Great content is the secret to success for just about any new business. Of course, there are many other elements to consider, such as finding a viable niche, building or buying a user-friendly website, and developing a strong social media presence. However, it is your content that will really cause customers to engage with your brand, click through to your website, and ultimately convert.
Yet for a new business owner, the prospect of generating all that content on a regular basis can be daunting. Of course, you could outsource the work, but depending on your budget, that may not be viable either. This is where curated content really wins the day. Instead of only sharing content you have created yourself, you can comb the web for existing material, and use it to flesh out your content schedule.
Of course, there is still plenty of work involved in content curation, and it is far more than simply sharing every related post you see. To help you get started, here are the basics of content curation, and how you can use it to give your startup a boost in 2018.
Figure Out What Your Audience Needs
Whatever your industry may be, there will be specific questions that you can answer for your audience. Yet you do not always need to do this with your own content. For example, if you sell diving equipment, you might decide to curate content that provides in-depth details on tides and how they affect swimming conditions, or updates on severe weather warnings.
Pay close attention to your data analytics to measure how your audience responds to different types of content. It’s not just the material itself that matters, but also its format, and even the channel via which you share it.
Perhaps your audience is most responsive to video content, and the occasional infographic. However, they may be willing to read longform content if it’s shared on a particular platform, or featured in a marketing communication.
Automate Your Content Roundup
Finding the best content as it appears can take a lot of work, and it’s practically impossible to stay on top of this solo. Fortunately, if you are struggling to find the time to create content you can automate at least part of the process.
One great way that you can do this is by adding MyCurator to your website. This will brings industry relevant articles to your WordPress dashboard and gives you the facility to curate them into your WordPress Editor.
You can then add a segment informing your readers about this great, useful, and valuable article you have read, creating easy content for your business, and giving your readers a fresh and valuable article to consume.
Add Value and Give Credit
Once you’ve selected the content you think would be most relevant and useful to your audience, you need to distribute it in a way that will drive the highest level of engagement. This might mean featuring items on your blog, sharing posts on Facebook, or even sending out a curated content roundup to your mailing list.
Remember that to make this content truly valuable, you need to add something of your own.
It’s no good simply sharing something that your audience could find elsewhere on the internet. Add your own thoughts, pose a question to your audience, or even compare curated items to your own content.
Be sure to give credit to the creator wherever it’s due, and keep in mind that there is a chance you may be asked to remove curated content if the creator is unhappy with how you’ve used it. If you are asked to take content down, you should do so immediately, both in the interests of courtesy and to avoid damaging your business’ reputation.
Distribute Your Content Across Several Channels
As we’ve already discussed, your audience may prefer to see different types of content on different platforms. As such, you should carefully distribute your curated content across all of your marketing channels, in accordance with the needs of your audience.
This is also a great chance to integrate your multi-platform content distribution. Keep in mind that there is no reason content can’t be shared on multiple channels. However, to have the maximum impact, you might benefit from repurposing items to share them in a format that is more appropriate to the needs of customers on a given channel.
For example, infographics could become slideshows, or longform articles could be abbreviated into an informative video. Pay attention to the success of each variety of content and experiment with a wide range of options to find the most successful combinations.
Credit: Pixabay
Effective content curation takes time, diligence, and a good understanding of your audience. However, if you’re willing to commit to generating a regular offering of quality curated content, you will quickly see a worthy return for your efforts.
Remember, curation is far more than simply sharing existing content; it is a process of cherry-picking the most useful and relevant content and presenting it to your audience alongside your own thoughts in order to give them the greatest possible value.
As you monitor the success of your curated content, this will not only help you to select future items of content more effectively, but it can also influence the content you generate yourself. Over time, you will get to know what sort of content your audience prefers, in what format, and on what topics.
Content Curation Works For All Niches
Whatever the niche area is for your company, be it pets, books, excercise, or, fashion, content curation is something that you can use to help grow your business and there are plenty of ways that you can utilize is.
Take this example from Move Your Body Fitness. They have employed a variety of content curation techniques to engage their customers with their brand:
Social Media
Move Your Body Fitness challenged their Instagram followers to curate content for them by sending in pictures of themselves, tagging Move Your Body Fitness when they do so:
Credit: moveyourbodyhf
Getting your followers to curate content for you on your social media platform, gives you the chance to get your brand’s name out their followers as well as your own. This increases the reach of your brand and helps to grow your business.
Guest Posting
One of the best ways to grow a new business is to improve the SEO for your website – the higher you rank on search engines, the better the chance you have of shoppers finding your business – and one of the best ways of doing this is by adding regular content to your website.
Move Your Body Fitness know this and they have invited their customers to curate content for their business by contributing guest posts to their website. It’s another form of content curation that puts the needs of the community first. Why not feature some of your guest bloggers’ top posts in a mega roundup?
Credit: MoveYourBodyFitness
This is something you can easily do — audience curation will help to grow your business by creating a community element amongst your customers, who will advertise your brand by sharing their guest posts among their friends, family, colleagues, and followers.
*You can find Move Your Body Fitness, and see all of the excellent ways in which they are using content curation, by locating them on the Exchange marketplace.
Content curation has been around for years, but many brands are still struggling to do it effectively. Stay ahead of the curve and automate and improve your content curation strategies in function of web traffic, engagement levels, and sales.
Victoria Greene is a writer and brand consultant who writes for VictoriaEcommerce. Big fan of content marketing — especially when we are talking about hacks and how busy business owners can create great content fast.