“Content is the reason search began in the first place” – Lee Odden
Brands across all industries have realized how powerful curated content can be and the race is on to produce the best quality content. There is extensive data to support this. Only 5% of marketers worldwide don’t share other organizations’ content. Up to 50% share industry publications, blogs, or other resources daily.
It’s no longer enough to blog four times a week for most companies. B2B marketers use 12 different content marketing tactics on average.
Here are some interesting statistics to put things in perspective:
- The best type of content marketing is 80% curation and 20% creation.
- 82% of marketers curate content.
- 16% of marketers curate for their audience every day.
- 48% curate from third-party sources at least once a week.
- 83% percent of marketers curate/share content with their customers and/or prospects from third party sources such as blogs, social media, industry publications or news sites.
However, content curation can prove to be a powerful tool only when you use it strategically. This brings us to the focus of this post – these are 7 best practices you must follow to make the best of content curation.
Align the content you curate with your marketing goals
Why are you curating content? You must be aiming to achieve something from it, right? It’s crucial that you define your marketing goals before you start curating content and sharing it.
Here’s how you can achieve some marketing goals with content curation:
1. Brand awareness: Here, your target would be an audience which doesn’t know your product/service and probably hasn’t identified the need for it. So, you can curate and share content that is relevant to your product/service and industry, and that talks about ‘why’ people are using the product/service. As a result, you create some curiosity among this audience.
Pro-tip: Curate and share content that highlights a ‘problem’ and show them ‘how’ your product/service helps them solve that problem.
2. Influencer outreach: Looking to collaborate with an influencer? Curate content produced by or shared by that influencer and share it on your social. Maybe you can add a comment about what you liked about the content. This way you’ll be able to initiate a partnership with the influencer.
3. Lead generation: Now this can be a little tricky. You can employ curated content to drive traffic to your website, make your audience take part in surveys, and communicate with them at different life cycle stages. However, ensure that your audience in genuinely interested in your message and then, subtly guide them towards your offerings.
Keep your target audience in mind
Don’t curate content that just serves your or your brand’s purpose. While your message is important to you, what you wish to put out and what your audience wishes to see/read – might not be the same. Solution? Find a middle ground and maintain relevance.
Many marketers neglect their target audience while creating content and end up with disinterested customers, causing their search engine rankings to plummet. Demographics and the interests of your audience need to be taken into account.
Start by identifying the kind of content that appeals to your audience. This will help you focus on creating great goal-oriented content. It’s pointless to curate content for its own sake. Rather, do so with the purpose of establishing yourself as an authority. To do this, ask yourself what problems your company’s product or service solves. You’re probably aware of why your brand’s product exists if you’ve been in business for a while. It follows that the content you curate will relate to that objective.
A good example of a brand that is well-aware of its target audience and uses content curation to augment its marketing efforts is Launch Ticker. Launch Ticker curates the most popular stories in the tech industry and creates short email newsletters out of them. Each story is summarized in a maximum of three hundred words.
Share content from reputable and informative sources
Sharing content from reputable sources helps in building trust and credibility. Your audience, then, is more likely to trust everything you share on your social.
A good data source is, above all else, original. When you work with data, make sure you’re always using the original source.
It’s okay to use Wikipedia to cite research, but make sure you track down the primary data. You’ll never know if the sample size was big enough, if the methods were flawed, or the questionnaire was biased without having reviewed the original data yourself.
If your data doesn’t answer your questions, your content isn’t likely to resonate with your audience. Your data source should provide enough information to get an overview within a relevant context.
Align curated content with popular keywords and hashtags
Why should you align your content with popular keywords and hashtags?
One reason is increased organic traffic. The right alignment is a great opportunity to be found through search engines without investing money. To achieve this, you need to develop a content marketing plan, and you’ll find a reliable social media scheduler to be very helpful.
Two, by covering topics that are valuable to target audiences in your content, you can stand out from your competitors. Curating content increases the number of articles or blog posts you can distribute across your social media channels.
According to an Infosys report, up to three-quarters of all customers feel frustrated when they don’t receive individualized website content from brands. However, here is a piece of equally important data – repeated, generic advertising messages annoy 63% of worldwide consumers. You need to start making investments in personalized content as soon as possible because, apparently, lack of personalized content can do your business damage. It’s possible to automate this process and save money and time.
Three, popular keywords and hashtags are great ways of knowing where your audience’s interest lies. Hence, look for content as per these to participate in your audience’s conversations.
76% of marketers share curated content on social media, which is the most widely encompassing platform for curated content distribution, and 79% of marketers use social media as a source of content for their curation strategy. In comparison, just 63% rely on subscriptions and company newsletters.
Share lists and roundups of your content
What if some new members of your audience missed out on all the content you shared earlier? Roundups are popular because the audience likes to consume a lot of information in one place.
The Content Marketing Institute is a very good example of an established brand that employs this strategy. When creating content lists and roundups, they identify the top influencers for that topic.
The CMI reaches out to industry influencers because this helps them win as much exposure and reach as possible.
Use tools to find and share relevant content
If you’ve been reading this post up until now, you probably think that content curation takes a lot of time and effort. But no. Free content curation tools like ShareIt help you research a keyword to get a ready-to-use list of relevant and popular content. And given the fact most marketers curate content to share it on social, ShareIt also helps you share the content directly to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
A strategic way to share curated content would be to schedule it for the best time – when you are sure your audience will be active. A social media scheduling and marketing tool like SocialPilot can prove indispensable to this end. It helps you create a posting schedule for each social account, add the posts to queue, get a broader idea of your schedule with a calendar and even manage all these posts within a team.
Over to you!
Besides achieving your marketing goals, content curation also helps you build a community wherein everyone looks forward to the content you share. What’s more, it also encourages them to consume the content that you or your brand produce.
