The 5 Content Sources You Should Consider for Your Strategy

Content is king. We have not coined the phrase, but we live by it! Content is the foundation of any good digital strategy, but these building blocks can come in many forms. Depending on your company, your industry, your resources, and your product, there are countless ways to approach your content. However, exploring different primary content categories is a great way to start.

When we talk about primary content categories, we are referring to the origins of content a brand uses to meet business and marketing goals. Combining different core content source strategies, you can better optimize and control your brand identity in front of your target audience.

Okay, but what are the primary content categories? There are five core content sources, which include:

• Brand-generated content (owned media)
• Employee-generated content (EGC)
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Partner-generated content
• Curated content

AI-generated content strategies can also be utilized in the brainstorming phase or to help optimize processes! However, we’re firm believers that the best way to speak to your audience is through your voice, not a robot's. At CID we like to use AI to help make our jobs easier, but let our people guide us from start to finish.

Not all of these primary content categories work for all brands, but a combination should work for yours! The key to building the strongest primary content strategy is determining what makes the most sense according to your marketing and business goals.

Why Content Source Strategy Matters

We’ve already talked about how content helps us build all digital strategies, but why does understanding their core categories matter? Because how and where your customers learn about you matters! Depending on your industry, your product, or even your brand voice, there may be more fruitful ways to build your content marketing strategy. For example, when building a strategy around selling something like home loans, it may make sense to utilize EGC (employee-generated content). Loan officers can give a face to your services and establish trust. Or think about a recruitment strategy. Your current employees can most effectively sell recruits on your company culture. But EGC isn’t the only option for these efforts, because brand content will help establish trust, and partner-generated content can help build on already established relationships. So this is where we talk about synergy.

Creating a holistic marketing strategy will always be the best way to build your brand. This requires synergy between all your core content categories, as well as a cohesive brand strategy to ensure all the moving pieces are focused on the same goals.

The Primary Content Categories

Strategic content marketing relies on five key categories: Corporate/brand content, user-generated content, employee-generated content, partner-generated content and curated content. We want to help you find the right mix of categories that will help you reach your marketing goals. Let’s start by examining each category’s strategic value.

Corporate or Brand Content

Corporate or branded content is most likely already in your content strategy. This is content that your company creates to establish and promote your brand. This can include any marketing collateral you may make internally, or create with a marketing partner, ranging from brochures to videos to blogs. Corporate content is important for all brands as it helps both define and establish your brand in all spaces. Before building more complex content strategies, establishing a strong corporate identity ensures your future efforts are all aligned with your goals!

Benefits:

• Provides complete control over your brand image
• An easy opportunity to build a strong content calendar
• Strengthens brand identity
• Ensures your brand is recognizable
• Establishes your brand voice
• Showcases your expertise

Misses:

• Does not come off overtly transparent: Corporate content is generated to make your business sound like the ideal partner or producer of high-quality products. This is exactly what your branded content should do, however, it can then come off too polished. This is where user-generated content can really highlight your brand in more objective ways! Where corporate content is very polished, user-generated content comes off more genuine.
• Often comes off dry and can lack personality: Particularly when selling services, potential clients like to know who they are working with. Employee-generated content is a great opportunity to give a sneak peak behind the curtain to meet the team behind the excellent services you offer.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is created by your clients and customers with the potential to prove the quality and efficiency of your business. This type of content can range from social media posts to blog content, and is great for both B2B and B2C brands. Learn more about how to garner this content, in our recent blog How to Garner B2B User-Generated Content!

Benefits:

• Establishes credibility
• Proves quality and success
• Does not require corporate time or funds
• Creates content that can be repurposed and shared
• Provides you with insights to improve current services

Misses:

• Is not controllable and risks negative discussions about your brand: When clients or customers love your business, they’ll sing their praises! However, the inevitable product failures or disappointed services will likely make it into content like reviews. This is unavoidable. However, this can be mitigated through the creation of branded content that showcases things like testimonials. A common way of doing this is creating a case study that showcases quotes from current or former clients.
• Can be hard to consistently produce: There are only so many ways to encourage users to create content that can support your brand. While this doesn’t take away from the importance of this content, it does reinforce the importance of other types of content like corporate content and employee-generated content that can fill these gaps!

Employee-Generated Content

Employee-generated content (EGC) is generated by your business’ team, whether encouraged or done on their own. EGC can include blog content, content shared on social media, or even staff-run podcasts. This very blog is an example of employee-generated content! Just as your employees keep your business running, they are also a reliable source of content that can prove your expertise and entice potential customers and clients to learn more. To learn more about EGC be sure to check out our blog discussing how to know if an EGC program is valuable for your B2B business.

Benefits:

• Utilizes an often untapped pipeline for content
• Builds a sense of ownership for your employees
• Attracts new talent Improves brand visibility
• Proves credibility and trust

Misses:

• Is not always sustainable: While this content is great to prove credibility and expertise, it isn’t always sustainable depending on your team’s bandwidth. Similarly to UGC, employee-generated content is best utilized as an additional content source rather than your primary focus.
• Quality inconsistency: Not all employees have experience creating content and will produce things at different ranges of quality. For the sake of authenticity it also isn’t a good idea to try and quality control this content, so there is a risk of low quality content. However, this is again where the high quality corporate content comes in clutch!

Partner-Generated Content

Partner-generated content is created by individuals and organizations who are partnered with your brand at some level. This content can include co-branded ebooks, affiliate blog posts, guest posts, and joint press releases. PGC isn’t necessarily the most common form of content, however there is space for this in specific situations where it can benefit both companies.

Benefits:

• Expands reach to overlapping audiences
• Provides third-party validations
• Strengthens industry relationships
• Shared content production workload
• Improved SEO visibility through backlinks

Misses:

• Less control of messaging: The price of partnering with another company is that you have to consider the messaging and tone of another brand. This can lead to some conflicts in tone and voice. However, this can easily be mitigated by having a strong vetting process. Consider your brand identity, your company’s values, and your target audience before beginning your search, and then use that as a checklist to see if they may be a match! Does your brand position itself as sustainable? Make sure your partner doesn’t conflict with that! While your companies don’t need to align in every way, it’s best ot ensure there are no major conflicts that could negatively impact your brand image.
• Requires legal agreements and disclosures: While UGC and EGC are encouraged and require no outside agreements, partnerships are more formal agreements. This can require contracts and more direct communication regarding alignment. While it may be worth it, it can be more time-consuming than other options.

Curated Content

Curated content is the sharing of third-party content relevant to your audience with the inclusion of commentary and insightful additional content. This is often done through sharing industry articles through social, or referencing and elaborating on relevant articles in original blog content. While this is categorized as its own category, this is generally part of general content strategies, particularly on social media.

Benefits:

• Bolsters social media presence
• Adds value to followers and subscribers
• Positions your brand as a resource
• Establishes brand as a thought leader
• Extends reach on platforms like LinkedIn
• Can help generate partnership opportunities

Misses:

• Can be seen as piggybacking: This is only the case if this strategy is utilized excessively. It is important to leverage things like EGC to continue to generate original content in addition to industry commentary.
• Limited SEO visibility: Because this content is already posted somewhere else, it is unlikely to provide much SEO value for an external domain. However, this is exactly why corporate content is so important! Creating high-quality brand content will create assets that other companies are likely to share to add their commentary, thus creating backlinks!

Are you looking for more strategic insights or searching for help with content creation? Talk to our team of digital marketing strategists to get started!