Curating Content for Context

Image via Andrey Kuzmin.

Optimally curated content can be a wonderful thing. You’ve got your original content that you create, a tremendously important asset that you want to highlight every chance you get. Augmenting that, you have curated content that you’re sharing, building trust and further establishing and legitimizing your own thought leadership in the field. And it’s this balanced combination of the two that enables you to reap the best of the benefits from both worlds: your audience seeing that you’ve got both your finger on the pulse of your industry and the tools, resources and know-how to blaze a path through that wilderness.

But sharing curated stories and writing your own content isn’t the full story; the key to success is what you curate and how it supports your own, original contributions. You have a lot of options for what content you want to share, and the better you get at content discovery, the better you can inform your audience as it relates to the value you provide. And that’s what curating for context is all about.

The articles you share can serve many purposes, including:

  • educating your audience about a widespread problem in your field,
  • showing them a project or applied use case that leads some of them towards success,
  • sharing a breakthrough or innovation that positively affects them, or
  • showcasing a product that may offer a solution to some of their problems,

but at the end of the day, you’re not just after clicks, you’re after conversions, or people who come to you for a product-or-service that you provide. And the best way to do that is to share articles that don’t just highlight an interesting problem, project, innovation or product in your field, but ones that highlight problems, projects, innovations or products that you offer a solution for.

That’s what thought-leadership is all about. It’s not just for sharing tidbits from a widespread conversation, but for framing that conversation around your strengths and offerings. Because when you put out your own original content — sometimes with a call to action as well — you want to maximize your audience’s response, and that’s only going to happen if your audience is well informed about both what you do and why that’s important to them. So don’t just curate for interesting stories alone, frame that conversation around your assets and capabilities, and give your audience the context they need so they can be confident choosing you for their solutions.

-Ethan

Leave a Reply