Nearly one-half of marketing executives (48%) now use content curation—the process of continually finding, organizing, and sharing relevant online content that caters to a specific audience—according to a survey from HiveFire.

Among such content curators, most (78.9%) cite thought leadership as their primary objective in content curation, followed by elevating brand visibility and buzz (76.1%) and lead generation (60.6%).

Below, other findings from HiveFire's first annual Content Curation Adoption Survey 2011, based on a poll of 150 marketing executives.

Content Marketing Challenges

But creating original content can be a time-consuming effort: 73.6% of marketing execs cite creating original content as their biggest challenge in content marketing, while 73.0% cite finding the time to develop such content.

Over two in five marketing exes (43.0%) cite finding high-quality content to share, while over one-third (36.5%) cite difficulties with measuring results.

Looking for great digital marketing data? MarketingProfs reviewed hundreds of research sources to create our most recent Digital Marketing Factbook (May 2010), a 296-page compilation of data and 254 charts, covering email marketing, social media, search engine marketing, e-commerce, and mobile marketing. Also check out The State of Social Media Marketing, a 240-page original research report from MarketingProfs.