You may feel guilty about “stealing” someone else’s content…but don’t. It can be the best thing ever for your email marketing campaigns if you do it right.
Of course, you must follow ethical content curation practices. One of the most important is giving attribution. In fact, when you give both attribution to the original source of content and a back link to their publication, they will thank you.
Why You Should Curate Content
Although the debate rages on about whether you should curate or not, most are seeing benefits all the way around. Here are a few of them:
1. You are perceived as the expert: With the “fire hose” volume of information out there, your sales leads cannot possibly swallow it all. Curation allows you to aggregate the information you find as valuable to your sales leads and pass it on.
2. Sales leads trust what you tell them: If all of the content in your email marketing campaigns are original and written with the bias of your company, the sales lead will continue to look for unbiased information from other sources. By feeding them information from other sources, they feel that you have nothing to hide and the level of trust increases.
3. Content sources recognize you: Let’s face it…isn’t it great when other content creators recognize your work? They are more likely to back link to your content. They may even invite you to write a guest post on their blog or some other kind of recognition for your efforts.
4. Current customers see your confidence: Nothing destroys confidence in what you have to offer faster than obvious “lack mentality”. If you are so focused on everything being pointed directly to you and your company, people wonder if you have something to hide.
5. You look smarter: Draw from a wide variety of sources for your curated content. It will make you appear well-read and more knowledgeable. That seems absolutely counter-intuitive. You would think that spreading your vast knowledge to sales leads and customers in totally original form would make you look smarter. That perception is ego-centric…not customer-centric. It’s not about you. It is about them.
Include Your Point of View
Don’t think you can copy/paste other content into yours without writing anything on your own. First, you want to understand Fair Use Guidelines. When you quote another article, it is best when it is a snippet. You want to entice the reader to go to the original content piece to read its entirety. Choose the juiciest short segment that teases the reader to click on the link.
You need to mention why you found the curated content useful. You also want to spell out any areas where you may feel different than the original author. Be sure to fill in any gaps where the curated content does not adequately reflect your business model. Always ask what else your sales leads need to know and include it in your curated content.
Finally, don’t swipe the title and/or subject line of the curated content. Write your own headline. You don’t want to create competition in search results. You also will have at least a slightly different focus than the original content and you need to play it up in your title.
Curated content is your friend. Learn to use it to keep the email marketing hungry beast fed on a regular basis. You will get many useful benefits within your marketing automation strategy.