Introduction: How to Use Content Marketing and Curation Tools
Content marketing is a type of marketing used to get the attention of a desired group of people. This strategic marketing approach focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain the attention of a desired group. By doing so consumers of another brand or guests at an event may see your product and relate it with their everyday hobbies and interests.
Firstly, Starbucks is a great example of a large and successful company that takes advantage of content marketing. Starbucks is one of the most popular American Coffee brands with locations all around the world. Knowing their customers are naturally competitive and as it's almost second nature for humans to enjoy winning compared to losing. Starbucks uses their Starbucks Rewards program as a form of content marketing, this creates challenges for customers to spend more money at their Coffee Shop in the hope to earn more Rewards.
In addition to that, Red Bull is another huge company that takes content marketing to the extreme. Red Bull is an energy drink with the popular ad "Red Bull gives you wings". However, their energy drink isn't the star in most of their marketing ads. Red Bull received a ton of publicity from Felix Baumgartner's "free-fall from space". Red Bull put together a highlight video of the event and gave the people what they wanted. This video gained over forty million views. From this one video where the energy drink wasn't the main point of view, Red Bull has put their brand in the view of new potential customers.
In conclusion, content marketing has become an important role for startup companies or companies who need a new way to promote their product. Content marketing will allow your business to grow and be dynamic, something that all companies strive to achieve.
Now that you know of content marketing I think it’s time to introduce you to the concept of content curation.
If you own or work for an organization that provides content to an audience then you know the amount of work that goes into collecting and filtering that information. Content curation is exactly that, gathering content relating to a specific topic so that it can be displayed to an audience. Providing interesting content on your website will drive traffic to it which will give your business or organization more exposure.
One example that comes to mind is Reddit. Reddit has a plethora of subreddits which relate to a specific topic. These subreddits act as curators because people gather and post content relating to that specific subreddit. This in turn drives more people to visit that sub and post to it themselves. Link to reddit is below.
https://www.reddit.com/
This Instructable will provide you with a description of two popular curator tools which will hopefully aid you in your decision of which curator tool you want to go with.
Step 1: Choose a Content Curator Tool
The first step to curating content is deciding which curator tool you want to go with. I have provided a description of two popular curator tools below. They are meant to aid you in your decision, I strongly advise you to do some research on your own so you can find a tool that fits your personalized needs.
TRAP.IT
The first recommendation that I have for you is Trap.it. Trap.it is an extensive content curation service. It discovers, organizes, and publishes content from all over the web. Additionally, Trap.it can be classified as an “intelligent” tool. This means that it remembers content that you curate and uses that information to improve itself and recommend you relevant content in the future. The last main feature that’s worth mentioning is Trap.it’s ability to publish curated content across multiple social media platforms at once (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). This saves users a lot of time because they don’t need to physically publish the content to each social media account individually.
FEEDLY
The second content curation service that I will mention is Feedly. Feedly finds and collects news and information from a variety of different online resources which the user can then organize, customize and share with their audience. One thing that makes Feedly stand out is that it’s not only a web application. Feedly also has applications that run on IOS and Android operating systems so you can collect and display relevant content right from your phone. Lastly, Feedly has been praised for its minimalist easy to navigate UI. Content curator applications are sometimes known to be a bit overwhelming at first due to their complex UI. Feedly doesn’t have this problem.
Below is a link to a simple Feedly introduction video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5lX8_clJKc
In conclusion you will need to make the decision of which curator tool you wish to go with yourself. Each tool differs in functionality and UI so you will need to find one that fits your specific needs. I’ve provided links to trap.it and Feedly below so you can research them a bit more if you’re interested.
Step 2: Learn More
Here are a couple links to some Instructables that you might find informative and helpful with attracting attention to your business.
