Content is vitally important to any business today. That’s because your content is how you communicate with your audience in your market. And it’s no exaggeration to state that content in today’s marketing world is everything, especially online. Studies continue to show that ‘information’ content has now much more influence over customer buying decisions online than any traditional sales method.
What this means for you and your business today is that you really need a steady stream of content that informs, helps, intrigues, and entertains your audience.
So, one major content marketing challenge is figuring out how to create, publish, and distribute this content.
There are two ways to generate content. One, which most businesses are probably familiar with, is to create the content yourself. But this can be time consuming, so companies either develop their content in-house or outsource the creation to bloggers, writers, video producers, and so on.
The other method is “content curation”. Curation offers an alternative content strategy that has many benefits for both yourself and for offering outstanding value to your audience.
In order to make content curation work for you and help you achieve your business’ marketing content goals …you need to approach it strategically.
Content curation means sharing with your audience the best content produced by others. Curating content strategically involves finding, organising, and publishing the most relevant content for your market audience in a format that adds value to what is already deemed exceptional content information material.
Curation is more than just sharing posts on Facebook. With content curation, you’re leveraging content originally created by others in order to create new content for your audience that’s engaging and unique. You’re acting as an editor, adding your own commentaries and perspective with the aim to help your readers get new insights from the existing content.
The aims of content curation are the same as any other form of content marketing …to educate your audience and build a relationship with them that later translates into business results for you.
Some examples of content curation include:
- A weekly roundup email newsletter with the latest news in your industry
- A commentary on an excellent article that’s gone viral online
- An infographic that displays a summary of the data on a research project
- A list of hot news stories your audience may have missed, along with your opinion on each one
- An article that unpacks a tweet from a thought leader in your niche and explains its meaning in context of your customers
- A short video where you summarise the main points of a long article or blog post.
In each of these examples, you’ve taken someone else’s content and used it to create something highly focused for your market audience that gives them a new perspective or helps them understand the content more clearly.
What makes content curation successful is the fact that you’re showing how you’re an expert in your field because you keep up-to-date by knowing your audience, by following industry leaders, influencers and great content creators in your market niche.
Which means you in turn get known for selecting excellent content for your audience based on their tastes and needs. You’re taking the best of your industry content from the internet and offline sources such as newspapers and magazines and presenting it to your audience and showing credibility by offering your own comments and ideas to make it relevant to them.
The Benefits of Content Curation
The big benefit of creating content curation is that you’re supplementing your own regular unique content and adding to it with even more excellent quality content creation from your market for your audience. Which means:
- This offers you many more opportunities to engage fully with your audience because you can share content and follow it up with a comment or question to get a conversation going, which is especially good for your social media sites.
- Which means you don’t have to create all of your content from scratch as you will be using the content of others as a basis for creating new content, hence cutting down on your time and costs while still providing excellent value to your audience.
- And because it cuts down on your time and costs by enabling you to create a continuous stream of great content, this will help you to “level the playing field” against your larger competitors.
- Sharing the content of others is also a great way to get yourself noticed in your market because it increases the range of your expertise by sharing content from other ‘thought leaders’ and connecting with them, hence building more ‘connections’ for you.
- By curating excellent content this will show how you’re keeping up-to-date and following the latest news content in your market which will help to establish you as a credible expert and influencer in your niche.
- Finally, and this is hugely important …more content means that you’ll have more opportunities to be indexed by search engines. Which means that your ‘diverse’ curated content allows you more keywords, more backlinking, and more SEO power.
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