Marketers in a content-driven landscape are responsible for producing huge amounts of content, day in and day out for their brand. With an always-on connected digital world, people expect a constant stream of engaging content but most companies don’t have the time, staff, or budget to publish enough good content on a regular basis.
Simply put by content specialist Nicola Kohler: “Content curation, is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest”. Essentially it’s a content process system that allows you to combine your "owned" content alongside existing content from the internet such as twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds and YouTube.
Content Marketing Institute states the main challenges for marketers include:
1) Producing engaging content
Engaging content builds relationships, the more insightful and compelling the content is, the more powerful the experience will be for the audience. If carried out effectively content curation can provide lots of opportunities for the 61% of marketers who are struggling with this. Curating relevant and high-quality content with a mix of your own such as videos, blogs and infographics can attract more people and allow for a better understanding on complex subjects. Sourcing material that is easy to digest boosts the chances of building communities and can ultimately increase brand awareness particularly if it’s deployed on different channels. Promoting your curated content on social media can help build discussions around topics to show off expert knowledge making you the “go to” resource in your industry.
2) Producing content consistently
Regular publishing makes it easier to increase your publishing rate and content curation exists for this very reason. Creating original content can be extremely time-consuming as 58% of marketers face challenges researching and writing up new content regularly. Curating content helps fill in your editorial calendar without the same time invested into creating original content. In the coming year, 88%* of enterprises plan to produce more content therefore, companies need to find efficient ways of delivering these expectations. Using a content curating software that surfs the web automatically for relevant content and providing it straight to you can break up the workload and ensure your platform is refreshed with new content. Spreading out the workload between the two by creating and curating content can aid towards the business growth and generating leads.
3) Lack of budget
Approximately, 29% of organisations budgets are spent on content marketing and these are expected to increase. Unfortunately, 26% of organisations lack the budgets to increase the spending towards producing more content. Content curation doesn’t have to be a time-consuming task, so you don’t have to allocate additional resources to gain the benefits. The ability to drip feed content from other sources alongside your own saves you time and money. It can be used to amplify your owned content to reduce the need to invest in new content developments.
4) Producing a variety of content
A recent CMI survey suggests that 40% companies now struggle to produce enough content. Combining the company’s owned content with relevant aggregated content from around the web can complement each other to attract and retain a loyal customer base. The ability to source curated content means businesses will always have "volume" and "capacity" to publish and keep customers informed and engaged on tailored content. There is a vast amount of content out there already – for example industry news, trends, how-to tips. So, whatever your business goals dictate, curating your own content can support your business’s content ambition.\
5) Gaps in knowledge and skills of internal team
If there are skills and knowledge gaps which exist within the internal marketing content, content curation output will help plug those knowledge deficits. Third party curated business content which is well researched, authoritative and timely will help save time and resources for companies looking to produce similar content for their own customers.
Best practice for content curation
A common-sense approach to content curation should be adopted. For example, always attribute curated content to the original publisher. The worse thing a business can do is to portray the content as their own. It’s also vital to ensure you check the copyright and get permission where necessary to publish the content. Finally, the most obvious, don’t change or alter curated content sources - ever.
Curating content can increase the output of a production schedule and it requires fewer resources to do rather than constantly developing original content.
For content curation to be credible, there needs to be a good balance between producing owned content and pulling together third party content sources.
By Anjana Varsani, digital marketing assistant at Better Than Paper
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