have links to blog posts or articles.
Here are some social media stats from a 2012 B2B buyer’s survey: 21% of B2B buyers use social media at some point in the buying process. LinkedIn is 67% more useful than Twitter for B2B buyers. Use of Twitter among B2B buyers has reduced from 10% to 3% in the last 12 months. Twenty-something B2B buyers are twice as likely to use social media as 31-40 year olds.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Buyers under 30 are the only age group of B2B buyers who rate social media more useful than word of mouth. To them, it is word of mouth. B2B buyers are far more likely to use LinkedIn for conversation than for just finding articles. This is less true of Twitter. B2B buyers see Twitter as more useful at the later stages of the buying process. 11% of B2B buyers say they share information by Twitter. Search engines now use social media “signals” to help with their search-engine rankings.
“According to a study by Searchmetrics, social signals, such as tweets and Facebook likes, have a large impact on your search engine rankings.” – curated snippet Love it, hate it, or not sure, social media is an important part of B2B content marketing. A whole industry has risen to service social-media marketing. Using curation to feed social media can be a great strategy for both thought leadership and driving targeted web traffic – when done right. NURTURE LEADS Part of your B2B content-marketing strategy had better be to attract social media followers, whether by Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or some other platform. Some of these followers are or will be leads. Use social media to nurture these leads also.
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P UTTING I T A LL T OGETHER An “all in” curation strategy for B2B content marketers will consist of:
A niche topic site Social media sharing A newsletter of curated content Curated content snippets for blog posts such as: Top 10 lists Wrap-up posts Researched snippets and quotes. All four of these strategies will drive traffic and position your business as a thought leader in your industry niche.
The B2B ContentEngine is uniquely and specifically designed to do these tasks and more for B2B content marketers.
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I NTEGRATING C URATION
WITH YOUR
C ONTENT M ARKETING
Doing curation marketing will fit right in with your B2B content-marketing strategy. The same rules apply: You need to know what your audience wants You need to know where your audience gets its information You need to know and use the social networks your audience uses You have to have the same keyword strategy – integrated strategy is important You will use the same capture-and-conversion strategy – nothing new to add You do NOT need to do as much content planning for curation o However, it is a good idea to be aware of your original content creation and editorial plans so that you can curate for them with quotes and researched snippets. You will use the same measurements of success: o Followers, fans, likes o Web traffic o Lead conversion, lead-to-prospect conversion (sales-ready) o Newsletter open rates
F REQUENCY Use curated content daily in social sharing and niche topic portal publishing. This will give you the best results. As we discussed previously, consistency matters. With the right, professional tools, such as the B2B ContentEngine, you can minimize your time and maximize your results. With these tools you can curate and schedule posts and social sharing for days in advance, saving you a lot of time compared to manual methods.
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H OW TO D O C ONTENT C URATION If you have cut and pasted a webpage URL and emailed it, tweeted it, or shared it on Facebook or LinkedIn, you have curated. If you have cut and pasted webpage content and put in on your blog or shared it on Facebook or LinkedIn, you have curated. To professionally curate as part of your B2B content-marketing strategy, you need to find, select, organize, publish, and share content targeted to your audience consistently and at scale. By at scale, I mean enough of it to bring in significantly more traffic and leads. You will need a tool to collect the multiple streams of content (feeds) into one place to be able to review them. If you are not using a professional tool such as the B2B ContentEngine to find, filter, publish, and share content, you will need something like Google Reader or Feedly to review multiple streams of content, although some people just use their email inbox and subscribe to numerous newsletters, which will work also.
F INDING C ONTENT
TO
C URATE
Use your existing keyword list to find sources for curation. Do searches using Google Blog search or the built-in search in Google Reader on your professional tool – it has one, right? You probably already follow several industry sources by newsletter. Once you identify a source that is appropriate, look for the RSS icon and copy the link address of this icon. The following paragraph from KissMetrics discribes getting and using RSS feeds in your reader nicely:
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Discovering RSS Feeds While many sites proudly display their RSS feed button, other sites make RSS feed discovery a little more challenging. In addition to the Google Reader Subscribe bookmarklet, you can use the Google Chrome RSS Subscription Extension which will show an RSS feed icon in Chrome’s address bar when you are viewing a page with an RSS feed. You can set this extension to add RSS feeds to your preferred RSS reader, including Google Reader, My Yahoo, or others. For Firefox, you can use the RSS Icon Add-On which also displays a RSS icon in Firefox’s address bar. To change the default RSS reader, go to the Firefox Options > Web Feed and select your preferred RSS reader.
WHAT CONTENT TO SHARE After you know who to target (probably with a persona and ideal company profile) it is important to know what to share with them. This is a large topic in content-marketing strategy, and you can find more on this on our blog. In the end, it boils down to educational content that shows the potential customers and influencers you are an expert in your field. Let me give an example: a company we work with offers specialty financial-management and regulatory-compliance services. They share government financial management and compliance information: news, trends, compliance breaches that become public, and new regulations. What all of that actually means is beyond me, but their targets know.
ALWAYS read the article or blog you are going to curate – always! Yes, there will be some reliable sources you get comfortable with and rely on. But just because a blog has a great title and you know the author or source does not make it worth curating. The post from the feed may be promoting a questionable event or contain a rant you do not want to share.
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The B2B ContentEngine features a built-in search for RSS feeds, blogs, and popular news feeds. We also recommend that you use our built-in keyword search feeds. You can replicate these in a feed reader by using Google Alerts and turning them into RSS feeds – Google it. We also have a built-in viewer where you can view the
whole original article, whereas readers and most curation tools only have what is shared in the RSS feed, which the publisher alone determines.
CONTENT CURATION STANDARDS Define your content standards. Policy guidelines should answer the following questions: Is there any unacceptable language? What content is appropriate? o Is the content at odds with your brand values? o Does it criticize unfairly? o Are the facts correct? Are you going to curate options? Where will you draw the line? You need to allow your curators to have discretion, but the guidelines for unacceptable content also need to be clear.
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F ILTERING A ND S ELECTING Now that you have your feeds set up and content flowing into your tool of choice, it is time to curate. This is where we earn our keep as marketers. FILTER: You do not want to share every piece of content that comes through your feeds. Remember, the more focused your content is on your niche, the more successful you will be in searches, social sharing, and targeting your prospects. As I stated previosuly, always read (or at least skim) what you share and curate. SELECT: Remember, whatever you share reflects your brand, be it on a social network or a niche portal. So, select content that both targets your audience and educates them. Not everything you select needs to be specifically targeted to your niche, but it should be related fairly closely and be valuable to your audience. When in doubt, do not curate the content – more will come along. Remember, it is not about quantity; it is about quality and targeting.
S ORTING , S HARING ,
AND
P UBLISHING
Now that you have carefully selected content to share and publish, you need to decide what goes where. Previously we discussed usages, ideas, and suggestions for each of these curation-sharing and publishing channels. The following diagram gives some broad guidelines on where to sort and share the desired curated content:
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Niche Portal
• Educational • Keyword-rich • Up to six per day
Blog
• Collections and wrap-ups • Adds your own value • Analysis and commentary
Social Media
Newsletter
Twitter - Several per hour is okay LinkedIn - Selective, 1–2 per day Facebook - Selective, 1–2 per day - News
• Lead nurturing • Targeted news • Collections and wrap-ups • Educational
The major drawback of a tool like Google Reader is that it does not allow built-in sharing with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Feedly does have more social sharing built-in. It used to be possible to a limited extent with Google Reader, but with Google pushing its Google+ network you, can only share there now. All other publishing or sharing activities have to be cut and pasted manually.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing NICHE PORTAL For a niche portal, you will need your own domain or website. Otherwise you will be driving traffic to a third party, which will diminish the traffic to your website and will not help your brand as much. Tools like Scoop.it, Tumblr.com, and Paper.li are sites for social publishing and sharing and can be used for a variety of niche publishing options. These services are often free and tout themselves as online magazines. The drawback of these free services is that they retain their branding and thus do not enhance your brand. Some have paid options where you can get your own domain, and this may be a good choice – you must have your own branded domain to drive traffic, brand awareness, and thought leadership. Like Pinterest, these sites encourage their users to re-post (or “scoop”) other users’ content, making it harder for you to rise to the top. The free ones may at some point be forced to put ads with your content, so be wary. But most of these sites are one-function sites – for an integrated contentmarketing strategy, you may want more. Tools like the B2B ContentEngine and Curata include a niche portal as part of their offering. These are optimized for maximum SEO and are configured for social sharing. BLOG It is important to be able to curate to your own blog. Earlier, we discussed whether to curate directly to your blog as your niche portal – the answer depends upon your strategy and resources. This section focuses on curating your company’s domain blog in addition to having a niche domain. For curation directly to your domain I recommend adding value such as wrap-up posts, focusedtopic posts, or posts that heavily comment on an article or blog. All of these use curation and give your own added value to your audience.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing Use one or both of the following two formats, both of which are built into the B2B ContentEngine, as guidelines: CONTENT CURATION POST FORMAT 1: SIMPLEST Blog Post Title Write an introduction on the post’s theme, or wrap up a previous post. Add a few comments of interest to your niche audience, letting them know why they should read. The curated abstract or a pertinent snippet from a blog/article. Attribution and/or link to the original post is a must. It is a good practice to have an image. You can also add one yourself if need be. The curated abstract or a pertinent snippet from a blog/article. Attribution and/or link to the original post is a must. It is a good practice to have an image. You can also add one yourself if need be. The curated abstract or a pertinent snippet from a blog/article. Attribution and/or link to the original post is a must. It is a good practice to have an image. You can also add one yourself if need be. Optional wrap-up comments.
CONTENT CURATION POST FORMAT 2
Blog Post Title Write an introduction on the post’s theme. Comment on first curated post. Add a few comments of interest to your niche audience, telling them why they should read. The curated abstract or a pertinent snippet from a blog/article. Attribution and/or link to the original post is a must. It is a good practice to have an image. You can also add one yourself if need be.
Repeat for each curated post.
Optional wrap-up comments.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing SOCIAL MEDIA Curating a social media platform is a great way to generate brand and thought leadership and to drive web traffic. Which social media network, what to share, and how frequently are different for each network. Most social networks have a best time to share content with links (which is what you will be doing with curation), so be sure to schedule your shares for these times when possible. For this, you will have to use a tool like the popular Hootsuite, which has scheduling for the major networks. And, yes, the B2B ContentEngine has scheduling built in and tools to schedule at optimal times for each network – the only professional curation platform, as far as I know, that has all of these features. LINKEDIN
LinkedIn is the professional networking platform. Sharing there once or twice a day is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your professional network. Be sure to share highly relevant content for your network. Typically, a user will get a daily wrap-up of their network activities, including shared updates (including your curated content). It is like sending them a daily newsletter that is not spamming, and that is hard to beat. This is especially valuable for professional service providers when a large part of your network consists of potential clients or potential business influencers or referrers. TWITTER
Twitter is a stream-of-consciousness platform where content gets old and out.
90% of retweets are done within the first hour of original tweeting. The half-life of a tweet, with retweeting, is 2.8 hours. For most tweets with links (curated and shared content falls here), the best chance at getting the most click-throughs is 1 to 3 p.m. EST, Monday through Thursday. Posting after 8 p.m. should be avoided, as comparatively few are listening. It appears that Twitter doesn’t work well on weekends link sharing.
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Curation for B2B Content Marketing FACEBOOK
While I do not always recommend Facebook as your first choice for B2B marketing, it does have its place and can work well for many businesses. If your audience is there, by all means use this network.
The absolute highest number of click-throughs comes at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday, with links posted from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. picking up numbers nearly as high.
Posts between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. get little attention.
As with Twitter, weekends are not ideal.
For more tips on writing the perfect Facebook post, click here.
GOOGLE+
Google+ is Google’s latest and most successful attempt to compete in social media. And, as they are tying it to almost all their products and services, it is gaining traction. On top of that, they are tying search results more and more to Google+ when they can. So the SEO benefits are there and they are growing. It is a new, rapidly changing platform, so there is little hard data on using, sharing, or curating with Google+. As of this writing they do not allow third-party applications to share content on their network, which is strictly done by using the g+ share button on most blogs. This may change soon and would open up their network greatly.
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D RIVING W EBSITE T RAFFIC As B2B content marketers, you are using curation to drive traffic to your company’s website. To be sure this is maximized, be sure all roads lead there:
SOCIAL MEDIA: Be sure all accounts have a link to your website. For example, here is my Twitter profile:
So, even when there is no link back to your website in a tweet, people who see it and find it interesting may look at your profile and visit your site – this does drive traffic. The same is true with LinkedIn and Facebook.
NICHE PORTAL: o Include your own original content and thus link back to your website. Find legitimate reasons to point to your site. o Make sure the site says which program is curating or sponsoring it. At right is an example from http://b2bcontent-marketing-strategy.com/.
BLOG: This content is already on your website, adding keyword-rich content. Just be sure to have good design so people will stay and check out your offerings.
NEWSLETTERS: These are for your subscribers. Your newsletter will be branded, right? Curated content helps feed your brand and thought leadership, as we have discussed.
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A BOUT THE B2B C ONTENT E NGINE
The B2B ContentEngine is a web-based tool suite that helps solve the #1 problem for content marketers: content. It is a curation and content-marketing tool suite designed from the ground up specifically for B2B professional content marketers and agencies. The B2B ContentEngine integrates research and discovery, curation, content creation, social-media sharing, planning, and SEO-focused publishing efforts. For agencies, it features tools for managing multiple clients, team content creation, planning, and client reporting.
We Help Solve the #1 Problem for Content Marketers: Content.
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