3 Major Steps to Content Curation: An Ultimate Guide

This is a guest post from Kate Parish, chief marketing officer at Onilab, with 8+ years in Digital Marketing and eCommerce web development promotion. Kate constantly upgrades her knowledge and skillset to stay fit in the progressing online world. She always does exhaustive research in such spheres as SEO, branding, SMM, PPC, and Magento PWA development, before sharing her expertise with a wide audience.


How can you get the attention of your target audience as the amount of produced content constantly grows? Your business has to be known and seen. So you need to be consistent in publishing engaging material on various platforms.

While it’s sometimes enough to blog one to four times a week, many companies have to post unique, catchy content every day. Where do you find such inspiration? How do you ensure that readers don’t miss what you’re posting in such an overwhelming amount of information that’s bombarding them from various sources?

Consider opting for content curation strategies. It’s a simple tactic to collect existing materials (delivered by you or other content creators) and present them on your blog, social media, or newsletters.

Note that it doesn’t imply simple copy-and-paste, nor that you’re deceiving your audience. With the content curation approach, you can select valuable pieces in your sphere to help readers cover everything important.

But how do you start with content curation? How can you take advantage of this content marketing strategy? This article will show you content curation examples and benefits.

Curated Content CharacteristicsA customer journey is no longer a straight line from point A (the buyer’s need) to point B (the purchase or other similar action). Buyers use various devices and explore different channels when making a decision, so they won’t wait for you to tell them what they should do next.

Just consider these numbers. According to data:

70% of purchasers understand what they need without contacting a salesperson, and 44% already have specific solutions in mind before the interaction begins.

This is why marketers should look for innovative ways to direct customers on their conversion “path” through complex and omnichannel experiences. How do you do that? For starters, you have to try to maintain their level of interest, provide valuable information, and share expertise.

Your task is to do this unobtrusively, for example, with the help of qualitative content. Users open the blog, see appealing images and topics, and move on with decision-making. Therefore, mind that your standards in terms of engagement must remain high.

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Screenshot taken on the official Databox website

How else can your business benefit from content marketing?

Content marketing helps businesses respond to the changing customer environment to achieve various goals:

• attract prospects;
• retain clients;
• grow the customer base.
  
  

However, it may be hard to post frequently enough to compete. So consider reposting what others have already written or said. 

What Defines Curated Content?In this respect, “curated” can mean “assembled”. It’s the content analog of making a quilt.

For example, you can put together helpful lists and “tops” on relevant topics that resonate with your business or niche. Or repost someone’s tweet or social media post that can liven up your feed.

However, as you select the material that’ll fit, you’ll most likely have to go through dozens of pages of content that’s already created by others. But, luckily, you can use one of the many tools that are perfect assistants in content curation, such as Scoop.it or Flipboard. These can save you a lot of time.

Importantly, make sure you’ve given all the deserved credit and mentioned your sources before sharing the piece with your audience.

Some key curated content characteristics include:

• It involves publications, research, blog entries, or tweets published by your company or others.
• It requires careful selection, reorganization/restructuring to make it more appealing and readable.
• It adds value to your customer’s experience, providing new and helpful information, that educates and entertains people.
• The easy-to-consume format saves readers time to find the needed insights without browsing many different sources on the web.
• Plus, it usually takes less time to assemble a curated piece than to create an entirely unique one from scratch.
  
  

Pro Tip: Optimize

On another note, remember that even the most authoritative content will hardly bring the expected return on investment if the page loads slowly. That’s why optimizing the website performance is always crucial for any sphere.

If we speak about an online store developed on the Magento CMS, the store owner should consider Magento Time to first byte optimization. The same also applies to different website types that work on other platforms, as page opening speed is a vital factor that influences SEO rankings, bounce rate, perception, user satisfaction, among other things.

3 Ways to Get Results from Content Curation Strategies

Now let’s take a closer look at how to implement content curation.

1. Educate with Well-Researched Content

Content curation strategies allow you to keep abreast of what’s going on in the industry. Suppose you’re gathering content for a keyword, such as “content marketing”. You see what other people in your industry are publishing and spot gaps in the information stream.

With so much content analyzed, you can write articles or shoot videos to fill in the gaps. As you see, it’s not just copying and pasting. You provide value to your viewers and get a chance to find some insights for future posts.

This is how you can make the content original:

• Create an infographic with the data presented by trusted resources.
• Include more details on the subject by asking industry experts.
• Make a video with the information you've found on the web.
• Give your thoughts on a book or course.
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Let’s take an article on Databox as an example. The author gathered the opinions of ten professionals on extracting insights from data and accompanied them with some excellent personal advice.

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Screenshot taken on the official Aurate Instagram account

2. Consider Reposting

Reposting doesn’t involve any spendings. Instead, it provides positive outcomes. You can repost and retweet content that is relevant to your audience, such as:

• articles;
• interviews;
• opinions;
• reviews;
• instructions about a specific product or service.
  
  

Furthermore, track whether celebrities and well-respected sources or the media mentioned your company. The easiest way to do this is by looking through customer tags on social media.
If you want to strengthen the bond with your audience, leverage user-generated content (UGC) in your content strategy.

For example, a jewelry brand, Aurate, collects every public figure wearing their adornments and shares the photos on Instagram. It’s an illustration of the so-called social media content curation.
The team created a separate Highlights folder on Instagram to show its popularity from all angles. Here is one of their Stories depicting a Victoria’s Secret model, Romee Strijd. Such a tactic helps brands increase their authority and attract more visitors to the website.
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Screenshot taken on the official Ulster Weavers website

​This doesn’t have to be limited to just socials. You can also devote a separate section with UGC on the website, for example, on the home page. It will work as social proof of your popularity and demand for your products and services among broad audiences. Below you will find how the Ulster Weavers online store shows such curated content examples.

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Screenshot taken from the newsletter from Spotify Design official website

​3. Send Digests in Email Newsletters

Digests are one of the greatest email newsletter formats available. They may contain discounts and other promotional information. However, impress your customers by giving them something extra.
First of all, filter the content before sending it. This step takes time and effort, but it will be well worth it.

Once you’ve gathered a decent amount of content, ask yourself the following questions about each piece:

• Is it well-written or professionally produced?
• Does it relate to my target audience? How can it meet their needs and encourage them to purchase?
• How long has this piece been circulating on the Internet?
• Is it relevant to everything else I’ve written or curated?
• How does it reflect my company’s goals and values?
  
  

When you’ve done your research, move on to the sharing stage.
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A case in point is Spotify and its monthly digest. The team collected the company’s news and reminded readers about its monthly curated station, providing more inspiration.

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Pro Tip: Automate

Do you share breaking news? If not, why not schedule curated content posts ahead of time? It allows you to delegate content publishing to automation tools and focus on other tasks. The system will send a newsletter even when you aren’t at your desk.

How do you create and schedule your post? Utilize free tools like Hootsuite to do it directly from your browser in just a few clicks. It enables you to generate curated content articles right when you find something worthy on the web.

Wrapping UpCustomers come to your website to get useful information, so you have to understand and meet their needs. How do you satisfy them when you don’t want to talk about yourself alone?

​Content curation comes in handy for companies that want to enrich their content marketing efforts.
Do you need more things to post on your social media? Employ social media content curation. Or maybe it’s time to remind clients of what the company has achieved recently? Then, send email newsletters with digests.

Pick the relevant content, add your expert opinion, and share it with the audience with the help of automation tools. Remember, content curation is in no way plagiarism. Link the content source and author. When done correctly, eye-catching visuals, statistics, and top stories will bring you only benefits.

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