Content creation vs content curation: the difference and the benefits
With all the ‘c’s involved, it’s easy to confuse ‘content creation’ with ‘content curation’, but the similarity between these two content marketing methods begins and ends with their spelling.
If you’re ready to grab content marketing by the horns, but you’re not sure what method to tackle first, then cancel your morning planning meeting, and read this before you do anything else.
What is content creation?
The words you’re reading right now are a content creation effort. Every single month, a skilled e-Arabization writer sits down at their desk and develops original written content for our blog. The creation process involves an in-depth understanding of our ideal reader, our target market(s), our content pillars, and how those look when we interpret them through the lens of what our target audience wants to know versus what we’d like them to know about us.
Content creation is a beast that takes many forms, but it’s most popularly consumed in the shape of blogs, social media posts, emails, videos and podcasts. Content creation is not a quick win, and it’s not an easy win either. Content creation is a wordsmith’s job, and to make it work for your business; it needs to pull readers in and keep them there, drinking in what you share.
There are many ways to get content creation wrong, and you probably stumble across hundreds of examples during your daily scroll. Creating content from scratch is a time-consuming content marketing effort, and it requires consistent good quality to draw in a crowd. Unfortunately, the internet is rife with copycat articles and boring blog posts. The best type of content creation is easy on the eyes and delivers a fresh perspective on a topic.
In short, content creation is the development of original content for your brand. You own it, it’s crafted specifically for your business goals, and when done well, it can generate high-quality leads and instant sales.
What is content curation?
If you’ve ever been to an art gallery or a museum, then chances are you’ve seen content curation in real life. A collector’s activity, online content curation involves hunting down other people’s blog posts, quotes, news, memes, Tweets, customer feedback, testimonials, opinions, and any other third party content you can get your hards on.
The idea behind content curation is that you find great material that’s already been published. You then leverage it for your brand by strategically linking it to your business mission, messaging and brand.
When it comes to the queen of content curation, social media lends itself incredibly well to this effort, and you’ll often see it through connections sharing a link to that “fascinating article” they’ve just read or a repost of a “totally relatable” meme. This is the most organic type of curation, and it’s a super quick way to connect to your target audience. More sophisticated examples of content curation include pulling together a round-up of well-researched sources that back up a topic you’d like to share.
Content curation is a quick win for your content marketing strategy. If your curation is thoughtful, you can expect to reap increased reach from link building, more networking and social sharing, and better SEO!
Everyone loves a list, so let’s examine some of the best reasons to create and curate your content marketing
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Content Creation
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Content Curation
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Google loves original content. Developing SEO-friendly content from scratch will drive all kinds of good traffic to your doorstep.
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You can double-up on the validity of your business processes/ideas/mission with multiple (reputable) sources. This can add credibility to your work.
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You can repurpose and upcycle content you develop over and over again. For example, a blog post can become a set of social posts, a follow-up video, or even a gif!
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Time and cost-effectiveness. You don’t need a copywriter or a content creator to curate content. All you need is a solid content marketing strategy and an eye for good material.
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Content developed by your team means a unique brand voice that speaks to your target audience and creates a strong brand identity and brand awareness over time.
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Bringing in other ideas and sources helps you provide a richer pool of knowledge for your audience. Trying out a range of content can help you quickly generate and pinpoint what type of content performs well for your brand.
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It’s all in the mix
Just like any content marketing effort, you can’t rely solely on one method to achieve your business goals. Instead, you need to feed your audience a conscientiously created mix. When it comes to B2B content creation and curation specifically, this is often a mix determined by time and effort needed. While the above list favours content creation as a vehicle for original brand content, there’s a place for curation, especially when it’s carefully researched, credible and lends itself to your position as an expert, sharing knowledge from your field.
The ideal content curation scenario involves creating a conversation around the content you collect and repurpose. It’s easy to share a link from another source, but it’s not so easy to make that content sing for your business. Curation might be the easy game, but it’s not effective unless it’s completely aligned with your overall messaging, values and mission.
84% of B2B organizations outsource their content creation, and there’s a very good reason for this fact. The average blog post takes almost 4 hours to write, with many writers taking up to 6 hours to create a single post. Content creation is a pretty heavy investment of time for many companies who regularly commit to and publish content; this is why big companies often have some in-house writers sitting in their marketing teams.
In short? It pays to consider a thoughtful balance of creation and curation in your marketing strategy.
Want to learn more about how you can market effectively using content? Send us a message, and let’s talk about how we can maximize your reach with language.