Content Strategy: Curators are the new Creators
Content Strategy: Curators are the new Creators
The Growth Report #30
Hello friend!
Happy Friday 🙌
It’s been a busy week here at GrowthBay:
we launched our new website
migrated all newsletter content to our sparkling new blog
and we put together the first three podcast episodes of The Growth Leadership Show, with Tim Hess, Nadya Khoja and Chris Walker.
The latter are an exclusive sneak peak for you. The episodes are not available on Spotify or Apple Podcast just yet, we’ll launch those end of October officially when we have 10 episodes recorded (more really exciting guests coming up!).
If you got feedback to any of the above, I’d love to hear it. Just reply to this email.
And now, without further ado….🥁🥁🥁….
Today's topics:
📈 Content Strategy:
Curators are the new Creators
⚒️ Tools of the Trade:
Educational Resources and Inspiration for Marketers
⛑️ Reflections from the Trenches:
Patience is a Terrific Growth Strategy
📈 Content Strategy
Curators are the new Creators
Content overload is real. This article from market intelligence firm Micro Focus puts that into numbers for us: 474'000 Tweets, 300 hours of new YouTube videos and 49'000 Instagram photos are posted every minute of every day. And hell, that does not even factor in all the blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts.
Or how Gaby Goldberg, VC at Chapter One put it:
With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention.
Our senses are (quite literally) bombarded with new information every day. So it becomes increasingly difficult to discern between what is important and worth reading and what is just more noise.
It's a personal question everyone has to answer for themselves. When it's impossible to absorb everything from this flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most, or - and here comes the point - find the people who can do the choosing for us.
The Business Model of Good Taste
Of course curation is nothing new. While book stores and record shops have been doing it manually for decades, Spotify (weekly playlists) and Netflix (taste clusters) are doing it based on algorithms. But with an ever growing long-tail of niche interests and niche industries, there is in fact a huge gap opening for you as an individual (personal brand) or for your business (company brand) to establish yourself as the go-to-resource for picking and choosing the best content out there for your audience.
Curating content within a particular niche can be an incredible way to build an audience and add value.
Content curation hooks people with the promise of learning new skills while saving time, and it keeps them coming back by building a sense of community around a particular subject or vertical.
Your Opportunity
What I would recommend if you are building a business or personal brand today:
First pick a topic that interests you (and is adjacent to your product) and has a large enough possible addressable market or reader base.
Secondly, you immerse yourself in that niche topic and start sharing the very best of what you read and listen to. This can be in the form of a weekly newsletter (hello!), videos, podcast, blog posts or whatever you feel drawn to.
Then as you grow your audience, you document and share your journey, your thoughts and your learnings by augmenting your curated content with your own reflections.
Finally, after you have delivered a ton of value for free (and only then), you can start dipping your toes in monetizing certain offers in the form of promoting your products or services, or launching a paid publication, community, or long-form content like a book.
If you are reading this newsletter, you are part of a community yourself. You are part of a handful of mindful leaders who are interested in both developing and growing their business (or the business they work for) and their personal self. It is likely that you are someone who is not satisfied with the status quo and makes learning, reflecting and growing a priority in your life.
Topics that I cover like growth marketing, leadership, psychology etc. are merely logical extensions of that mindset.
On to you...
What values, niche topics or category could you represent in your content strategy? How can you be the curator in your industry who surfaces the most interesting content and drives the conversation forward?
🛠️ Tools of the Trade:
Educational Resources and Inspiration for Marketers
Made me Chuckle:
Marketing Education
Superpath Pro - The first education program I have come across that's exclusively targeted at content marketers. And because the prolific content marketing agency Animalz is behind it, it won't disappoint!
Go Practice - A 12-week, hands-on startup building simulator that teaches you how to grow a company. You are dropped in a fictitious high-pressure role of trying to grow a new VC backed company. All you get is a rich data set to work with. Haven't tried it myself, but wow, what a great idea!
Brands and Products that caught my eye
Blush - An entirely free illustration library that offers plugins for Sketch and Figma. And who doesn't need illustrations nowadays :-)
Poolside - Just go and see for yourself.
Feather - A furniture rental company. Didn't know this exists and don't know if we need that in our lives. But I do love their branding.
Welcome - Been part of a conference that used Welcome, a premium software for hosting virtual events. The production value and networking capabilities are stellar and only matched by Hopin, from what I've experienced.
Best Reads of the week
Elon Musk, The Architect of Tomorrow (Rolling Stone Magazine)- How the entrepreneur of the decade is re-shaping our lives. What mind-bugglingly industrious man!
Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society (Scientific American) - One of the best articles I have read this year. The title says it all.
Vocal Emotions Library - This is so cool. The spectrum of human emotions captured and visually mapped to vocal reactions.
⛑️ Reflections From the Trenches
Patience is a Terrific Growth Strategy
Patience has not been a natural virtue of mine. It doesn't come easy to me at all.
And yet I have been learning to harness its power over the past couple of years.
Without patience we are doomed, because even if we produce the greatest work out there, there are no (or very few) instant successes. Success (however you define it for yourself) needs time. And time requires patience.
Patience is your invisible friend. While producing great work is the foundation, patience is the secret ingredient to keep you going. Because even if you're producing shitty work starting out, patience allows you to study your work over time, then reflect, learn, adapt and get better.
If we get nervous or anxious because results are not rolling in right away, we are passing up a great learning opportunity and all the personal and professional achievements that come with it.
Or how Naval puts it:
Well, long-term requires patience. But I chose the word terrific in the title very intentionally.
Because terrific means "extremely good or excellent", but actually originates from the latin word terrere, which means "to frighten" 🤓. So yes patience is both an excellent and a frightening growth strategy.
Excellent because consistently producing great work over a long time horizon is arguably the most overlooked growth strategy out there. And frightening because, without any guarantee we put all our faith into the fact that all of our hard work will pay out one day.
How to practice patience?
To that I have a remedy straight out of the Bhagavad Gita:
“Let your concern (or focus) be on your action, let it not be on the outcome of the action. Do not act only out of expectation of a result.”
Or in other words: Any action is like a released arrow. It is irreversible. Of course it has an intended target (i.e. result), but after it has been done, you do not have any control over the result. So there is no use in fretting over the result. In fact, the less you worry about the end result, but focus on the work itself, the more likely it is that your work will get the intended result.
With that in mind, practicing patience becomes so much easier.
That's it for today.
Enjoy your weekend 🏡
Cheers,
Sandro
