All About Content Curation: Benefits and Best Tips

Content curation is a buzzword in many digital marketing circles, but it’s one your business simply can’t do without. When done strategically, curated content can prove an effective component of your digital marketing plan and supply your target audience with relevant and useful information.

To achieve maximum results and benefits from curated content, business owners and digital marketers follow a series of well-thought-out steps. In this article, you can learn the tactics used and better understand how you can apply them to your own content strategy. The following provides a rundown of what you can expect:

• What is content curation?
• How is content curation valuable to the user?
• Steps for content curation
• Content curation benefits
• Content curation tips

What is content curation?

Unlike content creation produced by your own business, content curation is the act of sharing content from relevant outside sources with your industry through social media posts, blogs, or other marketing channels. When done strategically, curated content can add value for your customers and enhance their online experience. Curated content can take different forms, including social media content, such as shared tweets, website articles and blogs, podcasts, and even email newsletters.

More than sharing just any content, it’s important to keep the needs and interests of your target audience in mind. Throwing together a mishmash of information adds little value for your customer and can cause you to potentially lose leads. Think of yourself as a museum curator and bring something valuable to the public with your curation efforts. When you carefully pick and choose the best of the best, your audience will appreciate you and come back for more—ensuring the long-term success of your content marketing strategy.

How is content curation valuable to the user?

Day in and day out, there’s a massive amount of content displayed on the internet. To get through the crowd, businesses must provide a variety of informative, relevant content for consumers. When executed well, content curation helps customers sort through the heap and get good information from the best sources in the industry.

To add the most value for your customers, though, make sure to follow proven steps that can win over your followers and attract newcomers along the way. The following sections lay out all you need to know to find and share high-quality, freshly curated content for your target audience.

Steps for content curation

The best content curators take several factors into consideration when searching for new pieces of content. Think about adding these steps as a collective content curation tool so you can share valuable content with your target audience:

1. Define your audience
2. Select your sources
3. Determine your filters
4. Add your own touch
5. Start publishing
6. Analyze the content’s performance

Step 1. Define your audience

Great content is tailored to its audience. To maintain interest and engagement, define your audience when developing your content curation strategy.

Content that misses the mark with customer interests and needs can be an ineffective tool and may even cause your customers to ignore your products or services and look elsewhere. To keep customers, understand what people want and need from your brand.

You can learn about customer needs with some audience research. Turn to social media channels and tune in to industry conversations, keywords, and hashtags. Create a buyer or audience persona and imagine what drives their purchasing decision. What are their goals and pain points? Although fictional, make your persona real. Equip this imaginary person with a name, career, income, and hobbies. All of this can help you deliver a message, supply solutions that your audience actually needs, make your brand an influencer, and gain trust with your customers.

Step 2. Select your sources

Quality content shares insights and information your audience can actually use and can boost your brand reputation as a thought leader. The inclusion of other sources adds a human element to your content creation strategy and strengthens consumer trust. However, make sure to branch out and include a variety of sources outside of your business brand. And remember to always give credit to the contributing author when sharing quality content.

Sources can run the gamut. Choose from white papers, how-to guides, infographics, or research statistics. Of course, make sure to select trustworthy sources that actually add value for your audience. You can share content through social networks, such as LinkedIn, or through your own website.

Sorting through sources can quickly become overwhelming. Using a list of your favorite social media accounts or signing up for industry-related newsletters can be helpful. You can also use content curation tools, like aggregate sites, that can do all the work for you, such as Flipboard or ContentStudio. These shortcuts generate shareable content based on the parameters you set.

Step 3. Determine your filters

By now, you likely have an extensive collection of new content you can’t wait to share with your target audience. But hold tight—now is the time to sift through to find the most shareable pieces that bring value and purpose to your audience.

Filtering is exactly how it sounds. Keep the pieces that provide the most value for your audience and set the rest aside. Think about how a piece of content can enhance engagement or help solve a problem. Also, consider the source. When sharing content, it’s in the best interest of your brand to provide trusted sources to your audience, like well-known professional organizations.‍

Step 4. Add your own touch

A personal note is a nice touch, and the same applies to content curation. Customers want to know the real you. When you add a personal touch to shared content, you give a better sense of your brand and voice to your audience.

Business owners can take ownership of what they choose to share. You can add your own touch when you comment or add your opinion. For instance, rather than simply copying and pasting a link and hitting share on your social channels, introduce the content, explain why you think it’s important for your customers to know, and engage with those who comment or react to the post in real time. ‍

Step 5. Start publishing

Just as you put a lot of thought into what to share, think about where you want to share. Depending on the type of content, you may choose several social media platforms or you might choose to post as a blog on your own website or newsletter.

When publishing, structure the text into digestible pieces and add attention-grabbing visuals. This can help with scannability and will better hold the interest of the viewer. ‍

Step 6. Analyze the content’s performance

Lastly, analyze the performance of the curated content. You can track content performance with content metrics and analytics tools. These can measure things like site traffic and user behavior.

There are a number of ways to analyze and measure the success of a site or page, such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel. Platforms such as these can reveal how customers use a site, segment visitors, and identify glitches or other issues.

Content curation benefits

It’s hard to deny the benefits of content curation. This content marketing strategy can provide numerous advantages and help your business extend its reach. Some ways you can benefit from content curation include:

• Adding variety to your content feed
• Helping you grow your network
• Enhancing your brand-customer relationship
• Unveiling top trends
• Improving your SEO ranking
• Improving audience trust and establishing you as an industry leader

Adds variety to your content feed

Curated content adds variation to your original content mix and keeps it interesting. With commentary from a number of different industry sources, you can show your commitment to providing information that customers need. It can also limit any gaps in your content calendar. This combination of in-house and shared storytelling adds variety to the mix and can help draw and engage potential customers with informative content they can use.

Helps you grow your network

Content curation can help businesses reach a larger audience within their niche. When we share valuable content, we’re providing one of the best compliments in the digital world. Let creators know how much you enjoy their content and tag them when you share. This can help build long-term relationships with other industry leaders.

Enhances your brand-customer relationship

Content curation can help you develop relationships with others in your industry and lead to a more meaningful brand-customer relationship. Sharing relevant content shows customers your appreciation for their needs while recognizing your own limitations. Adding other experts to your content calendar lets customers know information is always in flux and your brand can help fill in the gaps. The more your audience can connect with your brand, the deeper the relationship and following.

Unveils top trends

Content curation allows your business to keep abreast of the top trends in your industry and share as they happen. People always want to be among the first people to know. Share the next best thing with your target audience and earn credibility and consumer trust.

Improves your SEO ranking

Curated content can get a lot of attention, and this can help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Due to the variety of content, such as video, images, and user-friendly text, brands can attract and maintain the attention of many different site visitors. Search engines reward high-activity brands and curated content can help boost your search engine rankings.

Improves audience trust and establishes you as an industry leader

When business brands add the best curated content to their content marketing strategy, they can become a trusted resource for reliable information and a business worth following. Make it personal and add your insight or personal takeaway. This element adds value for your audience and can help build your reputation as an industry leader, which can highly influence consumer purchasing decisions.‍

Content curation tips

A well-executed content strategy can help businesses stand out in their niche and strengthen their reputation. The following tips can help you develop a curation strategy for your online presence:

• Know your target audience
• Balance promotional content
• Link to the original source
• Add your own unique insight
• Analyze your content to optimize it
• Focus on quality over quantity
  

1. Know your target audience

Consider the ideal client for your products or services and know their needs. This can help you share the most valuable content that actually helps them solve a problem, informs, or entertains. For instance, an online grocery store might recognize the needs of busy, working parents and supply quick and easy recipes (and coupons) on their website and social media channels.

2. Balance promotional content

Balancing promotional and informational content is an effective strategy that can help build brand awareness and grow a customer base. Consumers don’t always want to be sold something. When you add valuable information they can use along with promotional content, it can diminish the appearance of pushing a product and can provide information your customer can use.

3. Link to the original source

Always link shared content to its original source. Crediting the source can help promote your brand as a trusted, reliable source for information. And, as a bonus, you may get some reciprocation from the original source in return. With that in mind, it’s best to avoid reaching out to the source and requesting the favor to be returned. Just let it happen organically.

4. Add your own unique insight

Although it might be easier to copy, paste, and share a link, you can provide more value to your audience when you add some unique, personal insights. Known as thought leadership, businesses can achieve this in a number of ways, such as adding a sentence or two that introduces and briefly explains the context of the topic, adding quotes from the original source, or including actionable tips.

5. Analyze your content to optimize it

To know how well content is received, analyze its performance. You can measure engagement by observing several activities, such as reader comments, likes, and shares. A lot of activity can show consumer interest and indicate content performance is going well. If little to no activity exists, re-evaluate and research customer needs and interests to optimize engagement and sharing.

6. Focus on quality over quantity

As with many things, more is not always better. An emphasis on quantity rarely delivers the results that businesses need. Good content harmoniously blends quality and quantity. Regular posts that bring value to consumers can eliminate noise and garner the attention of customers. No one wants to spend their time with fluff. Deliver a constant flow of high-quality content with a purpose directed at your target audience based on their wants, needs, and interests.

Benefit the most from content curation

Content curation supplies businesses with numerous rewards. Some benefits your business can receive from a well-planned content curation strategy include establishing new relationships with influencers and consumers and growing your network. All of this can help increase your web traffic and SEO ranking. And what’s more, content curation can help establish your brand as a trusted thought leader in your industry.

Content curation and creation both take time and effort, but the gains are well worth the additional work. Businesses can leverage the expertise of an independent content marketing expert and unfold a working strategy to reach their target audience and meet business goals. You can connect with content marketers on Upwork, a platform that delivers a needed marketplace for businesses and talented professionals.