Content Creation Plays Key Role in Establishing Thought Leadership

Content curation is one of the new trends in communications, as any marketing and communication expert will tell you, and it turns out that content is greatly perceived as an effective way of establishing thought leadership, as a new study shows.

One of the biggest challenges is to actually provide interesting content in a world where there is too much information and where often we see articles with bombastic titles that turn out to be lacking great content.

Content curation services provider Curata carried out a survey in March 2012 reaching out to more than 400 US marketers and agencies that sold to B2B and B2C companies. The findings are not surprising, I’d say, as 95% of the respondents said they had curated content over the past six months. Almost anyone shares a link, a blog post, articles and interesting things with existing and potential customers and six months isn’t a short period.

The main objectives of content creation identified in the poll might be surprising for some, as 85% of respondents consider its main goal is to establish thought leadership. The second objective for content creation is elevate brand visibility and buzz, as 80% of the people responded, while boost SEO came in as third objective, with only 65% of the mentions.

Also interesting are the content marketing challenges, as having the time to create original content was ranked first, as the most challenging, with 75% of the mentions, closely followed by the actual creation of original content, with 73% of the answers. Finding high quality content, allocating stuff to do it and the difficulties in measuring results are other important challenges for marketers.

Social media are heavily used to share content – in fact 76% of marketers said they used a social network as the main channel for content distribution – but sharing is not enough, as curation is necessary in order to keep consumers engaged.

I could say that the findings of this poll confirm the current trend and marketers’ empiric observations. Content is necessary, but engagement is at least as important. Finding great content however and having the time to create and share it are real challenges for anyone involved in communication industry. However, high quality content delivered to customers leads to positioning as an expert, as a leader and draws consumers.