Content curation is both an art and a science, a long-term social media strategy that is relatively simple but takes time to truly master. Yes, original content that reflects your company’s unique mission is important for generating leads, driving traffic, raising brand awareness, and establishing authority. But curated content, such as other brands’ blogs, social media posts, or white papers adds another layer, helping you effectively and efficiently compete in today’s market.
Curated content delivers a wealth of benefits to your overall inbound marketing plan:
- It improves search engine optimization (SEO).
- It bolsters your brand’s credibility as an industry thought-leader.
- It supports quality lead generation.
- It streamlines lead nurturing.
- It enhances your social media and blogging strategies.
Content creation is a big deal, with nearly 84% of marketers curating and sharing content from third-party sources with their audience.
Why Curate Content?
Customers today are hyper-connected to an avalanche of content via multiple devices. For smaller businesses, it’s just about impossible to create only original content to feed their readers’ appetites. Curated content is the ideal solution for keeping your inbound marketing fresh and relevant. It also helps build relationships with other industry influencers, saves your company valuable time, and allows you to use content from reputable sources to bolster your standing as an expert. Finally, curated content lets you shake things up a bit – adding other voices your audience might respond to – and makes it easier to learn what your audience responds to via clicks and shares.
When to Use Curated Content
More important than a fixed schedule, what matters most is that the content you curate aligns back to your overall marketing strategy. Depending on what that is, here are three curation methods that benefit most businesses that use them.
Social Media Shares.
If you want to increase your followers, and stay relevant to the ones you already have, sharing curated content on your social media platforms is key. Break your social media strategy down into thirds: 1/3 to promote your brand and convert readers; 1/3 to share ideas from industry thought leaders or similar brands; and 1/3 based on feedback and data analysis. Sharing other respected brands’ content indicates confidence in your own brand and multiplies your exposure by connecting you to other brands' audiences.
Weekly Blog Posts.
Collect helpful information and resources from around the web and then publish them as a handy guide for your readers. Give the post its own title, such as “News from Around the Web” so readers know to look for it every week. Share important stories about your industry, but also include lifestyle links that you think your readers would enjoy.
Weekly Email Newsletters.
Email marketing is 40 times more effective at gaining new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Weekly email newsletters are a great opportunity for your brand to share information curated from a variety of sources, saving your readers the time they’d spend searching for the information themselves. Pull content from trade publications, social media profiles, blogs, journals, news outlets, and more.
Discovering Content Sources
Finding valuable content to share can be a time-consuming task. Fortunately, there are many tools available to help out. As you go about curating content for your own marketing purposes, ask yourself these questions about the information before deciding to share:
- Is it relevant to my audience?
- Is it credible – does it come from a trusted source?
- Is it diverse enough to make it interesting to my audience?
- Is it offering additional insights that validate my brand’s message?
- Is it unique, providing my readers with new information?
What’s Next
While the science of content curation is pretty simple, perfecting the art of it takes time. It’s a long-term inbound marketing strategy, and being seen as a reliable and trusted source of information will not happen overnight. But if you’re looking for a way to gain a competitive edge, establish industry authority, and gain more followers and leads, nothing beats achieving online success like content curation.
