Every strong content marketing strategy includes a plan for gathering and sharing curated content. How can your brand deliver quality content curation on a consistent basis? Let’s walk through the basics.
What is content curation?
Content curation is the process of sifting through the vast world of content and information available online, identifying information that you find useful, and sharing that content with your audience. For business owners, your audience includes your customer base.
Curated content includes articles and links pulled from external sources, like news websites, trade publications and social media.
Read more: What the heck is content curation?
Why curate content?
The goal of curated content is to position your brand as an expert on topics that matter to your audience, building a more durable customer relationship and keeping your brand top-of-mind even when you aren’t engaged directly in a sale.
It can also save your marketing team time and energy, and help you better understand the needs of your customers.
Read more: Why content curation works.
What are curation best practices?
Content curation is a low-cost, efficient way to keep the conversation going with customers, but it’s easy to mess up.
For one, you want to be highly selective about the content that you share with your audience. Your curated content should be hand-picked with your audience in mind, and clustered around specific topics.
Also, don’t be afraid to add context and your brand voice to posts sharing curated content. Your audience wants to hear your thoughts.
Read more: Curation dos and don’ts
How do you curate content the right way?
Effective content curation requires a plan. Your first step? Figure out what topics you want to focus on. What news and information does your business care about? What topics matter to your customer? Narrow your topic list down to a few concentrated areas to explore.
Also, think about where you’re going to source your curated content, how you plan on gathering and storing links, and how you will share curated content with your audience.
Read more: How to do curation the right way
What curation tools are out there?
Content curation is a way to strengthen your content marketing efforts without having to invest a ton of time and money in creating original content like blog posts. Still, it takes energy and strategy to curate content well.
Fortunately, marketers have access to a range of free and paid tools designed to help small teams curate better and faster. Useful curation tools range from free platforms, like Twitter and Flipboard, to specialized software like UpContent and Curata.
Read more: 14 content curation tools to check out in 2020
Ready to take a deeper dive into content curation?
Get your free download of “The Straight Talk Guide to Content Curation” developed by home-dev.rasa.io. It includes detailed descriptions of content curation basics (without all the marketing jargon), as well as a useful checklist to make sure you’re getting started curating on the right foot.
