Content marketing, lesson 1:  sourcing is an art!

In order to create content you need to source information. If your content is very complex, like it is in destinations, how would you do that? A destination has so much information to offer and you have different key topics or themes that you want to cover.. let us take Gastronomy as an example: there are great chefs, new restaurants, concepts, trends, drinks and wine and many more. All this attracts a lot of interest for visitors and pulls readers to your information. Readers that find your content interesting and relevant and who come and visit your information repeatedly and finally get animated to travel to your destination.

The question is: if you do not want to spend all your /your team’s time on google, how do you source and track this information and especially, how do you then process it further to make proper blog posts, press releases and other publications in social media networks and build up communities?

After  having worked with new concepts in newsrooms and content marketing, we are by now turning into specialists for sourcing – which is really like detective work at times.  Researching sources that fit in the theme, creating lists and then using several tools to collect the news flow coming from these sources. If you do not put attention, you are swamped with information in no time. It needs committment and system to observe the sources and evaluate if they are worth to be followed – some produce interesting stuff, others produce only crap, which you would not want to serve to our readers and visitors of our social media accounts and newsrooms.

An example, again from gastronomy:

You find a great blog, describing a new chef in Mexico City. This particular chef has been Michelin Star awarded and focuses on Mexican cuisine and typical old-fashioned Mexican food supplies which he shops at farmers markets outside Mexico city. Now that concept is exciting for visitors interested in exploring Mexico’s food on a hitherto unknown level of quality. By reading about this chef, you identify links to a slow food group that describes the typical Mexican vegetables and dishes. Now these go well with Tequila. There are Tequila brands which actively promote and from there you can source a barkeeper and some recipes for drinks. And on and on.

And what do you do with all of this? You have to collect it in a system, view it and build stories from that information. The stories you can gather in a newsroom on the destination, which could present the topic of gastronomy in a dynamic, interactive and sharing way. Support the topic with social media campaigns and pool all blogs, posts, links, in a gastronomy „department“ on that newsroom.

Well. You need 5 people to just do the sourcing for one topic like that in one language – not to speak of global communication in several languages.

tmf dialogue marketing has developed a genius method to provide sourcing service.  We think content and we have a lot of fantasy, which offers opportunities that destinations are not yet making use of.

Remember: destination content marketing  can be so creative!