Why New Content is Not Always Needed for Content Marketing
Creating new content for your blog or social media pages can be a challenge, especially if you're in a fast-paced industry where things change frequently. Staying relevant can be hard in these circumstances, and you could find yourself spending the majority of your time on content creation or research for new ideas. We know that re-posting content from elsewhere on your website gets you penalised by search engines, but sharing content, with your own slant on it, is a good way of leveraging a popular topic and putting your stamp on it with minimal effort.
This is called content curation.It's a bit like being in charge of a museum or exhibition where you need to find items and artefacts people will want to see, except you're finding content online and pulling it together, then sharing that with your customer base (and potential customers too, if your post is then shared by the people who see it).
It's easier than you think to find great content you can share with your customers. Sign up for email newsletters on relevant topics and set up Google alerts for keywords related to your sector. You can also follow people and hashtags on Twitter and other social media channels to see what's popular and good for sharing. Don't simply share the content without commentary, this looks lazy and doesn't actually promote your brand or company. Instead, give one or two short sentences that summarise your take on the content, whether that's positive or negative, or even a promotion of your services.
Some of the most persuasive content is that which clearly shows how your service or product can solve a problem for your customers.If you can find some negative stories about the problems you're able to solve, you can use these (even better if they're popular or trending stories) with a description of how you could have fixed the issue as a piece of social or blog content that you can then share far and wide.
It's also a good idea to share content and stories around popular topics and current affairs.This should be done sensitively, because if you're seen to be promoting your company off the back of a tragedy or disaster, this will seriously harm your reputation. If, however, you can sensitively provide some commentary on a topic that is in the news which is relevant to your business then do so, it shows you're keeping up with events and that you're responsive to them.
You might find that the content you create gets curated and shared by someone, perhaps a competitor or a company in an adjacent sector.This is fantastic, because not only is that proof that your content is interesting enough to share, it also gets your content (and therefore your brand) in front of people who might not have seen it otherwise. It also gives you some insight into how your content is being received by reading and analysing the commentary someone has provided as the context of sharing your creation, which is always valuable.
When you're looking at your content calendar, and you can see gaps, don't despair. Use these gaps to post your curated content and keep a consistent mix of original and curated content, to show that you're also a leading content creator as well as someone whose opinions on your industry matter.
