How to Leverage the Benefits of Both Custom and Curated Content

While many businesses see the value in custom content, they may fail to see the opportunities of using curated content. Combining both in your marketing mix has numerous advantages.

If you’re unsure about the benefits, read on to see what each can add.

How to Use Custom Content

Custom content is anything that is created uniquely for your business and your brand. It allows you to establish your unique voice, share your expert knowledge, and communicate an understanding of your customer’s needs, which differentiates you from your competitors.

Speaking directly to your niche using their language and providing information tailored to your ideal customer (aka persona) gets you noticed. Specifically creating problem solving content for your niche starts a conversation with them and can set your business apart in your customer’s mind. People are searching for answers and so providing solutions captures more engagement because it’s what they want.

It takes longer to develop this kind of content, but over time the investment will yield a higher return. Custom content is designed to fit your company by providing a link between your business goals and your audience’s needs. Helpful, valuable content attracts relevant visitors who engage with it. Visitors perceive you as a helpful, credible, authoritative resource and come to trust your brand. Gaining trust is a crucial component of consumer psychology, which can have a direct impact on sales and conversion rates.

How to Use Curated Content

Content curation is when you find, annotate, republish, link to or share relevant, high-quality content from other sources outside your company. Some businesses believe it is a mistake to share anything that doesn’t come directly from your company, but curated content can help you overcome challenges like:

• consistently producing enough content,
• creating engaging content,
• a lack of budget,
• an inability to produce a variety of formats internally, and
• information like industry insights and trends that aren’t available inside your company.

Publishing and sharing curated content can help you build your brand, establish you as a thought leader and go-to resource for your niche. Incorporating outside voices has the added benefit of shifting your marketing away from a product-centric perspective.

Sharing fresh, relevant content on your social media channels can supplement your own custom content creation. It improves your search engine optimization efforts by creating more pages for search engines to index. Re-purposing additional information can also help support your lead nurturing and lead generation efforts.

All of these benefits are reasons to add this powerful strategy to your marketing, and use both to stand-out.