Whilst it’s important to have a content marketing campaignin place, coming up with new and original content to place on blogs websites etc, can be labour and indeed resource intensive. For this reason, if you make content curation the cornerstone of your campaign it’s a great way of engaging with your target audience by working a little smarter.
But what is Content Curation?
In essence content curation is taking existing news, facts and relevant content found on the web and enhancing it by adding personal opinions, expertise and advice. It’s this personalised re-telling of a story or piece of news that makes it compelling to audiences. If you then look to share it with your audience through social media channels, then it’s easy to see why content creation is a powerful way of creating awareness of your company and credibility.
Content Curation is successful because…
- Written in a personalised way it can really resonate with target audiences
- Good content curation can portray your brand as an authority
- It can also facilitate networking by means of linking, sharing, or referrals
- It can generate traffic and increase your search ability through social media such as Facebook and Twitter
- Written well it’s great for nurturing leads
Content curation provides that fine balance between content creation which can be extremely labour intensive and content automation, which simply doesn’t engage your target audience. Here are some ideas on best practices for the curation of content.
The best places to look for items for content marketing are news sources. These can be found through
- Industry specific newsletters
- Shared content sites such as Stumbleupon, Reddit, Dig
- Blogs in your niche/topic
- Curation tools such as Scoop.it, Storify.com and Flipboard
- Google news or Google alerts
The types of news that you are looking to curate should include
- Any industry related news
- Any content created by influential people within your niche/market
- Any interesting reports, white-papers, case studies or info-graphics relating to your industry
- Content that gives advice such as how to’s, best practices and tips
- Collation of comments from industry specific blogs, or indeed your own blog
- Relative content from video sites such as Youtube, Viddler and Vimeo
Once you’ve found your content and put your own personalisation on it then you need to spread the word. Best ways to do this are to….
- Publish on your own company blog
- Engage with people by publishing through social media channels
- Send out an email newsletter to your list
- Submit your blog post to industry specific sites with a high following
As you can see, if your content is compelling and personalised then there are many ways that great content curation can reach and connect with your target audience. For this reason it can really set the bench mark in terms of your content marketing efforts. There is of course an art to perfecting it correctly, but get it right and you may be surprised at just how powerful it can be!
