Content curation strategies are a valuable part of your long-term marketing plan. Curating content isn’t just simply sharing third party content. It’s an active approach to providing value to your audience while saving time in the process. Need a little inspiration? Here, we share our top 10 content curation tips for creating unique content that will grab your audience’s attention. But first, let’s delve into why you should curate content as part of your marketing strategy.
Why You Should Curate Content
Here are some benefits of using curated content for your business:
- Speeds up your content creation process
- Fills in gaps in your content library so you can post consistently
- Helps to establish brand awareness and grow your audience
- Helps to enhance your credibility in your industry
- Shares useful data/information with your audience
- Helps to build your network of industry connections
- Can be easily used for social or email content
- Expands the diversity of your content
How to Curate Content the Right Way
Curate content the right way by knowing how to curate unique content. People want to read actionable content that serves their pain points. To curate content that does this, all while providing a unique spin, read our top tips.
1. Add Extra Value
Adding your own take on curated content, and providing extra value, is one of the most effective ways to use third party content. For example, if you’re sharing some actionable tips, offer an easier way to implement them. Don’t just offer an opinion on curated content – you need to make sure you communicate why you’ve shared it and how it can benefit your audience.
For example, if you are reposting content to social media that provides tips, add to this content by providing your own tip. Or add some commentary around how using one of these tips helped your business.
2. Include Your Audience
Engaging with your audience is important, even when it comes to content curation. Use your curated content to create a discussion with your readers. Ask them questions, share content on your social media to spark interaction and ask them for their thoughts. Their feedback will help you to discover if the content you’re sharing is relevant to them and meets the objectives of your social media marketing plan.
For example, you could ask for your audience’s opinion on a piece of content you’ve shared using a simple poll. You could also ask your audience to submit questions in an “ask anything” style session where you respond via your social stories. This is a great way of connecting on a deeper level with your audience.
3. Address Your Audience’s Pain Points
Understanding your audience’s pain points will help you to know what type of content they need. You can then find valuable content which provides a solution to one of their requirements. Just ensure that you know how exactly this content will help them as you can provide extra resources to make it even more useful to your audience.
For example, if you know that your audience is often stressed in the months preceding Christmas because they will be working on important seasonal marketing campaigns, find content that will address that pain point specifically, i.e. providing tips on how to remain calm during Christmas marketing mayhem.
4. Add A Content Upgrade
A content upgrade is a free piece of content that a user downloads in exchange for an email address. This is a great way to start building your email list and providing extra value to your audience.
A content upgrade can be a PDF guide, email course, video or audio workshop, checklist, workbook or something else. Your content upgrade should be associated with your curated content in some way. For instance, if you have a blog post with curated content on job interviews, your content upgrade could be a guide on how to prepare for a job interview.
Here is an example of Position Digital’s downloadable SEO content brief template:
5. Consider Curating ‘Underground’ Content
While many businesses curate content from popular or viral content, it’s also a good idea to curate ‘underground’ content. This is valuable content that comes from less well-known sources. It’s essential that you ensure any facts you use are correct. However, you can use a wide range of content for curation purposes.
Try to go beyond popular sites that your audience knows. Dig deeper to find high-quality content – it’s also an effective way of networking within your industry. For example, you might find interesting content when browsing on Instagram or LinkedIn that you think would be relevant and useful for your audience. Remember, sharing from less well-known sources means that content is less likely to have been seen before – and the fresher the content, the better.
6. Use Curated Content to Back Up Important Information
You can easily use curated content to back up important information within your blog posts and social media content. Many SaaS blogs do this well when linking out to relevant data. You can link to relevant reports, survey findings or other data to support your thoughts on a topic.
Whitepapers, research findings and infographics produced by a third party will help to add gravitas and authority to your content if selected appropriately. Make sure you validate the robustness of any supporting content you use, though.
7. Use Visuals
Curated images and videos make a great addition to your content. There are many ways you can use visuals, including curating images and video content from social media to use as examples for a blog post, using other people’s Pinterest images to complement your content and incorporating a third-party infographic into your social, blog or email content. Just remember to correctly add an attribution to the creator.
Visuals can help to tell your story more completely, especially for people who are visual learners as opposed to learning through words only. It can also help create more interest on your page, providing a better user experience and encouraging people to stick around and browse for longer.
8. Use Personal Stories
Personal stories add a human approach to your content, encouraging engagement on a deeper level. You can use stories told by other people, providing your audience with your own take on the subject or you could mention how you have similar stories to share. Either way, personal stories can generate a more meaningful conversation with your audience, as well as offer valuable insight into a topic.
When researching personal stories you could use to make a point, consider how valuable they are. Is the story about personal growth or how someone overcome obstacles to reach success? And is the story something that would resonate and add value for your audience?
9. Share Fan Content
One of the most effortless ways to curate content the right way is to use content created by fans of your business. User-generated content is any type of content posted by users of online platforms, such as Instagram or Twitter. The great thing about user-generated content is that you can easily reshare it with your audience, helping to build your credibility.
To find content relating to your brand, search relevant hashtags on social media. For example, if you’re a beauty brand, you may discover the content of people sharing tutorials using your products, which you can then share with your wider audience. Not only does this promote your brand offerings, but it also shows that you already have a community of engaged fans who approve of what it is you do. People are also more likely to post content about your products onto social media if they realise you actively engage with user-generated content, too.
10. Curate Your Own Content
Curating your own content effectively boosts the lifetime value of a piece of branded content, meaning you can get more from every piece of content you produce. When curating your own content, choose an evergreen topic – a topic that won’t lose its value – or a topic relevant to your audience at that moment in time.
You can then assess how to curate it to maximise its value. For example, you could add extra valuable information to the content – such as deepening the information or looking at it from a different perspective. Alternatively, you could update the content with a content upgrade. For example, asking people to download an in-depth guide that delves deeply into the topic. You may also find it helpful to use an existing piece of content as the basis for content on another channel. For example, if you create an in-depth blog about keyword research, that same content could be utilised in 3 or 4 bitesize social media posts.
Use These Content Curation Tips to Influence Your Content Curation Strategy
When planning your content curation strategies, use our top content curation tips. These tips are easy to implement, helping you to save time and outperform your competitors with high-quality content. Just remember to add an appropriate link to any third-party content you use and continually analyse your metrics to see which type of curated content works well.
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