Content marketing pro tip: curate to augment your efforts

Do you want to attract more high-quality clients and provide value to your existing clientele at the same time? One proven strategy that RIAs and financial advisors can add to an existing content marketing plan is to expand beyond the content you create internally.  You can become a curator.

Curators are most commonly known as the aggregators of museums’ art collections.   In their role, they carefully select and commingle art from various artists around certain themes or styles.  Different rooms may have varying types of art, but the individual exhibits, in their entirety, make sense together under one roof.

This curator role translates well­­­­ to content marketing. You can leverage the brilliant work of other bloggers, podcasters, youtube celebs, social media influencers, publications, groups, and authors (the list goes on) to fill your message gaps and stay top of mind. A ton of content fitting your audience exists that you do not have to write yourself.  You can collect, and aggregate, and share it.

Why Curate?

You may wonder if you will receive the same value if you share content that is not original.  Curation offers incremental benefits when combined with work you’re already doing to share your story.  When you curate, you:

• Help your audience escape the overwhelm of content overload. As you demonstrate your skill at selecting the best works, they begin to trust you’ll share what they need to know.  They let go of their stress to keep tabs on everything. Perhaps the best example of curating that you as an advisor may benefit from is Michael Kitces’ Weekly Reading for Financial Planners. Michael and his team cull the stories of the week, along with his own content, and share the essentials that you need to know.
• Maintain frequency of sharing your content so you build awareness and generate interest.
• Show who you are and what you like, believe, support. When selected according to your brand values and personality, the content you share reinforces your brand through association.
• Demonstrates curiosity, resourcefulness, connectedness. You know where to find the information and opinions your audience will value.
• Gives every member of your team the opportunity to contribute and engage in your marketing in a cohesive way to support the brand.

How to Curate

When you view curation as a service to your followers and share what will help them, finding content becomes much simpler. If you have a multi-advisor firm, curation works particularly well to widen the pool of content from which to draw.  Here’s how to approach curation:

1. Identify high value content

Pick out the best content related to the worries and aspirations of your high value hyper-target audience.  Quality content that is relevant is an essential element of curation.  You can’t just send out generic retirement or investing articles. You need to select pieces that specifically tie to your ideal client and preferably fall outside of what you would cover in content where you are the expert. If your team will be contributing as well, be sure to articulate a clear description of your ideal clients’ needs, wants, interests, hobbies, aspirations, and concerns.  This will help spark inspiration as other advisors or staff members come across relevant content.

Example:  You are a Philadelphia-based RIA who focuses on working parents of school-aged children. You tend to speak first with the woman in the relationship, so your content is geared to working moms.  A fitness article like this one published in a local magazine may be the perfect content to share.  It’s outside your sphere of expertise, yet a topic of interest to your audience.  (see sample facebook post below).

2. Keep the content in a single spot

Create a cloud folder where you can collect and store the content. When you read, see or hear something of interest, put the link or info in this one spot.  You can break down the folder into subtopics if you desire, especially if you have multiple team members participating.

Encourage team members to list books, podcasts, films, videos, or other media they consume that you may want to recommend or review for your audience.

3.  Share the content

If you are a solo advisor or you share under your own name, you do not have to wait to share an article. If you have one team member posting under your company identity, aggregating content first before sharing can be more efficient and give you a chance to review to ensure you stay on strategy.  You can leverage this collected content in multiple ways:

•  Add it into your ‘homebase’ content platform as a blog post, podcast episode or video where you create Top 10 or Best of lists.  You can also boost the credibility of your original content with mention of the relevant article(s). Plus, when you incorporate links to outside content you get the added benefit of potential SEO help.
• If you have old posts with new research, articles, infographics, or tools to support the content you wrote, go back and add in the links.  Connecting these updates also gives you a reason to “re-share” your earlier content (think “new & improved” or “now with more!”).
• Fill in content gaps in your email newsletter that you send to clients and prospects. You can also use this content to round out your “lead nurture strategy” to demonstrate your understanding of what matters to them.  Queue it up in your auto-responder sequences to add depth to your follow-up.
• Incorporate the curated content into your social media content sharing regimen.

**MISTAKE ALERT**

One of the biggest errors I see financial advisors make — especially if they use a service that curates on their behalf (which, by the way, I do not recommend unless you can does extremely tight targeting and personalize the posts) —- is failing to give context for curated content.  When you do post on social media, make sure you state why you are sharing this content rather than just posting a link.  To do this, you can:

• Pull out a quote, stat or summary statement from an article.
• Mention what caught your eye in an infographic or chart.
• State upfront whether you agree or disagree with an opinion piece.
• Ask, “What do you think?”

Using the Philadelphia firm example from above, I could do a facebook post with an introduction like this:

As you can see, curation helps you augment your existing marketing efforts and stay in front of your clients and prospects.  This depth of perspective resulting from curation can also spark new interest in your brand from someone who needed a different entry point to a conversation with you.  When you share content above and beyond what you create yourself, you make your brand far more well-rounded and attractive.  You’re not afraid to send people to other sites and other places to help them get the education that benefits them.  You act in service of your client and that will come back around.