B2B Integrated Marcom: The Role of Content Curation

B2B content curation involves placing context around content.

In my opinion, curating content should be applied to a content marketing strategy with the goal of placing context around a piece of content created by a source other than yourself.  So for example, let’s say you’re a B2B tech firm who develops service desk automation software and you’re curating content about IT service management.  The goal is not simply to retweet or reference the content, but to place it within the context of your company’s product or service.

Here’s how content curation works in a B2B application (all company and product names are fictitious, of course!)…

Awesome Engineering publishes a post on how their service desk improved service levels and decreased operating costs by automating their service desk. Your company, Super Duper Service Desk Software, is looking for source material to write post about ITIL certification (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a related topic to the service desk. Awesome Engineering’s post provides a firsthand look at ITIL principles at work.

Curating Awesome Engineering’s content not only gives you an opportunity to frame their article within the context of Super Duper Service Desk Software’s product, but also provides several content opportunities to insert the Super Duper name and product into the socialsphere.   For example, you could write a blog post about how the Super Duper software automates workflows to follow ITIL best practices.  Then write a tweet or two, covering an ITIL best practice, each of which links back to your blog post along with another tweet that puts your spin on Awesome Engineering’s post and links back to their post. Perhaps there’s also a SlideShare presentation or  YouTube video that’s also relevant.  They, too, are sources of curated content and represent additional opportunities to provide context around your products or services.

I like +Jay Acunzo’s analogy that creation represents the bricks and curation, the mortar. He also explains, through an example, that when a curator maintains a “continual, genuine presence via curation, the original content registers more profoundly with followers.”

If you plan to integrate curated content into your B2B marcom plan, it helps to have a content calendar.   The content calendar (a.k.a. conversation calendar) locating content easier because you can base you search for content on a specific theme or topic.  More importantly, the content calendar ensures message consistency echoed across all your owned media properties that will hopefully convert to a few earned media properties as well.

Additional references on content curation:

New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot by Tristan Handy via Convince&Convert
I like this post because it provides performance data on curated versus created content.

Should You Curate Content? The Essentials Every Content Marketer Needs to Consider by Mark Serbin via Content Marketing Institute
This article was selected because it provides a slightly different perspective on content curation versus content aggregation their risks and rewards. It also provides a number of tools to make curating content easier.

5 Ways to Use Content Curation for Marketing and Tools to Do It by Susan Gunelius via Forbes
Another perspective on how to curate content and few additional tools.  I like the real-time nature of Monittor.com, a keyword-based curation tool.

By: Joan Damico

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