An infographic illustrating the path to building brand via content marketing.

Content curation is one of the driving factors for generating leads in content marketing. More and more brands are choosing to pursue content marketing for that very reason. A recent study by BtoB Magazine concludes that 28% of content marketers focus on content marketing simply to boost lead generation.

This is conceivable as content marketing drives three times the sales of digital advertising (Nielson). Leads generated from marketing spend passes leads in paid search after nineteen months (Heidi Cohen) Furthermore, “content marketing leads generated per $1,000 of marketing spend is three times greater after three years (or thirty-six months),” writes Cohen.

If that isn’t convincing enough, both Kapost and Eloqua found that content marketing’s cost per lead drops 80% after the first five months.

So how does content curation fit into this?

As a form of content marketing, content curation plays a driving factor in generating leads and sales for brands. In a previous post titled How Content Curation Enhances SEO, we established that backlinks, social signals and traffic are methods to cultivating better search engine results.

It is precisely through SEO and traffic does content curation attract and cultivate prospects.

An example of this is Greg Bardwell, who performed a ROI analysis on a three-year-old website that updates sporadically. “The purpose of this ROI analysis,” Bardwell writes, “is to show how a curation and content marketing strategy can grow your organic [website] traffic.”

In just four months (June through September 2012), Bardwell saw the website’s traffic grow by 464%. “This fast growth is achieved using content curation to accelerate traditional content marketing traffic generating tactics.” More importantly, this growth in traffic led to significant leads.

Roger Parker shares 7 simple content curation tips for personal branding success.

7 tips for content curation done right

I’ve been studying this series since it began; here are some of the lessons and tips that set it apart from the everyday.

1. Purposeful. The essence of successful project lies in its description and purpose statement. In this case, the series is described as, “a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web.” Most of the time, it’s mission is described as, “Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general.“

2. Relevance. People don’t read high-tech blogs for comic relief, however. For a blog, or a business, to survive, it has to value to customers and readers in terms of practical assistance, entertainment, or inspiration. This calls for a level of curation that goes beyond checking out the most popular blogs on the Internet. It requires an intimate understanding of your intended reader’s interests and values combined with a bloodhound’s tenacity following a clue.

3. Surprise. Given the wealth of daily compiled content curation publications on the Internet, serendipity–the ability to search out and discover previous unknown resources–becomes more and more essential. If your compilations merely echo the information that’s available elsewhere, the value of your brand quickly declines. The game is over when your recommendations fail to be pleasant discoveries. (I find these are almost always fresh discoveries on topics I do not normally follow–but am glad I’ve been introduced to.)

4. Annotation. The care you take in introducing and “selling the value” of the resources you’re recommending plays a big role in the success of your content curation efforts. You have to provide a context that relates the resource you’re recommending to your readers interests in as concise and entertaining a way as possible.

5. Engaging. Engagement, as practiced in the Mindjet blog’s Super Fun Friday Link Time takes forms. One is the over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek title, which promises a lighthearted end-of-the-week approach. A second approach is hinted at by the second part of the feature’s mission statement, that follows the “Most of the time” sentence above. The second sentence reads, just 4 words, reads; “Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK!” The sentence engages because promise to provoke.

6. Scarcity. Small, but crucial point; once a week is the perfect frequency for curated content. The Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time would quickly lose its appeal the more days of the week it appeared. As it is, the Friday-only schedule not only provides enough time to search out on-target, undiscovered relevant posts, it avoids reader burnout while providing a welcome change from the other daily blog post topics.

7. Consistency. The other side of scarcity, of course, is consistency. Having made a commitment to a fresh feature each Friday, it soon becomes a habit for readers who look forward to it each week…and will probably check back the next week if they were traveling or busy over the weekend.

Marketing is about facilitating more closed business, and ultimately grow the company. When asked, most midsized and B2B companies will tell you that they are “doing content marketing.”

However, often when you look at their social channels and company blog the content they create seems highly unlikely to help increase demand generation.

The reason that the majority of marketing content is an #Epicfail can be explained by the lack of vision and imagination that too many marketing professionals and their empty suit senior managers sadly share.

But I hear you there saying, “What the heck? My team and I are smarter than the average bear, what can we do to give us the edge of our competition? I am glad you asked.

To get the answers from two well respected pros I spoke to Alex Conroy and Bill Grunau of Esotech. They are both digital marketing experts who work with midsized and B2B companies.

Bill says the key is to keep the content focus on solving your customer’s problem. Customer’s don’t care about your product. They care about how they can make more money, do their job better, or grow their business.

Key Takeaways:
- Creating original content is the biggest obstacle for 73% of content marketers.

- 75% of marketers cannot justify spending the time needed to create original content for their audience.

- There are a variety of tools developed within the past 3 years that can help marketers and content curators gather the most relevant content, re-purpose it, and present it to their audience in unique ways.

- 85% of brands use content curation to establish thought leadership, and 80% say it enables them to increase brand visibility

Using Content Curation To Find New Customers.

Being an Internet marketer for many years I’ve seen the landscape change many times but one thing has stayed the same “Content is King”, when it comes to driving traffic to a website.

As a business owner we all want to get new customers to our websites. Many have tried blogging to drive traffic to their website and due to a shortage of hours in a day they end up dropping the blog or hiring ghost writers to develop content for the site. We now have a new player on the net and it comes in the form of Content Curation. No it will not completely eliminate business owners creating content for their website but adds a whole new area of content development for a website.

Over the past two years I’ve tested different content curation sites and tools and have found Scoop.it to be the leader in both innovation and traffic building potential.

Below are examples on how Scoop.it can drive traffic and help to show the world, yes the world that your business knows your market.

In this article are 3 areas that when done correctly can drive new traffic to your business or brand?.

*** If you would like help setting up a Scoop.it traffic generator for your company. Contact Brian at 1-888-535-9139 or Email Me ideas@marketinghits.com ***