As content marketing grows in popularity, marketers are discovering that – for all but the largest and best-funded marketing teams – it’s nearly impossible to publish only original, created content at the pace expected of today’s brands. Given this reality, many successful content marketers publish a mix of content they’ve created themselves, content they’re curating and annotating from other sources, and syndicated content.
Curata surveyed over 500 marketers from both the B2B and B2C worlds about their mix of content marketing. But before we get into numbers, let’s define each of these content types:
Created content is content that is authored by your in-house marketing team or an outsourced team of content creators. Content can also be created based on material that is crowdsourced from customers or clients. In some cases content that you’ve created for one distribution platform can be repurposed for another platform (such as when you leverage a white paper into a series of blog posts) but it still must be an original work to be considered “created content.”
Curated content is external content that you link to and provide additional commentary, context, or opinions to tailor the content to your audience and add your brand’s voice to the conversation. Curated content can include blog posts, tweets, email newsletters, and more.
Syndicated content or licensed content is third-party content that has been previously published elsewhere and is republished in its entirety on your website through a syndication agreement. Ideally, this is quality content that stands on its own without the need for additional context.
Based on Curata’s survey, the current marketing mix of marketers surveyed is as follows: 63.4 percent created, 24 percent curated and 12.6 percent syndicated.
The average desired overall content marketing mix is: 61 percent created, 27 percent curated and 12 percent syndicated; not much change from the current mix.
However, given trends we’ve identified, we expect to see a shift in the content marketing mix in the next 6 to 18 months as marketers complement their original, created content with more curated content. In 2014, best-in-class marketers will strive to create 65 percent of their content, with the remainder being 25 percent curated and 10 percent syndicated. The objectives behind this shift are three-fold: to better leverage resources, to improve the ideation process, and to better engage buyers through higher value content.
More created and curated content and slightly less syndicated content will allow these marketers to differentiate themselves and produce valuable content that builds trust in their brand.
Ready to learn more about content marketing strategy? Download the 2014 Content Marketing Tactics Planner, Curata’s third annual content marketing benchmark study. This free eBook covers the new strategies of successful content marketing teams, the impact of technology on content marketing, and more.
Curata provides software that enables marketers to create and curate the most relevant and highest quality content as part of their content marketing strategy. As CMO of Curata, Michael Gerard is responsible for Curata’s marketing strategy and all related activities (i.e., product marketing, brand building, lead generation and sales enablement). Follow Michael on Twitter.
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