Content curation — discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content — is popular across the Web and is now growing rapidly in the financial advisor world. Apps to allow advisors and vendors to advisors are becoming more common. But the success of these efforts is likely to be derailed by the explosion in the growth of curated content and by personalization.
Content curation is popular because it usually means not producing content but sharing content you find valuable, which in and of itself can have great value.
As a financial advisor, you are reading content on the Web to keep up with investing and wealth management. Doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and business owners that are your clients and prospective clients don’t have the time or inclination to read what you do.
By sharing the best stories in the Wall Street Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and other specialized knowledge with your clients and prospects, you provide a valuable service. You can also make aggregated content more valuable by writing about what these publications are saying and adding your analysis.
By providing clients with your viewpoint on content that is special and specialized, you make help them by putting in front of them information and ideas about wealth management that they would otherwise be very unlikely to see. Hence, content curation is seen as a solution to the information explosion.
Trouble is, we’re seeing such an increase in curated content that it is, ironically, contributing to the information overload that it’s supposed to alleviate.
Content curation is a good thing but it does not replace content creation. If you are engaging in content curation as a marketing tactic, that’s great. But presenting your own original ideas is the most valuable content you can provide.
While many really cool apps for content curation are available and more are on the way, advisors who can regularly create their own original content will succeed at content marketing.
Concurrent with the development of many new apps for curation that can make aggregated digital content look very elegant on smartphones, tablets and desktops, apps for content personalization are growing. These apps, such as
Zite, let you select your interests and then send you your own personalized magazine with content about the topics you care about most. Content personalization trumps content curation.
If people can choose between reading a digital magazine you provide about investing and one that is personalized to their interests about investing, they are likely to choose the personalized app because content you curate will not be as well aligned with their interests.
The most important content you can provide clients is original content.
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