We have talked a lot about content marketing in our previous blog posts. But where do companies get all that content from, to conduct a successful content marketing campaign? It is a time consuming, energy draining and resource intensive process for a company to constantly churn out original, unique and quality content. This is especially true for start-ups and smaller companies as they are often hard pressed for resources (Money and Manpower) which are often diverted to other pressing issues such as product development and customer acquisition.
So, what is the solution to this problem? Is it impossible for a smaller company to actually conduct a successful content marketing campaign? The answer is a loud and resounding ‘NO!’
“Content Curation” are the 2 magic words that empower companies to post good quality content without requiring too much resources. Companies can supplement their own content with third party information which enables them to leverage on other people’s topical expertise. This empowers companies to build and establish their brands at a much lower cost.
People frequently confuse content curation with content aggregation, when in reality content aggregation is the first step of the entire content curation process. Content aggregation is just the mindless compilation of information with respect to a pre-defined algorithm while curation is the act of selecting only relevant, informative and interesting content.
  “People are just more interesting than algorithms”  - Noah Brier
This quote highlights the importance of curating and publishing only interesting content instead of relying only on an algorithm to do so. Think of it this way: Content aggregation provides a pool of information based on a pre-defined formula and what content curation does is to distill captivating content from this pool to be posted to a company’s target audience. If you are a more visual person, perhaps the following infographic from Rohit Bhargava, will provide a clearer image.
So, in summary, content curation is the magic solution for companies to constantly engage their audience with interesting content without having to spend too much resources on marketing. This is certainly great news for marketers in start-ups and smaller companies as they are often constrained by several financial limitations.
