Mastering Content Curation: The Secret Sauce of Content Marketing

In my work, I often hear executives say they don’t have time to create content for their business’ websites. They’re already fully occupied with running their businesses and believe, not without cause, that content marketing just takes too much time. That’s one big reason so many hire Advice Local to manage this part of marketing for them.

For some business owners and managers, however, there are good reasons to take the time to work on content marketing themselves. For instance, they want to experiment with it so they can learn more about their customers’ needs and wants. Or, they want to understand more about the content marketing processes so they can make smarter choices about what to outsource and who to hire. Maybe they’re running a startup and just don’t have the budget to outsource content marketing right now. Whatever the reason, content curation is definitely one way to boost marketing efforts. Let’s explore more on that today.

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is the process of collecting, evaluating and commenting on great content that is produced by other people. Don’t make the mistake of thinking its plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work and presenting it as your own. Curation, much like in a museum, is having an eye for excellent work, organizing and interpreting it, giving credit to the creator(s), and presenting it to an audience you believe will appreciate it. Consider these facts:

• Content is an important part of SEO. Google algorithms prefer quality content over technical tricks. Fresh, relevant, quality content is what moves businesses up in search results.
• According to scoop.it, 76% of the content that small and medium sized businesses publish is curated, versus just 24% that’s original. Social media curation saves executives between one and three hours per day.
• Research shows that 88% of content marketing professionals believe content curation helps them find the time to publish more content. (And that takes us full circle back to my first point about Google — fresh content matters.)

Five Questions for the New Content Curator

Once you decide to leverage content curation, there are five questions to help determine the kind of content to curate.

1. What type of content should I curate — articles, charts, data, video, other?
2. What topics should I focus on — what are useful criteria for selecting the topics?
3. Where do I find good content — which sites or writers?
4. Where do I present it — on my website, in social media?
5. How will I add value to it — comment, analysis?

Ready to Create a Content Curation Plan?

Be sure and come back. Next, I will be addressing each of the above questions. I’ll outline how to find and create good content, various ways to present it to an audience(s) and how to add value to curated content to give it a business’ own personal stamp.

In the meantime, if you need assistance with your content marketing efforts, we’re here to help. Learn more today.