Content is the king, no doubt. It’s also a fact that you can’t always produce the best content for each topic in your vertical. If you’ve been creating epic content, you must know it’s not a child’s play.  It’s important to add content curation strategies to complement your content marketing strategy.

Your audience doesn’t want to see your content all the time. People love the variety as long as it’s quality. The internet has millions of blogs and articles on a single topic, but most are just rubbish. Traversing the internet to find that one blog that fulfills your search intent is like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

That’s why, if done right, content curation is an effective content marketing strategy in your arsenal. Here are some of the benefits of using curated content to complement your content marketing strategy.

• Helps retain audience interest in your platform
• Establishes your credibility as an industry leader
• Enhances search engine optimization of your blog
• Builds relationships with influencers and the community
• It costs less than producing new content

Top 10 content curation strategies

Let’s look at the top 10 content curation strategies you can apply today to boost your content marketing efforts.

1. Know your audience in and out

Knowing your audience is the first step in creating any marketing strategy. Digital marketing is based on reaching the right audience, which isn’t possible until you know who you’re targeting. Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next important step is to understand what it wants.

Open-ended surveys and customer interviews are excellent tools for analyzing audience preferences. With enough data, you can use HubSpot buyer persona tool to create personas for your ideal customers. The best thing about these caricatures is that you can share them with your entire team to set the right direction for all marketing efforts. 

Your business can get the most benefits of content curation if you know what kind of content your audience expects from you.

2. Set clear content curation goals

Content curation seems pretty straightforward, yet having clear-cut goals is essential for gaining any substantial benefits. Once you know what your audience will like and what they’ll most probably ignore, you can strategize your content curation around it. 

Whether your goal is to boost search engine optimization (SEO) or establish yourself as an industry expert, you need to be clear about it before you start collecting content to share. You can share infographics with your audience to engage them or showcase them in your posts to boost SEO. 

Similarly, sharing industry news and the latest trends can enhance your visibility and broaden your reach. If you share valuable content, people start to look up to your brand to stay informed. 

3. Leverage fresh, lesser-known content 

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As much as content curation is helpful in your content marketing, it can also back-fire. If the audience sees the same content on different websites and pages, they get tired of it. Sharing such old and beaten content can also decrease your website’s credibility. 

So, where can you get the content that’s valuable yet unseen by the majority? 

Curate data from authentic yet lesser-known websites to bring a fresh perspective to your audience. Find the hidden gems tangled in the world wide web and share them with your followers. Your audience will come to expect unique content from you over time, the content they won’t find anywhere else.

Most of the social media management tools allow you to curate content through RSS feeds. You can select and schedule the content right there and then. You can also create alerts for websites like PubMed, The New York Times, The Economist, etc. to get the latest news as soon as it’s released.

4. Share content with your unique brand voice

Having a unique voice is essential to make your brand memorable. The brand voice can be sophisticated, motivational, sweet, fun, playful, or any other type depending on your brand identity.

When you curate content, naturally, the blogs and articles are in all types of different styles and tones, which may or may not match yours. But that doesn’t mean you cannot optimize your selected content for your brand voice. 

For example, when you share a blog, write a custom caption to tell your readers why you’re sharing it. If you’re sharing an infographic or statistics, you can write a summary to meet audience expectations for style and tone. 

5. Curate content ethically

Ethical content curation is crucial for creating meaningful relationships with fellow influencers in your niche. Sharing content without permission can land you in trouble, and your impression on your audience can suffer too. 

Plagiarism is a crime with moral and legal implications. Google also pulls your rank down if you neglect to give credit where it’s due. So, the first and foremost rule of content curation is to credit the author or the source. Just adding the author’s name or website isn’t enough. You must add a link to their website so that people can trace their path to the source. 

Content is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of images, videos, or written content. It’s always the best policy to ask the content owner permission to share their content before using it. It can save you from potential copyright violations that can lead to a lawsuit.

6. Share content from credible sources

There are millions and billions of blogs you can share with your audience, but not all are worth your consideration. If you want your audience to trust you, you need to vet the content you share with them carefully. 

Choose content from credible sources only. For example, if you come across an infographic, make sure the website hosting it has the rights to share it. If you come across some stats or facts, dig to their source and ensure that they come from credible websites like Statistica or HubSpot. 

Read the scientific research quoted by a blog before sharing that piece of content to make sure you don’t end up misguiding your audience by mistake.

7. Focus on quality over quantity

Less is more. That couldn’t be truer for content curation. You don’t need to bombard your audience with curated content because you found exciting blogs, articles, and videos to share. 

Focus on quality content that is unique and unseen. Stella Spoils is a fine example of what you can achieve with thoughtful content curation. It’s a daily newsletter that solely depends on curated content. Each newsletter has no more than six pieces of content that matter to the brand’s audience the most.

It’s best to follow a schedule because, over time, your audience comes to expect new content from you at a set time. According to Buffer, five posts a day on Facebook are best for optimal page engagement, after which it can start declining.

8. Repurpose curated content

Repurposing curated content is a cost-effective way of creating new content without much effort. There are many ways you can do that. For example, gather all the research about a topic and summarize it to make it easier for your audience to understand.

Perhaps the most popular way of repurposing curated content is publishing roundups. Gather the best content about a specific topic, write a custom introduction for each, and voila, you have your new blog post.

Another way of creating an article through curation is asking industry experts about their opinion about a topic. Once you have a few, you can create a new article to showcase all the expert opinions about a subject. For example, Devrix has an entire series of expert roundups on various topics. You can approach experts on Linkedin or use HARO to get expert opinions without spending much time.

9. Mix it up with original content

Seasoned content marketers use 65% created content and 25% curated content in their content marketing campaigns. Original content is the backbone of your content marketing efforts because it conforms to your brand image and helps you stand out from the competition.

Successful marketers create unique content for their audience and use their company data to drive the point home. If you share a lot of curated content, your audience will not be able to associate with you, and you can risk losing your brand voice and affinity with your audience. 

10. Remember to evaluate content creation success

Content curation saves money and time, but the real question is, does it boost engagement and sales too?

Every marketing strategy has some parameters to judge how effective it is. Measuring your content curation strategy’s success can help you decide if you should continue with it or find some other way to hike your business. 

Depending on your content curation goals, you can measure its success in terms of brand mentions, engagement, website traffic, page views, followers, retweets, click-through rates, etc. You can use this data to decide how you can tweak your content curations strategies to get the most content marketing benefits out of your efforts. 

Tying content curation strategies together

Creating new content all the time can create unwanted pressure on your content team. Successful marketers use content curation, not as a necessity to fill out calendar gaps, but as a strategy to boost their marketing efforts without spending many resources. Content curation is also an excellent way to keep an eye on the latest trends and shifts in your industry so that you’re the first to create and share content on new topics.

This guest blog article was written by Karli Jaenike who is a content marketer and founder of boutique agency JuiceBox. With more than 10 years in the marketing industry, she writes on everything from content marketing, social, and SEO to travel and real estate. On the weekends, she loves to explore new places, enjoy the outdoors, and have a glass or two of vino.