As discussed in our post Aligning content to the customer buying cycle, we believe that the key to getting the most out of your content marketing strategy is to ensure that you have a mix of content that appeals to the key personas in different stages of the buying cycle. The challenge in executing the strategy is resources. How do you amass enough content to provide coverage across numerous personas and numerous buying cycle stages across all of your customer buying agendas? Unless you have a Roman army of content developers, it’s impossible to build all this content yourself. That’s where content curation comes in. Leveraging content from third parties and adding it into your inbound, outbound and social media programs should be an essential part of your content mix.
Curation Lifts Conversion Rates and Accelerates Sales Cycles
In addition to filling in content gaps, curation done well leverages credible 3rd parties to educate your prospects and validate the space you’re in, the problems you solve and your own solutions. With peer references being one of the most trusted sources of information in all stages of the buying process, content curation is a key aggregator of peer created content that can help optimize your conversion rates and accelerate your sales cycles. For more on content curation, check out this excellent article by Pawan Deshpande, The Rise of the Curator in Marketing, which we have, of course, “curated” 🙂
