Marissa Burdett
Many brands have already harnessed the power of curated content in various parts of their content marketing strategy: on social media, through email newsletters, and in blog posts. Through these efforts, they have helped to establish themselves as strong thought leaders and provided opportunities for their audiences to engage in more meaningful conversations. However, there’s one additional area in which curated content has yet to be included but contains some seriously untapped potential: your website.
Certainly, some brands have included content plugins and widgets that display seemingly related third-party content at the bottom of blog posts or in sidebars to make a few extra advertising dollars, but these are ineffective and tend to make a negative impression on website visitors. Additionally, one of the common misconceptions about curated content is that it can drive hard-earned traffic away, something to be avoided when it comes to your website.
Now there’s a way to include curated content on your website to convert more leads without having to invest in more content creation and bring traffic back to your site in a more targeted way.
Introducing the UpContent Gallery, a tool that allows you embed an UpContent topic onto any page of your website so visitors can access third-party content curated by you within the context of your site. The Gallery includes custom calls-to-action so that when visitors click on a content suggestion, they can easily navigate back to your site to specific offer or related piece of content you have created.
Not only does the Gallery help you reap the benefits of curated content, but it also helps direct your website visitors to the next stage in the Buyer’s Journey and closer to that important sale.
The BHiveLab team, Brunner’s industry-leading innovation lab, chose to add the Gallery to give their increased website traffic something fresh and new to look at, especially as they work on building their social media presence for this new brand. Partner and Chief Digital Officer Rick Gardinier shares: “We had a space on our homepage initially reserved for heavier social integration, but we thought the UpContent Gallery could replace some of our static content and make it more dynamic for our web visitors.”
Once installed, your website visitors will be able to:
Click on the topic they are interested in–displayed as a carousel
View the list of curated suggestions
Click on an article or blog post they are interested
Read the content in a separate tab
Click on the custom call-to-action to be redirected to your site
Enjoy a more targeted content or offer
This process helps you close the content circuit, leaving less room for visitors to fall down their own rabbit holes and distracting content and more opportunity to convert prospects into leads.
To curate content for your Gallery, simply “favorite” a desired article or blog post from your UpContent topic by clicking the heart (or star in Hootsuite) icon. Only these selected pieces of content will display in your Gallery.
For Gardinier, keeping his Gallery updated with fresh new curated content is a part of his regular morning routine: “It takes about ten minutes when I’m getting my coffee in the morning to go through and favorite articles. I’m reading news anyway, so it doesn’t really change my process at all. It enhances it, really.”
If you prefer a more automated approach, you can also choose to display all new content that UpContent discovers for your topic.
Getting your Gallery up and running is simple and offers opportunities for customization to ensure it makes sense within the context of your site. Here are the steps to set up your UpContent Gallery:
Create relevant topics in UpContent to identify content that aligns with your brand mission.
If desired, curate articles and blog posts using the “favorite” button
Develop custom calls-to-action for each topic to close the content loop and bring visitors back to your site.
Customize the UpContent Gallery to match the branding of your site.
If you’re feeling extra fancy, you can also modify the code to achieve an even more customized result. Gardinier shares, “The final result looks seamless. The code was pretty easy to modify and we also worked with the UpContent team to find the best approach. Our team was surprised to see how easy it was to integrate.”
Check out the versatility of the UpContent Gallery in these live examples from actual Gallery customers:
Interested in learning more about the UpContent Gallery and receiving a personalized demo? Click here to sign up.