Curation, Personalization, and Repurposing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Content curation

It’s not always feasible or possible to create the content you need, so content curation is another option. This involves using or sharing third-party or other people's content in a fair and selective way. It's a quick, easy, low-cost, and high-impact content marketing method, when done correctly.

It is important to be selective about what you curate. You’re trying to showcase your thought leadership, so pick high-quality content that reflects well on your personal brand and adds genuine value to your target audience.

So first, you need to identify the best sources from which to curate content. Then you can begin to think about the types of content your target audience engages with most. You can do this by experimenting with the content formats and topics you curate. Make sure to include full credit for the original creator and adhere to any specific copyright guidelines associated with the content you curate.

It’s good practice to provide your own commentary on any content you curate. For example, you can give some additional insight, an opinion, or some context. In this way, even though you may not have created the content yourself, you’re still establishing yourself as a source of knowledge and an expert commentator.

You can also seek community input by asking your audience for their opinions, thoughts, and insights to help curate your content.

Benefits of using curated content

The main benefits of using curated content are:

• It can make your brand appear less promotional and show that you care about the wider industry in which you operate.
• It can make your brand seem more relatable and accessible to your audience.
• It can generate overall goodwill because it shows that you, as a business, care about what is happening in the wider industry from a content perspective, and what your consumers are engaging with, and interested in.
• It can position you as an industry leader, giving you a voice in the space so that you can add credible opinion or discussion around trending industry topics.

Types of curated content

There are five main types of curated content:

• Aggregation: This consists of curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common form of curation and the basis of most content curations services available for use or purchase.
• Distillation: This removes some of the ‘noise’ from a topic and reduces it to its core concept. It looks to simplify a topic by covering the key points that the audience needs to know at this stage of the consumer journey.
• Elevation: This happens when curators draft more general insights or trends from a large amount of content. They look to form a hypothesis, an idea, or a theory based on multiple content threads that are all similar in their view.
• Mashups: These merge different content types to create a new original point of view. For example, you might find pieces of relevant content in the same industry that nobody has yet joined the dots between, to show a new perspective.
• Chronology: This is historiographical content curation. You map a series of content pieces along a storyline or a timeline. This shows the evolution of a concept or theory through content or a full story. It also shows how individual pieces of content have contributed towards the end point.

Content personalization

Content personalization is the powerful process of using different content at different stages of the consumer journey. The different pieces of content are highly relevant to the users’ need state at that particular time. Because personalized content is targeted and more relevant to your audience, this strategy can lead to an increase in conversion rates, higher brand affinity, and increased campaign efficiency.

The main strategies for content personalization include:

• Leveraging customer data: Apply your research findings around customer interests and behaviors to the content you create.
• Targeting your messaging: Tailor your messaging specifically to the audience who will receive it. Timing is important here! What stage of the consumer journey are they at? What actions have they taken already? What actions do they still have to take? Also consider what time of day or day of the week the user will consume the content. Remember that consumers are more receptive during certain hours, and on different days.
• Measuring and analyzing: As you create personalized content, pay attention to the performance of the content. Then adjust and optimize your content strategy accordingly.

Benefits to repurposing content

What are the benefits of repurposing the content you create? Repurposing content means adapting it or breaking it up to use for other purposes. For example, you might take an infographic and turn it into a number of individual images.

There are many benefits to repurposing:

• It saves time: It’s quicker than creating content from scratch.
• It’s low cost: It’s more cost-effective than purchasing or creating new content.
• It reinforces your message: If content appears in more than one place, it can reinforce the message you’re trying to convey.

By using good evergreen content that doesn’t date quickly, you can always look for opportunities to maximize, reuse, and save yourself time by repurposing it.

Tools for repurposing content

There are some great tools and templates available for repurposing content:

• Visual editors like Pixlr and Canva have libraries with extensive templates and examples for producing social media images and blog graphics.
• Lumen5 allows you to convert articles and blogs into videos.
• Full Twitter threads can be shared to blogs.
• Anchor allows you convert your blog to audio – ‘listen to this article’.

Repurposing allows you to get creative in thinking about the way that you create content and how you can possibly reuse it in different formats or on different platforms, or even by making small tweaks to your original piece. When done cleverly, repurposing saves time and reinforces your brand message and personality.

Guidelines for repurposing content

Keep the following guidelines in mind when repurposing content:

• Ensure that the quality is high and free from any copyright.
• Ensure you remove any placeholder content.
• Be inspired by these sources, but don’t just copy them directly.
• Be careful of the contrast and fonts of some of the templates.