What is the key question every brand faces when it comes to customer connection and engaging their audience? Content is what generates leads and engagement online. It comes in many forms, and is the driving force behind much of what happens online. Identifying content that is compelling and also effective in terms of conversion rates can be difficult for any business leader.
It’s interesting how the Internet is full of content, but it feels like a big challenge to come up with your own content. How are these companies continually producing engaging content week after week? What do they have that you don’t?
Compelling Web Content is No Coincidence
There is a method to the madness of companies that generate content that is thought-provoking, actionable, and generates leads. There is both an art and a science to coming up with compelling content. Writing original content can be very time consuming, it requires Expert knowledge on the subject and a good imagination. If you don’t have any of the skills mentioned, what will happen? If you don’t have time to create high-quality content, you won’t be able to become an expert marketer.
How You Can Look To Content Auditing and Curation to Rescue You
There are two strategies that can help take your content marketing to a new level and help you engage more effectively with your audience.
Auditing and curating content are two ways that expert content marketers can make their content more powerful. While content auditing evaluates the current state of your content and works to improve it, content curation finds and curates the best content from external sources to supplement your own. Both content auditing and content curation are effective methods for ensuring that your content is high-quality and relevant to your audience. In order to be successful in content marketing, it is important to both audit and curate content.
Now that you are familiar with two of the strategies for creating compelling content on a regular basis, it is time to share some secrets about how each system works and how you can use it to your advantage.
Creating Compelling Content: What is Content Curation?
Content curation is finding and discovering content from other sources on the web to use to improve your online presence. Curation does not involve generating any content. This text is about how to use existing content from authoritative sources to build your brand’s online audience.
The quality of your content is important when you are sharing it. If you want to be known as an expert in your field, the content you share with your audience must be of high quality. As you are an expert on your subject, you should be aware of what topics will interest your audience. You can understand your audience’s needs by looking at how much your content is shared, liked, and tweeted.
If you want to keep your audience engaged without having to come up with new ideas all the time, curating content is a great option. This involves finding and sharing information that is already out there, and making sure it is relevant to your audience.
Finding The Content That Gets Your Audience Buzzing
You are aware of what your audience desires from the content you curate.
Now comes the hard part of finding that content. Finding your content would take days, and you don’t have much time to spare. It’s not possible to follow all your top sources every minute of the day, so how can you find content gems on a moment’s notice?
There are a few tools that can help you find the best content on the Internet. To make content marketing more efficient, it is sensible to use tools that gather the content you need into one place. Although content curation tools are convenient, you will still have to do some research yourself. These curation tools require human intervention to select the best results from a search.
When it comes to choosing content to curate, it’s best to get advice from people who are experts in the field and have a lot of knowledge about the industry. It is important to remember that your audience sees you as an expert and authority in your field. Therefore, when sharing content with your audience, it is important to use your best judgment.
Models Of Content Curation
You need to put in the effort to get the best data in order to be successful. Publish your curated content. There are ways to figure out what your purpose is.
Looking at how curation might be applied in very specific situations, a trend curator and founder of Influential Marketing Group, Rohit Bhargava puts models of content creation as follows:
- Aggregation is about curating the most relevant information about a specific topic in one location. It is often in the form of a catalog list. “16 Best Resources for Digital Marketers” can be one of the examples. Some also argue that this is the easiest way to do curation because it is often algorithmically automated.
- Distillation is more on getting only the best relevant ideas and putting it in a simple format.
- Elevation targets mainly the smaller thoughts or daily musings posted online and then creating a more significant and overlooked trend out of it.
- Mashup, on the other hand, refers to uniquely curated juxtapositions and creating a concrete or new point of view.
- Chronology, remember history? Citing content from oldest to present, telling a story of how things came to be and how we know it.
6 Content Curation Approaches
Content curation is a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage Google Panda than other methods. You might not know it, but there are some helpful strategies to consider before beginning your curation process.
It is also important to know the strategies you can use to express your own commentary or annotations better.
In an article by Pawan Deshpande on the Content Marketing Institute website, he outlines 6 different approaches that are most effective for content curation.
- Abstracting is a low-effort approach where you copy-paste bits of content from your source. This works by pulling the source title, first few sentences, and an image from the article. This might cause the curator some trouble for copyright allegations. This is also known for having too little SEO-value.
- Summarizing, as the word suggests, requires more effort than abstracting. It can synopsize the idea of the whole source with additional beneficial keywords, making it a unique content as far as search engines are concerned.
- Quoting is one of the most popular ways of annotating third-party content. It gives thought-provoking block of information from the original content with a mix of the curator’s commentary or thoughts on the topic. This is known to have good SEO value and readership value.
- Retitling means creating provocative and relative short titles out of the original content. This is most especially known in social media sharing and mobile curation sites. With little effort, you can add value to your reader.
- Storyboarding includes weaving various content. It could consist of tweets, posts, photos, videos, and blog posts to come up with an interesting story or the curator’s commentary.
- Parallelizing is about taking 2 points of seemingly unrelated ideas and drawing a connection between them. This enables the curator to tackle a broader scope of discussion. Its SEO and reader’s values are known to be high because of its original and unique viewpoint.
3 Content Curation Tools To Help You Get The Job Done
Streamlining your job makes you feel more productive and efficient. There are many content curation tools available that make it easy to find content your audience will love.
Quora
If you want to know what questions your audience is asking, Quora can provide helpful insight. Quora is a Q&A platform with questions from everyday people on a variety of topics. The Q&As contain a lot of information on many different topics and industries. You are likely to find something interesting while looking through them.
Although it requires more effort than some other automated tools, Quora is good for finding out what questions your audience is asking. If you’re looking for ideas for your blog or topics to discuss with your audience on social media, you’ll definitely find some here.
An additional advantage of Quora is that it eliminates the guesswork in determining what your customers are inquiring about. As a marketer, you sometimes have to make an educated guess about what kind of questions your customers are asking. Quora provides users with questions and answers that are readily available.
Scoop.it
Another powerful tool for content curation is Scoop.it. If you are thinking about spending money on a curation tool, Scoop.it is the best tool to invest in. The dashboard for Scoop.it is designed to look like a magazine, with the most useful content options for your niche easily accessible. You can find content on the internet either by inputting a web address or by searching for keywords. You can also upload your own documents so that others can find and share the best content you have to offer.
HubSpot Blog Topic Generator
This is a very fun and useful tool to help create insightful blog topics when you are fresh out of ideas. The blog topic generator is a tool that allows you to input keywords and generate pre-written blog titles. If you are struggling to come up with ideas for your blog, Hubspot offers a spreadsheet with a long list of possible blog topics. The spreadsheet provides blog topic ideas for an entire year.
Strategic Scheduling And Content Curation Promotion
You have done a good job highlighting the things that interest your market in a user and SEO-friendly manner. Your work is now complete and ready to be shared with others. Excellent.
The best way to make sure your target market sees your curated piece is to use social media platforms, email marketing, or other digital marketing tools to promote it. How can your curation tools help? The Top Rank Blog emphasizes the importance of finding a curation tool with features that will ease your sharing and promotion. One of the best features of these tools is the built-in social scheduling and amplification. Your target market may be asleep on the other side of the world while you are blogging. To prove your existence efficiently, posting on major social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be helpful. But remember to schedule all your posts strategically. It’s important to know when your target audience is most likely to consume your content. This way, you can ensure that your content is seen by as many people as possible.
Curation, The Next Level Strategy
Curation can be a great strategy whether you’re trying to power up your content marketing or join the spotlight of thought leadership. There is a big difference between knowing how to make your content stand out online and not knowing how. Having a plan for your online content and using the right tools to share it are what will help you succeed. You need to be different in a way that makes you stand out. How about taking your curation to the next level?
Content strategy basics are the best deal. As Christina Walker from Writtent states, research thoroughly, plan to deliver value, create content, distribute it well, and measure the results.
The most important rule in marketing is to do your research. Mind both your target market and your competitors. You need to be aware of what your target market wants and what your competitors are offering. This way you can make sure that your business is able to meet the needs of your customers and stand out from the competition. Unearth all the data and information possible. Next would be planning. You cannot simply go to war with your samurai and expect to win by slashing your competitor’s tanks and bombs. Planning is essential. What are some ways that you could deliver value to your target market? Will curating 10 valuable posts about banana interest them? Or will they be interested in 101 ways of content curation to eat a banana? Plan, well. Your content should be targeted to your market and delivered in a way that is strategic and effective. It is crucial to measure the results of your efforts. But measuring shouldn’t be the end of your strategy. Re-evaluate your strategy and repeat the process after seeing the results of your work.
