Sourcing Content: A Guide For Marketers

Part of having a successful content marketing strategy entails understanding where you acquire your content.

Companies with marketing departments already overwhelmed with tasks tend to outsource content production, often purchasing ready-made content to support their respective content marketing strategies.

Regardless, someone from within the company needs to have oversight of the outsourced content to make sure the content is on brand and that it addresses user needs.

Let’s dive into a few examples of content you can source for your content marketing strategy.

Original Content
Original content is what you produce in-house with your team of writers. The pros of original content is that it speaks directly to your audience, in the right tone. After all, no one understands your audience like those from within your company. But creating original content is time consuming and involves a lot of sourcing. It’s no wonder that creating original content is often pricey.

Co-Created Content
Co-created content involves linking up with external forces. This could be getting a well-known thought leader in your industry to write on your blog. It could be taking a thought leader from within your company and getting them to speak on an industry podcast. The great thing about co-created content is you gain access to not only your audience, but also the audience of your co-creator. It’s a win-win for both sides.

Aggregated Content
Aggregated content involves rummaging through the web—with support from search algorithms and keywords or phrases—to find content for your blog. This content needs to speak to the industry you’re in. Using aggregated content makes the content creation process a whole lot easier. But there are a few cons with aggregating content for your company blog. For one, you’re publishing content that doesn’t speak in the tone of your brand since aggregated content comes from disparate sources. Another downside of aggregated content is it may not speak directly to your audience since you’re basing your searches on keyword searches and algorithms. The danger there is that you may lose the attention of your audience.

Curated Content
Similar to an art curator who creates a theme for an exhibition, curated content involves a content marketer collecting content and curating it on the company website. This involves have an editorial sense, one where the content marketer can easily build content around specific content pillars that serve the organization’s audience.

Licensed Content
Some companies that don’t have the capacity to create an in-depth library of content look to license content. In the healthcare industry, where I’m currently working, you’ll see health insurers license content from WebMD or Harvard Medical School, for example. The goal here is to source content that speaks to your audience and comes from reputable outlets. A content marketer should still offer oversight of the content, making sure to pick the right posts to publish.