Our Favorite Content Finds of the Week, Curated for You

It’s hard to keep up with the latest news in the world of content and marketing, isn’t it?

We curate content using Trapit all week long, and to help you keep up, we’ve highlighted some of our favorite discoveries below. To save you a little time, we’re giving you the quick breakdown, too.

Background: 10 pieces of content. According to Joe Pulizzi in Epic Content Marketing, that’s how many pieces of content the average buyer looks at before reaching a decision. But in B2B scenarios, who’s consuming that content?

CMO and NetLine examined how employees pass along content as they research their buying options.

It turns out there isn’t a dominant content path.

Why should we care about this?

When creating content, B2B marketers want to cater to specific personas. However, as this study points out, there are limits to marketers’ specificity. We can’t write content just for junior-level teams or just for senior management or just for executive-level management because we don’t know who will be consuming our content.

The solution, according to Yuyu Chen, is to develop a point of view supported by “industry facts and stats, research, and insights.”

In other words: Remember the good, ol’-fashioned research that went into creating white papers? Yeah, well, good, ol’-fashioned research hasn’t died. The challenge is to find ways to repurpose the research and to present the information across different channels.

2. Why 55% of potential B2B buyers might not trust your website content

Author: Dianna Huff | Site: CMI | Link

If you haven’t read this article, go ahead and take a guess. What establishes credibility with B2B buyers?

Are you ready for the answer?

It’s your “About page.” Fancy that.

On your “About page,” you better put your e-mail address and phone number. 81% of buyers prefer to contact vendors via e-mail, and 58% of buyers prefer to contact vendors via phone.

For more stats from the study, click here.

3. Is curation overused? The votes are in

Author: Steven Rosenbaum | Site: Forbes | Link

The problem: Curation has become a buzzword, and as a result, thought leaders have begun to poke fun at it. Most notably, NPR’s Scott Simon channeled his inner Elizabeth Barrett Browning and said, “How do I love thee? Let me curate the ways…”

Rosenbaum’s take: He points out that the term curation isn’t as overused as members of the media would have you believe. According to CNBC’s 2014 poll, “viral” is far buzzier than the word “curation.”

Rosenbaum includes a call-to-action: “Let’s start by putting our foot down and returning the world of curation to the world of content. Maybe we need the curation police to start handing out tickets for unlicensed curators and irresponsible use of the word.”

To that, I’d like to add a sappy, but sincere note: Curation is about more than simply “the world of content.” The verb “curate” comes from the Latin verb curare, meaning “to care for.” So, for me, good content curation involves some tender, love, and care.

To put it differently, good curation means caring about what the original author wrote. It means engaging with the content on a deeper intellectual or emotional level. Good content curation also means caring about your audience – sharing content that your audience wants and needs to digest, and it means feeding your audience enough context so that they can appreciate the deliciousness of the content.

4. Why content marketers should step back from creation and focus on strategy

Author: Nathan Safran | Site: Search Engine Watch | Link

The main idea: According to a Demand Metric study:

Only 13% of marketers think that their content strategy is “very successful.”

Let me repeat that…

Only 13% of marketers think that their content strategy is “very successful.”

Why don’t content marketers feel more successful?

Nathan Safran conjectures that marketers are focused on the wrong things. Mainly, they are fixated on generating leads.

53% of enterprise marketers seek to increase leads through content marketing.

56% of marketers from small- and medium-sized businesses seek to increase leads through content marketing.

But… How is that a problem? Don’t all marketers want to increase leads?

Perhaps, but Safran’s point is this: Content can’t generate leads if no one is looking at it! And unless our buyers are expert conjurers, they will not find our content by magic. So, in Safran’s view, marketers should focus more on how potential buyers find their content.

So… how do we make sure that our buyers see our content?

As someone writing for Search Engine Watch, Safran is focused on all things search-y. So, his solution is to focus on SEO strategies and social media. (ICYMI: Search engines have begun to incorporate social media signals like +1s into their results. More info here.)

By improving our search ranking, we will make sure that potential buyers will see our content, which, in turn, will generate more leads. Or so Safran’s logic goes.

But is SEO our magical antidote?

That’s a tough one. I agree that we have to focus on how our audience will find our content, but I’m reluctant to be as prescriptive as Nathan Safran.

What I will say is this: SEO can be a bumpy and frustrating road, given that many sites are vying for that top spot in search results. After all, the first-ranked search results receives 33% of the traffic. (Study summary here.)

But herein lies the rub. There’s only one first-ranked search result. Only one page can receive 33% of the Google traffic. So, as Journey says in “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Some will win. Some will lose.”

Bottom line: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution in marketing, but the general goal is to be where your audience is.

5. Visualize it: Get started with the content that will rule 2014

Author: Kelly Montgomery | Site: Trapit

2014 continues to be the year of the visuals. In February of this year, Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio published their book The Power of Visual Storytelling. In the introduction of the book, the authors posit:

“Companies that go beyond creating and sharing content to embrace visual storytelling are emerging as the leaders of the pack and are being rewarded with engagmenet, referral traffic, and even sales.”

In case that snippet from the book didn’t convince you that visuals are important, Trapit’s own Kelly Montgomery created an infographic with some powerful stats:

You can read the rest of the blog post here.

So, there you have it…

5 summaries of 5 content marketing posts from the week of March 30, 2014. If you’d like to discuss any of these stories or if you’d like to add one article to the list, leave a comment below.

Until next time,

-Mark