high quality newsletter

Everywhere you look, marketing gurus are talking about the virtues of content development and curation. Content marketing is the practice of creating or curating content and sharing it in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects is proving to be more successful than traditional ‘in your face’ advertising.

For businesses, it’s a low-cost way to communicate with your audience and advertise your brand without trying to “sell” anything. Additionally, it gives you an opportunity to showcase your expertise and become an industry thought leader.

It used to be a difficult and time-consuming process to find quality content and get it out to your audience but this is no longer the case. There are a number of great tools out there that will help you get started quickly and inexpensively.

How to Find Quality Content

All Top – Choose a topic and get a list of the top headlines from around the web.
Popurls – This site aggregates buzz-worthy stories from around the web.
Google News – Top stories from around the web compiled in Google search format.

How to Distribute It

Email –  Flash Issue

FlashIssue enables you to get your marketing message out in a different way. It lets you rapidly curate your own email digest from content you find on the web and articles you write yourself.  Testing has shown that delivering high-quality, targeted content produces a significantly higher response rate among audience members than traditional email campaigns.

Social Media – HootSuite

This social media dashboard allows you to monitor and post to multiple social networks at the same time. Once you’ve identified great content, you can use this one simple tool to share it.

A well designed content marketing campaign can have many benefits including developing brand awareness, increasing customer acquisitions, lead generation and improved retention/loyalty.

With any content marketing campaign, the name of the game is value. Customers are looking for companies who contribute to their quality of life and will in turn reward them with their business. This is why Pinterest has been such a massive success; they provide tremendous value to their audience.  Astoundingly, Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined showing the viral power of well-crafted, curated content.

It’s clear that content marketing is here to stay; will your business respond proactively and stay ahead of the curve?