The Foundation of your Content Marketing Pyramid: Content Curation
Posted in Exclusives By Pawan Deshpande
Content marketing relies on content and lots of it, in many shapes, forms and sizes. Many proponents of content marketing have been focusing on how you can leverage your existing content towards building out your content marketing strategy.
For example, you can take an eBook and slice it into twenty blog posts. Or you could do the inverse and fuse twenty blog posts into an eBook. Or if you’re really aggressive, you can take it a step further and turn your hundred blog posts into a print book. You can do the same with your white papers, presentations or any of your other content. It’s no secret.
The picture below shows what I call the “Content Pyramid”. At the top of the pyramid is your dense, high value, hard to produce, hard to distribute content. This content is rarely produced such as a physical hardcover book. In the middle is content that you produce more often with less effort such as white papers, followed by press releases, followed by blog posts.
As we move down the pyramid, we notice three things change:
1. Content can be produced more easily: It’s easier to write a blog post than it is to write a press release or white paper.
2. Content can be published more often: I can update my blog every single day, but I can’t create a press release at the same rate.
3. Content can include a wider array of perspectives: Every member of my company can blog, but not everyone can author an eBook.
But most organizations lack a foundation for their pyramid, or they choose not to leverage it in their content marketing strategies. So what type of content is at the foundation of your pyramid? What content is it that easiest to produce, very often, very easily and that includes the widest array of perspectives? It’s curated content.
By including Content Curation in the content marketing pyramid, companies can produce content easier, more often and include the widest array of perspectives. With content curation, companies can easily produce content, by sharing relevant content that they may not have written themselves. With content curation, companies can publish content not only every day but in many cases several times a day or even every hour. And with content curation, companies incorporate perspectives that reach far beyond even their own brand by including perspectives from across the industry.
And curated content can be repurposed as well. At HiveFire, we have often seen our customer leverage third party perspectives as fodder for their next blog post. Eventually these perspectives make their way up the pyramid and influence all aspects of the content marketing strategy.
About Author
Pawan Deshpande
Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata, a Boston-based company offering content marketing software used by thousands of marketers around the world. He spearheaded the first-ever panel at SxSW on Content Marketing in 2011, and was a 2014 Finalist for MarketingProfs B2B Marketer of the Year. Pawan was an engineer at Microsoft and Google where he was awarded patents in social networking and machine learning. He previously attended MIT where his graduate thesis won top departmental and international awards. Pawan is also a blogger for The Huffington Post, the Content Marketing Institute, CMO.com, Forbes, Marketing Profs, and other technology and marketing publications. See Pawan Deshpande's full bio.
