Curation – the Savior of SMB Content Marketers

We know content marketing is effective, yet for SMBs it often doesn’t deliver the results that it should. Why not?

EXECUTION!

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the consultants, the gurus… even the clients know it. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources available to create relevant and useful content on an ongoing basis. They start out with good intentions. They write a few blog posts, get increased traffic and some comments; but the real business payback doesn’t occur until after three to six months of consistently publishing compelling content that people read because there’s value to them.

It takes time, skill and energy to produce all that content. What if you don’t have the time, skill or energy?

CONTENT CURATION!

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and adding commentary to information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline is essential to content marketing.

Today, we are drowning in information. Much of it is poor quality. There is value in sifting through content to find those rare gems that are high quality, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining.

There is value in curating both consumer generated AND professional content. With the ever increasing volume of information we’re faced with, businesses can bring real value to their prospects and clients by serving as a filter.

Marketers can build trust by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their prospects and clients. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas. For SMB B2Bs, those are the areas that are of most interest to the buyers of your products and services. The information should help them make better buying decisions, and increase the benefits of using your products and services. It might include economic or regulatory news that affects the industry, and other peripheral but relevant topics. Your aim is to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of time or money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well.

In this post I told you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of content curation for SMB B2Bs. In our next post, I’ll discuss the ‘hows’.

Bob Leonard is the managing consultant at acSellerant. Over a 20 year period, prior to launching acSellerant, Bob held individual contributor and management positions in Corporate Marketing, Field Marketing, Sales and Sales Support at EMC, GTE, Interleaf (document management), and Digital Equipment Corp.