What is content curation and how to do it well

The role of content curation as part of a successful content marketing strategy

I personally use content curation as an opportunity to drive traffic, build links and increase awareness of GOAT’s own website and our clients’ websites.

A great way to do this is to work with influencers on the topic you are curating, as this aids campaign reach and overall chances of success.

An example of this could be as simple as Simply Business’s content curation piece, The small business guide to Google Analytics. They simply gathered content already available elsewhere on the web into one easy-reference resource. This is the epitome of good content curation – making the user’s life easier, with minimal effort required to create fresh content yourself.

Create experiential, immersive content and reap the rewards it brings

Imagine your client was Zoopla (property search site). What sort of content could you create to aid the conversion process, to push a potential customer over the line when deciding if they want to buy or rent a property in a specific area, say, London?

One answer is to create experiential (even if based on the experiences of others), immersive, lifestyle content. A London area guide with the best places to shop, exercise, eat, visit, would fit the bill nicely.

You could curate the main bulk of content by working with local London based bloggers – with their own individual blogs on each of the areas someone moving into an area would care about – as listed above. Throw a great street photographer into the mix and soon you’re building a great piece of content that will keep Zoopla’s customers onsite and aid conversions.

Airbnb does a great job of this with Airbnb stories – allowing viewers to explore each area Airbnb features property in and why you’d want to go and stay there, through the eyes of a local. Check out Andrew’s story below. It’s immersive and engaging and makes you want to visit the area.

Why is content curation so essential?

Content curation is essential because it takes time. A well curated piece of content will stand out a mile against, for example, a standard blog post – which, while sharing knowledge on a particular topic, can often fall short in comprehensively adding to the discussion / user understanding.

Content curation is essential if you want to create newsworthy, engaging content that will attract traffic to your site, increase the potential to build valuable links on sites relevant to your content and improve overall awareness of your brand. It can support the buying process – building trust in your brand and its knowledge and subsequently making it easier to close a deal.

Your content is going to take off if it’s supported by top online influencers

Top two tips for effective content curation

Tip 1: Work with top influencers on your topic

Your content is going to take off that much more if it’s supported and co-curated with the help of a top influencers in the field. Not only will it make the content richer in terms of knowledge share, the influencers you work with will be crucial to seeding the content online – sharing on their own online property e.g. website, blogs, social media accounts, video sharing channels etc. even through good old word of mouth.

BuzzSumo is a great tool to find influencers in the topic you are curating content for – you can even see which Twitter users have engaged with the content of your influencers in the past and use that data to promote your content to them too – again, increasing the chances of it succeeding.

Tip 2: Pay to promote your content

Once you’ve taken time to create such great content – it’s imperative that you put some budget into promoting it, rather than rely solely on organic shares through your own online property and that of the influencers you’re working with.

As an example, social media advertising is a great start – on both Twitter and Facebook in particular – the audience targeting you can do e.g. by interest / keywords in their bios / by accounts they follow etc. are too good to ignore. Equally, cost per click of social media advertising is far more cheaper than Google PPC. On Twitter, create lists of people you have identified as regular sharers of your chosen topic’s content (use BuzzSumo to identify who these people are). You can then run Twitter ads targeted at these lists – increasing your chance of higher engagement rates.

Do you want to benefit from content curation projects that increase engagement with your brand? Have you got any questions on how it could help you to reach your target audience?

Maybe you’ve curated a great piece of content yourself and would like to share. Please leave a comment below and spark up the conversation,

To find how GOAT’s research led process can help you achieve business growth online, contact us today.

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Thanks for reading.