87% of marketers have indicated that content marketing is a key part of their marketing strategy, surpassing SEO, events and other initiatives. These marketing organizations are hard at work establishing the infrastructure for their own publishing house, striving to be the one-stop shop for content for their audience. There are three key challenges that limit the success of this strategy:

• Developing high quality content: Creating content on a continuous basis with sufficient relevancy for your target audience is an extremely time consuming and resource intensive process.
• Lack of Staff: As good as your marketing team may be, few organizations have the talent in-house for consistent generation of high quality content. Outsourcing is certainly an option, however, achieving consistent high quality content is a challenge.
• Trusted Content: Most importantly, just as buyers do not want to rely solely on vendors for product information, they do not want to read content that is only generated by one source, especially if that source is a vendor. They desire other perspectives and opinions.

Best-in-class marketers have already taken steps to accommodate the demands of their audience, including:

• Inviting guest bloggers to contribute their own insight and knowledge;
• Interviewing industry experts and customers to provide fresh, relevant content; and
• Tapping into content curation to supplement their company’s content creation strategy while still providing the opportunity to add their own voice and value to the curated content.

Content curation is the process of an individual (or team) consistently finding, organizing, annotating and sharing the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.  Curation provides the following opportunities to boost your content marketing strategy:

1. Supercharge your content generation engine with high quality, relevant content

The best content marketing strategies include creating your own content as well as curating other experts’ content. As a content curator, you can publish sufficient content for your content marketing campaigns by selectively finding, organizing, annotating and sharing the best content on your topic. Learn how to balance and blend the two halves of content marketing - creation and curation - in this eBook which includes a foreword by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs: How to Feed the Content Beast.

2. Increase engagement with your audience

With 100+ millions blogs and 1,000s of online news sites across the Internet, buyers are overwhelmed with options for keeping up to date on topics of interest to them. As much as they value diverse opinions and perspectives, they certainly value individual content destinations that offer high quality, relevant knowledge and insight from diverse sources. You can provide that destination for your audience by supplementing your created content with curated content, even if it’s competitors’ information.

3. Inspire your content creation team and your audience

The inspirational benefits of curation are two-fold:

• As your marketing team searches the internet to discover high quality content to curate, it will provide them inspiration to share unique information with your audience, as well as exposing them to new approaches and strategies used by other organizations’ content marketing tactics.
• Bringing your buyers the most innovative and relevant content from across the Internet will surely expose them to new insights and ideas that they would not have had the opportunity to view in one place as a result of your curation expertise.

4. Increase your organization's level of interaction with the broader community of content creators

Publishers and other content creators are interested in increasing traffic to their site, boosting their search engine ranking, educating their audience, and possibly monetizing their traffic through advertising or subscription revenue.  Using good, ethical curation means that you are taking the steps to provide attribution for your content providers. (e.g., prominently indicate the source of the content, provide clear links back to content authors and do not use no-follows on your links back to the original content source) The more you link to third parties’ original content, the more likely they are to link back to you – which ultimately improves your SEO.

5. Better leverage marketing resources

Not only can content curation improve your content marketing initiatives, it can also be an extremely cost effective means to produce high quality and relevant content alongside of your created content. Content curation typically takes less than 20 minutes a day, offering your marketing team the opportunity to bring the best of the Internet to your buyers accompanied by your company’s insight and guidance wrapped around the most important parts of that content.

Some of the industry’s best and brightest marketers have already tapped into the power of content curation to increase buyer engagement, drive thought leadership, improve lead nurturing and lower content development costs.  Refer to Curata’s LookBook 2013 for detailed examples of content curation in action from companies such as Whole Foods, allsalesforce.com, Color Association of the US and many others.

Michael is the CMO of Curata. He is responsible for Curata's marketing strategy and all related activities. Michael has over 25 years of marketing and sales experience, having successfully launched and sustained three start-up ventures as well as having driven innovative customer creation strategies for large technology organizations. (e.g., IDC, Kenan Systems, Prospero (mZinga) and Millipore). Michael received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as a BS in Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MS in Engineering from Northeastern University.

Learn more about creating great content with the Content Creation Guide at the button below.