The importance of this type of content creation and how to do it easily and with relevance

Creating Content can be difficult with bite sized marketing budgets or as a “solopreneur.” Writer’s block is a real thing, video cameras don’t make a celebrity, and information isn’t (yet) downloaded to our brain (I know Kung Fu.) Curating is an easier method of delivering content to your market and keeping them engaged which drives awareness to your brand. Here is HubSpot’s graph on how more content drives better results.

Let’s start with an example we can all understand. A chef curates a menu for his clientele — the ethnicity of the food, its origins, how it’s prepared, and it’s price. A sommelier curates a wine list at that same restaurant based on the chef’s menu options, and the desired atmosphere — cheap and cheerful vs. expensive and luxurious. A DJ curates a playlist to pair with the ambience of the restaurant, “Are we playing Jazz, classical, oldies, or Hip Hop?” All of this curation leads to brand development, its recognition, and the customer experience.

What you like, share, retweet, etc. of available content — forms the perception of your brand and entices potential clients. You’ve chosen content because it fits you, your clients agree with you, and ultimately it’s about style, taste, values, opinions otherwise known as, your brand. It’s one more way of ensuring your social accounts are always active. Now, let’s take it one step further.

“Originality is when you mix two things that haven’t been mixed.” –DJ Marlboro, from RiP! A Remix Manifesto

I want to look at this idea in two ways.

1. You can curate content that is in line with your brand vision and elevate it by commenting or critiquing it. Now you’ve also created content. The only flaw here – is it something your clients may have come across in another feed?
2. So, be original, look for what’s #trending to be a part of a daily conversation and see how it can relate to your brand or its clients.

As an example, I’m going to publish this article on Monday, August 28th, 2017, or two days after the #mayweathervmcgregor fight, the “fight of the century.” I’ll use the # to attract anyone who’s interested in the fights’ outcomes. Someone may come to read this article and learn something about how to leverage their brand by curating content. Let the #memes begin.

If I were a #divorcelawyer, I could use this twitter post as curated content. It’s lighthearted and it speaks to my audience.

If I was in #ITsupport, I could talk about the benefits of my cloud servers not failing.

If I was in #wealthmanagement I could ask my funnel who made money betting this weekend?

If I was a #personaltrainer I could talk about what kind of training the fighters underwent and why one fighter beat the other.

There are a lot of ways to make use of content and it pays to be active ESPECIALLY when something is trending to relate it back to your business. You are building value on the content available to you and it’s of interest to the audience right now. Think about its traction!

How to get started #curating? Follow companies that are already providing services similar to yours. You’re not stealing their methods, this is just a development of your own method and how you choose to approach it.

1. How often are they posting? Too much it annoys or too little they fall into the blackhole?
2. Are they commenting/critiquing? Or just reposting? What’s important to you?
3. If it’s fact based, be sure it’s from a reliable source. You don’t want to hurt your brand by drawing the wrong attention to it.
4. Does your audience care about the content and why?

Finally, the best thing about curating content is that you have a chance to “share” someone else’s content; show gratitude. You aren’t taking the Mona Lisa and reselling it. You are taking a picture of it and telling people why they should visit the #Louvre. The #Louvre wants to drive traffic and may even thank you for sharing, telling people to go, and by doing so, exposing their whole network… to you! That’s HUGE! So to finish, here’s an awesome infographic from Curata on the benefits of curating content (they present a lot more than me, it’s worth a look.) Maybe they’ll share back 😉

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