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But constant content creation is hard. If you’re having a tough time producing original content pieces at a consistent clip, it may be time to invest in content curation.

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is the act of finding, packaging, and sharing relevant digital content with a specific demographic of people. The content you curate could be in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, eye-catching infographics, or anything else. Just make sure that your content revolves around an interesting central topic.

It’s important to note that content curation is not:

• An Automated Process: You can’t simply program a piece of software to curate content for you. There are tools you can use to streamline your efforts, though.
• Simple List Building: Sending a list of content pieces to your audience isn’t content curation in its true form either. You need to add a personal touch.
• A One-Time Event: If you curate content for your audience one week and then drop the ball for the next two months, content curation won’t benefit you. You should make the commitment and curate content for your audience on a regular basis.

Effective content curation will require effort. But when this strategy is used correctly, it will provide your business with a few very compelling benefits.

The Benefits of Content Curation

Why should your organization develop and commit to curating content? Because it’s extremely advantageous when done correctly. Here are a few top benefits:

Greater Productivity

Content curation isn’t a one-time, set it and forget it strategy. But it’s much easier than always creating your own content from scratch. By curating content rather than creating it, you’ll save time which you can then spend on other business-building activities.

It should be noted that content curation alone won’t work for most companies. You should still create original content pieces. Content curation simply allows you to create less marketing collateral, while still maintaining regular contact with your target audience.

Higher Brand Authority

Content curation will also position your brand as a recognized authority in its niche. By sharing valuable content, your audience will associate quality with your company and learn to trust that you know what you’re talking about — at least when it comes to your area of expertise.

This is important because people buy from brands they know, like, and trust. By building authority in your industry, you’ll shorten the sales cycles.

Easy Learning Opportunities

Lastly, content curation is a great way to learn about and stay up to date with your profession. To properly curate content, you have to actually consume the content generated by other brands, which means you’ll be in a prime position to acquire new tips, tricks, and best practices.

The only way to remain at the forefront of your field is to continually learn about it and use what you learn to improve your skill set. Why not do this while also propelling your business forward via content curation?

Popular Content Curation Tools

As mentioned above, there are a number of content curation tools that will help you improve your curation productivity and effectiveness. Here are four of them:

Pocket

Pocket is an entry level tool that allows users to easily save blog posts, videos, and other forms of content to a personalized space, which can be accessed on or offline. When you find a relevant piece of content, save it to your Pocket for safe keeping. Then, when you’re ready, you can send it to your audience via email, social media, etc.

BuzzSumo

The BuzzSumo platform is used by millions of marketers because it includes four key components: content discovery, market research, influencer outreach, and digital monitors. For content curation purposes, you’ll want to use the content discovery tool, which will help you identify top content pieces in your industry.

Feedly

Feedly is another popular tool that makes it easy to curate content. You simply choose a few trusted content sources and Feedly will pipe the articles, videos, etc. into one easy to read feed. What really makes it unique, though, is Leo, an AI research assistant that can be trained to prioritize content based on your qualifications. That way you always have the best content to share with your audience at any given time.

Curata

The Curata for content curation software scours the web and listens to social media looking for the freshest, most relevant content pieces. It then allows users to publish the content it sources to a website or social media channel with one click. The more users use the tool, the more the built-in AI learns about the user’s preferences, allowing it to source better content in the future.

None of these tools are mandatory. You can definitely curate content manually by visiting your favorite sites on a regular basis and cataloging the pieces you find interesting. But the content curation tools mentioned above will help make the entire process more productive.

How to Curate Content

Ready to curate content for your brand? Follow the simple, four-step system we’ve outlined below and you’ll quickly become a content curation expert.

1. Choose Your Topics

Before you can begin effectively curating content for your audience, you need to choose the topics you’ll cover. This step serves two purposes:

1. You’ll ensure you only share content that’s of interest to your recipients, and
2. You’ll be able to easily vary your content and keep your audience engaged.

Will your brand only share content related to its industry? Or will you share any random blog or video, regardless of its relevance to the products your company sells, if it’s of interest to your audience? Also, how often do you plan to share content?

You can only answer these questions effectively if you have a solid understanding of your target market. They should be the ones who determine what kind of content you curate and how often. The articles and videos you share are for them, after all.

2. Find Trusted Content Creators

Now that you know the kind of content you’ll be curating, you can pinpoint specific content creators to source material from. Be sure to build an extensive list. This will ensure your content never gets stale and comes in a variety of formats. It will also give you the chance to build relationships with many different content creators, which may prove useful down the road.

Once you have a list of content creators, either add them to your content curation tool of choice, or commit to manually browsing through their content feeds on a regular basis.

Depending on your brand, you might also want to take advantage of user-generated content, which is content created by customers. If your tribe posts pictures of themselves on Instagram using your products, why not repost the images?

This is a fantastic way to create additional content without having to spend a lot of time and money on the process. Your customers will also love the chance to be featured on your company’s social media pages, which is an additional benefit.

3. Personalize Your Outreach

Once you’ve developed a system for curating relevant content, you have to actually share it with your audience. The key to this step is personalization.

Simply emailing your list with a collection of links or reposting a photo on Instagram without a caption won’t benefit your brand much. You need to add your own voice and input so that your audience connects with you, not just the content you share.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to write an essay about every piece of content you curate. A quick blurb about why you enjoyed reading a blog, for example, and a specific section that inspired you is all that’s required.

When it comes to the technical side of sharing the content you’ve curated, we suggest using software tools. For email, apps like MailChimp and MailerLite are popular options. In regards to social media content, you can easily share posts via Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

4. Optimize Your Approach

The last step is to optimize your content curation efforts. Does your audience enjoy the content you’re sharing with them? Are you able to source the content in an efficient manner? How can you improve your content curation process?

Perhaps you can research additional content creators to curate content from. Maybe you can invest in a new content curation tool to help you find and publish top content more effectively.

Always look for ways to improve your content curation efforts for greater future success.

Market Your Business With Content Curation

To effectively market your business, you have to publish content. Fortunately, you don’t have to always be the one who creates the content you share with the world. Content curation will enable your company to consistently produce relevant blogs, videos, and other content pieces without having to do all the work yourself.

Simply follow the four-step content curation process we outlined above and enjoy the increase in productivity, brand authority, and learning opportunities it affords you.