Almost a third of marketers find it challenging to curate content—which is much less than our hypothesis because curating and sourcing content is complex.
However, if leveraged correctly, content curation could become an excellent part of your content strategy and get phenomenal results even with a limited budget and tight deadlines.
On that note, let’s go forward and dive into this topic a little more, including why content curation should be part of your strategy and some of the best practices you can leverage to improve your performance.
Why should content curation be part of your content marketing strategy?
Sources say that within every second, more than 2.7 million emails are sent, 76k videos are watched, 71k queries are looked up on search engines, and a multitude of tweets and posts are shared on the internet.
There’s plenty of information and content on the internet already, so there’s very little leverage to create original content when you can source this ready-made content to use on your own marketing channels.
For example, you could follow Mad Over Marketing’s example and curate information about what other brands are doing in marketing.
Regardless of whichever route you choose, here are the benefits you could get from curated content:
Increased brand authority and credibility
If you regularly share high-quality content from reputable sources (and provide your own commentary or insights to elevate the content further), you position yourself as an industry expert.
For example, consider the way brands like WatchMojo or ScreenRant have positioned themselves as industry leaders by regularly posting curated listicles on topics like “Best Moments from Spiderman Movies” or “Top Grammy Performances of All Time.”
In truth, these moments have already existed—brands like WatchMojo and ScreenRant have just capitalized on them and ranked/picked certain snippets of them they liked best.
Through such curated content, they’ve built a stellar reputation and gained much online traffic by posting this content online.
Saves time and other resources
Perhaps the best part of curated content is that you don’t have to create it, which also means you save tons of time, energy, and money (these resources are incredibly essential, especially if you’re a new-age startup or if you’re still trying to build your presence on social media channels).
If you’re still trying to find your footing on social media, spending tons of money from the get-go doesn’t make sense because you’d still be testing out what your customers like/dislike or how they prefer to communicate.
Curated content, on the other hand, will allow you to gain more perspective on audience preferences without spending a lot of money on social media posts.
Sister companies can also leverage content curation to maximize their content strategy. By sharing and repurposing each other’s content.
They can provide a richer experience for their audience while reducing the workload. This collaborative approach ensures a steady flow of high-quality content across different platforms.
For example, Beaches of Normandy Tours and Band of Brothers Tours exemplify how sister companies can use content curation.
Beaches of Normandy Tours focuses on creating original content. They produce engaging blog posts and maintain an active YouTube channel. Their content includes videos of past travelers sharing their experiences on the tours. Also, informative blog posts about the historical sites they visit.
Meanwhile, Band of Brothers Tours utilizes the content created by Beaches of Normandy Tours. They embed the traveler testimonial videos and blog posts on their own website.
By curating and repurposing pieces of content, Band of Brothers Tours enriches its site with engaging and authentic material. This approach saves time and enhances the user experience with real stories from past travelers.
Enhances audience engagement
Sometimes, your target audience doesn’t have much time to research and find things on their own, which is where content curation becomes a handy tool. They actively look for brands that offer curated content.
Consider the case of Mad Over Marketing (MOM) — you’ll often find marketers stalking MOM’s Instagram page and finding inspiration for timely marketing content and out-of-box ideas for their client campaigns.
Suppose you’re an industry expert who offers commentary on a topic. In that case, you’ll see excellent engagement on curated content through this, too, as your audience would love to know your analysis of existing content.
For example, Jeremy Moser, a search engine optimization (SEO) thought leader, often posts breakdowns of SEO case studies, industry strategies, and other people’s/companies’ SEO insights through this newsletter, SEO PowerPlays, and has gained an impressive list of subscribers through this approach.
As a marketing strategy, content curation is not only great for direct benefits (e.g., increasing audience traffic), but it also brings in indirect benefits like increased brand awareness, positive user interactions, and a well-versed understanding of customer preferences.
Best practices for curated content marketing
A curated content strategy will help you reach your potential only if you do it effectively. On that note, here are some of the best practices to consider to help you increase your reach and improve your performance.
Do audience and competitive research
To create a well-thought-out content strategy, you need to know exactly what your readers want and how you can present this information differently from your competitors. This starts with audience and competitive research.
Research helps you stay current on trends, find unique marketable opportunities, and explore how to avoid mistakes (by examining what your competitors have done wrong and right).
For example, Delta Remedys realized, through audience research, that its customers took these remedies for a multitude of reasons. Hence, they’d be required to curate content for different subsets of customers.
They also realized that regardless of this segmented audience, all had similar questions, such as traveling with Delta-8 products or the legalities around newer supplements.
To analyze audiences and competitors, you can leverage social listening tools, feedback tools, audience research tools like Sparktoro, and SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush. By doing so you can ensure you get the right content to the right audience at the right time.
Only use high-quality content from reputable sources
Even if you’re sharing curated content from different sources, the kind of companies you list or the sources you refer to can directly impact your company’s reputation.
This could be due to moralistic reasons. For example, today’s consumers are boycotting certain companies due to their unsustainable or harmful practices (e.g., weaponry or oil shipment companies). Hence, sharing content from these companies might cause some complications for you, too.
Alternatively, curating content from spammy sites could affect your readers’ viewing experience, which might again cause a wrong impression of your company.
It’s essential to know the more significant things at play here and only share good-quality content from high-quality websites. (You can also rely on Scoop.it to find and curate content from reputed sites for you.)
On that note, here are a few best practices when it comes to sharing high-quality content:
- Build relationships with sources: To access important information first and provide truly unique and surprising content for your readers, you need to build a network of reputable sources. Try to go beyond traditional media sources and build relationships with content creators, journalists, PRs, writers, local media, and more.
- Always cite your sources: It’s always best to give credit where credit is due, which is why it pays to cite your sources. This will not only help you build stronger partnerships with people whose content you use but will also increase your trust and professionalism for future partnerships. (Besides, if you share content from social platforms like Instagram and X, the creator names will already be visible.)
Mix up your content formats
To keep things interesting, test out different content formats, optimize them, and keep a pulse on what works best for you. Mixing up content formats makes you easily findable and boosts your visibility on SERPs.
Besides, we never know where our customers are present and where they might discover us, so try to create an active presence on multiple social sites to boost your chances of being found.
Track performance
Plenty of tools in the market will help you understand how your content is performing, which topics and formats are working well for you, and what kind of ROI you are getting from your content efforts.
Heat maps are invaluable tools for optimizing content strategy in curated content marketing. By visually representing user interaction and engagement patterns on web pages, heat maps provide insights into what content resonates most with audiences.
This data allows you to track performance metrics such as click-through rates, scroll depth, and areas of high and low engagement.
By analyzing this heat map data, you can identify which curated content attracts the most attention and adjust your strategies accordingly. This optimization ensures that your content is strategically placed and tailored to meet audience preferences, ultimately enhancing user experience and driving higher conversion rates.
We recommend monitoring relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) based on goals, such as engagement rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, and time on page.
Update your strategies as needed
Last but not least, as you progress, conduct tests, and track the performance of your curated content, you’ll realize how effective your strategy is and if it’s helping you reach your goals.
Based on this, you can update your strategy as needed and monitor its results closely. We recommend being flexible at this point and considering all perspectives to achieve the results you need.
Give curated content marketing a try
In this guide, we discussed the importance of curated content and shared a few best practices for helping you curate content.
However, we can’t deny that it takes some serious time and effort to curate content from scratch and provide something valuable (read: engaging and relevant content) to the reader.
If time’s what you wish to save, you can leave your curated content strategy in our trusted hands. Scoop.it will curate content for your socials, websites, blogs, newsletters, and much more (and will also provide analytics on how your efforts are faring).
You can try it for free today and save yourself hours and hours’ worth of time and effort!
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