Want to know how content curation fits into your overall marketing strategy? You’re in the right place. This guide will walk you through the basics of sourcing and sharing content as a way to connect with your audience and extend your brand reach.
First, let’s start with the basics.
What is curated 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. Examples of it are all around us.
Netflix uses your viewing history to populate your homepage with a curated list of movies you might like to watch next. Music lovers build curated playlists. A wine-of-the-month club handpicks bottles it thinks will appeal most to its subscribers.
Think of a curator at an art museum.
Their job is to select works of art that align with the museum’s collection and purpose, or with the direction of a specific exhibit.
The best curators are selective and intentional, not apathetic.
Likewise, your curated content should be clustered around and related to a specific topic. The content you share can span a range of mediums, including articles, guides, reports, videos, social media posts, and product reviews among other online content.
Content Curation vs. Content Creation
To be clear, content curation differs from content creation.
Curation focuses on gathering useful content centered on a specific topic from multiple sources, re-organizing it, and sharing it with your audience in an easily digestible way. Curated content includes articles and links pulled from external sources, like news websites, trade publications, and social media.
Content creation, on the other hand, refers to the content your business develops on its own, like an original blog post, video tutorial, or guide.
A robust content marketing strategy includes a healthy mix of creation and curation, and the approaches can intersect.
Once your business starts generating enough content of its own, it’s possible to start curating your original content around specific topics. For example, a landscaping firm that features a backyard makeover each month on its YouTube channel can use that list to curate its most popular videos or feature projects that included a swimming pool installation.
Content Curation for Newsletters
What content strategy can you employ to send curated, valuable content? Answer: A curated newsletter! A curated newsletter features relevant news or trends on a specific topic or industry. The goal of curating content is to find important articles and posts relevant to your audience to build trust and position yourself as a thought leader.
From developing, researching, executing, measuring, and repeating the right content for your target audience – curating content for your newsletter can be daunting. But it does not have to be. Many newsletter content curation tools can save you, the content curator, precious marketing time. Here at rasa.io, our focus is on building smarter email newsletters, rasa.io automatically generates a unique email newsletter for each reader. Read more about how rasa.io works.
Content Curation for Social Media
We can’t forget about social media. The goal of curating content on social media is to share value with your followers. To take it a beyond just sharing your own social media content and creating original content, you can strengthen your content marketing strategy by utilizing your social network. What does that mean? When curating content, find new content your audience wants to see and know, and repost or share it on your social media platform.
Great content takes time, and so does curating it as well. Luckily, to curate content well, marketers have a large arsenal available to them with a couple of clicks (or touch for your mobile users) of a button. Here is a list of content curation tools that can save you precious marketing time.
Still not sure how this fits into your content curation strategy? Keep reading to understand why your business should be thinking about content curation.
The Straight Talk Guide to Content Curation [Free Download]
