How to Drive Revenue through content - without writing it

It’s time for your team to position themselves, and your company, as trusted resources to provide your customers, prospects, and other team members with the most valuable insights of the day, but...

• Your sales team is constantly requesting more content to share across their social media and email profiles that will drive new business.
• It’s been near impossible to keep your employees engaged and grow adoption in coordinated social selling and employee advocacy efforts. 
• You’ve identified that by blending properly curated articles with your original content creation and promotion, you can keep your team happy and increase your conversion rates.
• The mere thought of implementing yet another suite of technology siloed from your other efforts is enough to prompt yourself, and your team, to consider a career change. 

Well, you’ve come to the right place. 

This process is designed to help you set the foundation for your strategy, get your workflow in order, outline a rollout plan, and actually get this off the ground and running.

No more guessing games. Your team, whether big or small, will know who is responsible for what and exactly what they need to do to gain the real benefits of content curation. 

Let’s get started!

Laying the Foundation

Whether you are a “Team of One” or you have multiple teammates ready to take action, it’s important to start with the basics. It may be tempting, but don’t skip this step! Together, review your goals, responsibilities, and process as a group. 

We’ve outlined some of the main points to be addressed and provided some helpful worksheets for mapping out your unique curation process to ensure a successful implementation. 

Why should we be curating?

Be sure to define leading and lagging indicators - considering both internal and external audiences. “More leads” is great, but what other metrics can be defined to help understand how best to adjust effort to increase the “more leads” metric further?

• Define what a successful curation flow looks like. The optimal goal is to evolve to a point where the process of identifying and recommending pertinent articles becomes habitual and the distribution efforts fold into your current marketing and sales strategies. 
• What are the metrics needed to track this success? Some areas to consider: Metrics by channel (social media, email, website), Engagement?, Conversion?

What should we be curating?

Focus less on the names of the publications and more on the quality of the articles that should pass your filters. It can be easy to fall into the trap of saying, “We only want to share articles from X, Y, and Z major publications.” However, doing so can greatly diminish the value of your curation efforts. Remember, the goal is for this to be seen as a service that surfaces the best articles, and not just simply reposts all content from the same handful of publications. 

Don’t just ask those amongst those responsible for marketing. This is a great way to get your sales and business development team engaged in the process, and ensure what you provide will meet their goals as well. 

Defining the criteria for your topic areas is TOUGH. We see our customers often iterating on these criteria a number of times as their strategy evolved, and metrics are reviewed.  Look to those (including your dear friends at UpContent) to help you get those criteria “just right”. 

• Create a list of relevant topics that your customers, prospects, and employees would find valuable. 
• Develop specific keywords and phrases for each topic to utilize as search criteria during the curation process.
• Determine what standards a piece of content must meet in order to be considered.

Who should be curating?

In many cases, it is best to have individuals outside your traditional marketing team fill this role. Subject matter experts from across the organization, including those in business development or client/customer success position make great Curators.  

Don’t forget about your internal community. Apply the same test for content effectiveness and resonance with your internal team as well as your external audience. 

• Look outside the immediate curation team to identify subject matter experts (SMEs) and (if applicable) compliance team members that should be involved in the definition and execution of your curation process. 
• Assign role(s) and responsibilities to each team member. We’ll dig into this a bit more, later on.

Where should we be curating?

Be sure to consider how the channels intertwine as part of your audience journey. Audience members who are unfamiliar with your brand may follow a different path from your loyal customers.

Consider what the ideal next step is for an individual who engages with a curated article in each channel - and ensure there is a stimulus for this journey to continue. 

• Identify the channels where you wish to deliver curated articles. Be sure to consider your internal and external audiences. 
• Outline the desired journey you’d like visitors to take after engaging with curated articles on each channel. 
• Determine how curated content can flow easily into the distribution technologies and processes you are already using - rather than having to define new or independent activities. 

How should we be curating?

Note how the Curators may mainly be outside the marketing group - tapping into the organization’s subject matter experts and business development teammates.

The marketing group’s main responsibility is to be an orchestrator of the flow - keeping momentum and reducing friction. 

• Where the What, Who, and Where, all come together.
• Define a workflow for how articles move from being identified by a team member, through any approval requirements, to being distributed on one or more of your company’s or employee’s digital channels. 
• Agree upon a schedule for curated content distribution that includes which platforms and their respective frequencies. 
• Work back from your distribution schedule to create a timetable, and process, for curating to consistently meet the posting timeline

Ready to dive in?

Download our full guide to building your organization’s content curation strategy, with worksheets to support you and your team in evaluating, defining, and implementing each stage. 

Questions remain? Head over to upcontent.com and start a chat with our team, or send along an email to info@upcontent.com. We’d be happy to help!