But many people interested in content curation—and some who are already curating—may still have lingering questions about best practices.

What should a curated post look like? How much of the original article should I include? How do I align this content with my own content?

To help answer some of these questions and outline the anatomy of curated piece of content, we created “The Art of a Curated Post.” Just like a painting, a good curated post is not complete without all the necessary elements. Follow along as this curator—let’s call her Claire—paints the perfect post.

Five Elements of Content Curation

1. New Title

It’s vital to always craft a new headline to avoid competing with the original article in search engine results. And a good headline can be the difference between someone clicking on your article or ignoring it. Some handy sites to use for creating titles include:

• Upworthy.com – Although many of these titles can be outrageous, simply browsing this site will help in brainstorming catchier titles.

• UpworthyGenerator.com – This website provides a new “Upworthy Style” title every time you click “Generate.” Again, while these titles are outrageous—and in this case, fake—it’s a good jumping off point to start pushing the boundaries with headlines.

• TitleCapitilization.com – This tool comes in handy any time you are wondering which words are capitalized in a title. Simply paste your title into the field on the home page and it automatically corrects capitalization errors.

• UberSuggest.org – This website helps find popular keywords surrounding various topics to help your article rank higher in search engine results.

• Thesaurus.com – Never underestimate the power of a synonym. Often, simply inserting one word in place of another can take your title to the next level.

Remember, even if a title worked well on the original post you’re curating (it got you to click, didn’t it?), it may not work well for your specific audience.

For example, at Curata we often curate posts about social media best practices. However, we try to put it in the context of content marketing, since this is what our audience wants to read about. A recent post showing this is titled “How to Optimize Content For Social Media Success.”

2. New Image

To avoid copyright issues and add originality to your post, use an entirely new image. Useful image sites include:

• Stock photo libraries such as Shutterstock, iStock, RGBStock
• The Creative Commons for free ‘Copyleft‘ images in a range of licenses
• Image Creation tools such as Canva
• Basic design tools such as PowerPoint, and more sophisticated tools such as Adobe Creative Suite and the free, open source GiMP

3. Body Text

Your own, original body text should take up the majority of the post. Include the following elements:

• Attribution of the original article and author (with a link to the article)

• Commentary and/or annotation. Frame the original article in a useful way to your readers by citing the content’s relevance to them, and provide your own analysis on the topic or issue at hand

• Links to created content. You’ve no doubt spent time creating unique and interesting blog posts, eBooks, and other resources. Now is the time to link back to these assets—when they relate to the topic—and give your audience additional value/further reading

4. Quote

Draw in a quote from the original article, or even several quotes. The exact format can vary depending on the length of the original article and its topic. Be sure to pick a quote or stat that will surprise, educate, and/or entertain your readers. This is your opportunity to bring in intelligent outside voices—one of the main advantages of content curation.

5. Call to Action

A call to action (CTA) is necessary for every blog post, but it’s especially important for curated content. Don’t leave readers hanging. Link to a piece of your content that helps expand their knowledge on the subject at hand.

Offer readers a piece of gated content such as an eBook or a webinar to help generate new leads and nurture existing leads. Keeping leads engaged reinforces how you are catering to their needs and bringing them value on a consistent basis.

Make sure your CTA is both eye-catching and appealing. Here are some great articles about creating CTAs that convert:

• Anatomy of a CTA by Vieo Design

• The Complete Checklist for Creating Compelling Calls-to-Action by HubSpot

• How to Make Calls to Action More Effective by Search Engine Watch

What’s Next?

This is a useful template for composing a curated post, but note there is much more to the curation process not touched upon here. E.g., finding articles to curate and promoting content once it is produced.

Fortunately, there are many tools and technologies to help with each step of this process. We rounded up a handy selection of curation tools in this ultimate list to help you weigh your options.

Want to know more about curating content? Curata’s eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation will have you curating like a champ. Alternatively, reach out to us for a demo of Curata’s content curation software.

What is Content Curation?

Curata’s definition of content curation is as follows:

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.”

At its best, curation is:

• Performed by a person, not simply a computer algorithm.
• Being discerning, discriminative, and selective.
• Added value. You offer perspective, insight, guidance.
• Not a one-time event or activity.
• Informed by a laser focus on your audience.

How Can Curation Help Your Business?

According to Curata data, leading marketers use a mixture of 65 percent created content and 25 percent curated content.

Why? The path to purchase used to be a straightforward line from point A (buyer need) to point B (conversion). It was easy for marketers to guide and even control a prospect’s journey along this narrowly defined series of steps.

The world is different now.

Buyers are hyper-connected today. They use multiple devices and channels to access an inexhaustible avalanche of information in real time. This buyer isn’t waiting for you to tell them what to do next. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, 70 percent of the buyer journey is now completed without any sales involvement.

So, how are buyers making their purchase decisions, and—more importantly—how can you influence those decisions?

Enter Content Marketing

Businesses use content marketing to respond to this consumer environment. It’s a process for developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base.

However, as more businesses jump onto the content marketing bandwagon, it becomes more difficult for marketers to maintain the frequency and quality of content required to compete.

Content curation helps you compete effectively and efficiently, and provides unique benefits critical in today’s market.

Take a look at the infographic below. You’ll discover some of the biggest benefits of content curation. And you’ll also see how curation can help marketers overcome some of their greatest challenges.

To develop and maintain an efficient, effective, and ethical curation practice requires five primary activities:

1. Define your objectives
2. Find your sources
3. Curate by organizing and editorializing
4. Share via a variety of channels and mediums
5. Analyze and optimize your content curation performance

To learn more about content curation, including the five step process for starting your own curation program, download the eBook, Curate Content Like a Boss: The Hands-on Guide.

Often it seems that there are only two things the world tells you about ideas: you should have more of them and they should be more creative.

We dedicate entire conferences to better ideas and read best-selling books to inspire more of them. Yet over time, the sad truth is that the only thing most of us do better than coming up with ideas is routinely squandering them, with bad or no execution.

Why do we fail to execute well on our best ideas so often? More importantly, what would it take to change that pattern?

The Mini Bottle Gallery

An unexpected clue to answering this question can be found at one of the world’s quirkiest museum destinations nestled in a corner of Oslo, Norway. The brainchild of renowned art collector and billionaire Christian Ringnes, it is called The Mini Bottle Gallery. It boasts the largest collection of mini liquor bottles in the world.

The collection goes far beyond those iconic Dutch house liquor bottles given out by KLM to air travelers for decades. The Mini Bottle Gallery includes everything from macabre bottles with unique objects floating in them to a “room of sin” with bottles collected from the Red Light District in Amsterdam.

What is most interesting about this odd collection is not the bottles themselves. It’s that only a fifth of the entire 50,000 bottle collection is on display at any given time. It is a masterpiece of curation.

Putting every bottle on display at once would be noise. Selecting the best and grouping them into interesting themes is what makes the story the Gallery tells meaningful. Like all great museum destinations, the Gallery uses curation to add meaning to isolated interesting things.

What does a quirky museum and its use of curation have to do with getting better about holding onto and executing on your best ideas?

Curation in the Museum of Your Mind

Imagine if you were the curator of a museum of your own ideas. You have limited physical space to share the very best of them. The way to ensure your best ideas come to life is by integrating them into bigger themes to add meaning.

This is exactly what visionary entrepreneurs and leaders do.

They take disparate ideas from multiple industries and put them together into something unique and valuable for the world. This type of “intersection thinking” requires us all to learn to become better curators of our own ideas.

To learn to do it, here are five habits that can help:

1 Being Curious

We as people are naturally curious. The challenge is to allow yourself to explore your curiosity without it feeling like an ongoing distraction. Noted chef and food pioneer Ferran Adrià was once asked what he likes to have for breakfast. His reply was simple: “I like to eat a different fruit every day of the month.” Imagine if you could do that with ideas. Being more curious means asking questions about why things work the way they do, and embracing unfamiliar situations or topics with a sense of wonder.

2 Being Observant

Famous ex-FBI agent Joe Navarro now teaches people how to read body language. He once wrote, “the problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing.” Learning to be more observant isn’t about seeing the big things. It is about training yourself to pay more attention to the little things. Being more observant means training yourself to see the details most others miss. When you learn to do it, what you observe can offer new insights about people, processes, and companies you didn’t know or see before.

3 Being Fickle

Being fickle may seem like a bad thing, but this isn’t always true. We tend to associate it with negative situations where we act inconsistently, or abandon people or ideas too quickly. But there is an upside to learning how to be purposefully fickle. Being fickle means capturing ideas without needing to fully understand or analyze them in that same moment. On the surface, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, when you find a great idea, why wouldn’t you take the time to analyze it and develop a point of view? Yet freeing yourself from this as a necessity can enable you to see and collect more ideas. A key part of becoming an idea curator is learning to save ideas for later digestion.

4 Being Thoughtful

In 2014 after 10 years of writing my personal blog, I decided to stop allowing comments. The reason I stopped was simple. I had noticed a steady decline in the quality of comments. What was once a robust discussion with thoughtfully worded responses had devolved into thumbs-up style comments and spam. Unfortunately, comments had become thoughtless instead of thoughtful. Being thoughtful means taking the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way. Thanks to anonymous commenting and the ease of sharing knee-jerk responses, thoughtfulness matters more than ever.

5 Being Elegant

We love to read or see elegant solutions. We delight in their ability to help us get the big picture with ease, but they aren’t often simple to develop or write. If you’ve ever sat down with paper or a computer screen and tried to tell a simple story, you know it can be harder than it seems. But we all have the power to simplify our ideas and share them in more elegant ways. Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.

Curation was once seen as a skill largely confined to the world of art and museums. Today it has grown dramatically. It now encompass everything from the growing use of content as part of marketing, to the increasingly widespread belief that well rounded employees with divergent interests (like Steve Jobs’ famous fascination with calligraphy and fonts) can yield unexpected business benefits.

The most effective brands and leaders today are focusing on becoming active curators of ideas.

Examples Are All Around Us

Pioneering brands like Red Bull and Coca-Cola have created entirely new categories for themselves by using active storytelling to fuel spin-off media businesses. Both Zappos and Disney have started consulting groups to help other brands emulate their approach in their own businesses.

The growing shift toward the collaborative economy is leading businesses into unexpected adjacent spaces. For example, BMW operating its DriveNow program to rent electric vehicles directly to consumers in the US and Germany. Or GE partnering with invention community website Quirky to approve, manufacture, and sell new products invented by everyday people in the market.

The common thread is a method of thinking that is more than linear. It is circuitous, uncertain, and entrepreneurial. This method brings ideas from multiple categories or even industries together. It is a method I have often described as non-obvious.

Non-Obvious Thinking

Non-Obvious thinking requires embracing the art of curation as a skill that isn’t just useful for museums. It can help connect the dots between isolated practices, divisions, or product groups and break down silos to encourage collaboration.

So how do you get started? Imagine you’re participating in yet another brainstorm at work designed to come up with a basket of ideas. The next time you’re faced with an overflowing whiteboard, step back and encourage everyone to see the bigger picture.

Want to know the key to transforming how much value you get from your ideas? Stop focusing on having more of them. The leaders and teams who manage to execute on their best thinking and act have mastered the art of finding meaning and value in the connections between ideas they already have.

Curation can turn good ideas into great execution. Become a master of curation—download Curata’s eBook Curate Content Like a Boss: The Hands On Guide.

Curata defines content curation as when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market. Curation is a great way to support a created content strategy, publish content consistently, and keep track of your favorite information sources. Enlightened content marketers use a content mix that is only 65% created, with the remainder being 25% curated and 10% syndicated.

The Purpose of This List

This map was constructed to help you or your organization navigate the growing world of curation and find a tool that best fits your content needs. If you’re all caught up on The Ultimate Content Marketing Tools List, then you already know the content marketing tools universe is vast—and expanding.

Marketing technology is constantly providing marketers with simpler solutions for publishing higher quality, more relevant content. Whether you’re one of the 75 percent of marketers increasing content investment this year, or you’re just looking for a tool to help keep track of news and social media, this list cuts through the curation clutter to make sense of what differentiates each application, service, and platform.

Disclaimer

It is increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapidly expanding universe of content marketing. Not to mention each sector it encompasses, such as content curation. For this reason, this list is not comprehensive. There are certainly other tools out there as effective as the ones listed below, which may serve different functions.

We welcome your suggestions in the comments section to help make this list more complete.

Content Curation Tools

Curata – Curata is the leading provider of business grade content curation software. Curata CCS enables marketers to create, curate, organize, annotate and share the most relevant and highest quality content as part of a successful content marketing strategy.

flockler – Combine all your content, including what your fans say about you, into one social hub. Create your own social hub or bring social content into your existing websites, applications, ecommerce sites, and other services.

The Tweeted Times – Aggregates news in your Twitter stream every hour. Ranks each piece by its popularity amongst your friends.

Addict-o-matic – Search the best live sites on the web. Find the latest news, blog posts, videos and images to keep up with trending topics.

Pinterest – A visual discovery platform. Collect ideas for different projects and interests using interactive boards.

Feedly – Delivers fast, mobile-optimized content using RSS feeds. Browse and share content from your favorite news sites, feeds, blogs and YouTube channels.

Storify – Create ‘stories’ or ‘timelines’ by collecting and publishing content from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

RockTheDeadline – A curation platform. Makes it easy for brands, agencies, and publishers to create and manage compelling content. Curate timely news and promote that content over multiple channels.

Paper.li – Publish ‘newspapers’ comprised of content from anywhere on the web to treat your readers to fresh news daily.

Sutori – Create and share visual stories, collaboratively.

List.ly – Curate, crowdsource, and engage readers via live embedded list content inside blog posts.

Kuratur – Consistently publish fresh content on websites or blogs in minutes a day to keep readers engaged.

Pearltrees – A visual and collaborative curation tool. Allows you to collect, organize, and share any URL, and upload personal images and notes.

Juxtapost – A fast, free and simple way to bookmark online images. Collect and manage categorized post boards.

HeadSlinger – Find all your news in half the time. Scan your favorite sites’ headlines in a matter of seconds, and store your favorite news sources in quick, easy to find folders.

Scoop.it – Helps individuals and businesses publish content in an efficient and impacting way. Uses big data semantic technology to help you quickly find relevant content.

CurationSoft – Enables content curation for users. Helps establish brands as an authoritative voice, and a go-to source of information.

TagBoard – A social media hub for hashtags. Aggregate, moderate, and follow hashtags, as well as create and follow your own hashtag conversations.

Curation Traffic – A WordPress plugin that allows you to collect posts, articles, infographics, videos—really any type of content. Share it in the way your market finds helpful and interesting.

Spredfast – Helps brands, media, and agencies involve and connect with audiences by integrating social media into their marketing and advertising efforts.

BagTheWeb – A content and curation networking company. Users can find, create, and share ‘bags’ of web content on topics they care about.

papaly – A bookmark management and discovery tool.

Pulse – Makes it easy to consume news on mobile phones and tablets. Provides a curated feed from reputable news sources.

Pocket – Save articles, videos, or other content on the web. Works in your browser, or from apps such as Twitter, FlipBoard, Pulse and Zite.

Trap!t – A personalized content discovery application. Can be used by brands, publishers, or individuals to discover, engage, share, and publish content.

sprinklr – Helps brands and organizations distribute curated social media content to support their content strategy. Platforms include websites, event displays, retail signage, and mobile apps.

Newsle – Track users’ Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and email contacts in the news. Never miss an important story about a friend, professional contact, or public figure.

Bundlepost – Aggregate and schedule social media content. Search, edit, and schedule with the browser plugin or social media dashboard.

Postplanner – Makes it easy to post like-worthy content. Provides status ideas, delivers content based on users’ keywords, and helps users find blogs and experts in their niche.

Flipboard – Create your own personal magazine. Catch up on news, read stories from around the world, and browse articles, videos, and photos your friends are sharing.

Storyful – Helps newsrooms find the most valuable content on the social web. Uses a “human algorithm” to sort through verified curated news from various mediums.

RebelMouse – Create a blog, website, or social page in seconds. Simply connect your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn.

Waywire – A video curation tool. Embed hundreds of top-quality sources from trusted media makers to enhance your site with topical, timely, and contextually-relevant video.

Eqentia – A platform for web content publishing, distribution and engagement. Features advanced curation, real-time aggregation, and text-mining where content is discovered to match your existing content.

Shareist – A home base for users’ content marketing activities. Capture bookmarks and ideas, share them on social media, and save them for building and publishing pages to blogs.

Pluggio – A secure, web-based system. It helps individuals, businesses, organizations and marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles.

Kbucket – A user indexed search site. Expert “content curators” organize, comment, tag, and publish their research to support their content marketing strategy.

Flashissue – A Gmail newsletter creator. Helps you find content, create mailing lists, and get reports and analytics for emails sent.

symbaloo – A personal startpage that allows you to easily navigate the web. Compile your favorite sites into one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.

ContentGems – Find, curate, and share engaging content. Build your company’s thought leadership and increase qualified website traffic.

Vidinterest – A social video discovery platform which allows you to bookmark videos and create private or public playlists of videos. Bookmark videos from any website featuring videos from YouTube, Daily Motion, and Vimeo. 

Folloze – A B2B content engagement platform for marketing and sales. Create content experiences that dynamically adapt to a visitor’s profile, company, industry, and stage of the deal.

Channelkit – Allows you to tag and structure all kinds of information in one place. This includes websites, contacts, articles, PDF files or images—all displayed as neat cards in channels.

Sharpr – Break down information silos, improve collaboration, and share what matters most with the people who matter most to your business.

Huzzaz – A video curation platform that allows you to discover, collect, and showcase YouTube and Vimeo videos. Analyze viewing behavior, find out which videos matter most to your viewers, and increase site engagement.

UpContent – A content discovery and curation tool that crawls the web to pull news articles and blog posts. Sorts by factors like social influence and recency, reducing the need to browse through hundreds of pages of results.

LinkHubb – Curate and share links visually, upload documents and files to the cloud, and use affiliate technology to generate ad-based revenue. Features an enterprise dashboard with detailed metrics.

Crowdynews – Automatically integrates real-time social content alongside editorial content to increase engagement and drive revenue.

DrumUp – A social media manager and content marketing app. It mines web content in real time to recommend to your audience, reducing your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter management time.

elink – Offers a fast way to turn a bunch of links into content. It enables you to curate, publish and share online content in a visually appealing way.

Zimilate – A webpage clipper. Save perfect copies of webpages, files, images and notes from your browser to collections stored in the cloud. They’re accessible even if the original page changes or disappears.

Roojoom – Create Smart MiniSites, online magazines, and e-newsletters. You can personalize content for each user to increase engagement and conversions across the customer life-cycle.

Know of any other great content curation tools? Leave a comment below!

Adding annotation and commentary to third-party content you choose to share is fundamental to quality content curation. It’s easy for novice curators to simply focus on finding and sharing relevant content while overlooking the importance of annotating content with your own perspective.

Why it’s Important to Annotate Curated Content

Annotating your content is crucial for a few reasons:

Differentiation
Curata’s Content Marketing Staffing & Tactics Planner shows content curation continues to accelerate in popularity year over year. This means others are curating the same content you are to their audience. Adding thoughtful commentary demonstrates your expertise and unique point of view about a subject to stand out from the rest. Thoughtful commentary is what separates a retweet bot from an emerging thought leader.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With Google’s increased attention to duplicate content, curators must be mindful of how much content they excerpt from third-party articles. Excerpting a majority or large portion of an original article without proper link attribution risks Google penalizing your search ranking. However, by minimizing excerpts and affixing value-added commentary, Google will recognize a curated effort as original. Furthermore, your commentary enables you to incorporate other search keywords absent in the original article.

Fair Use and Ethics
When using other people’s content, be respectful of fair-use and copyright law. Kimberley Isbell of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab emphasizes the importance of annotations and commentary. “Whenever possible,” advises Isbell, “Provide context or commentary for the material you use.” Read Curata’s Content Marketing Done Right eBook for a comprehensive exploration of the ethics of reusing other people’s work.

In many ways, annotations go back to the heart of curation in the physical world, predating online content curation. In museums, one of the primary functions of an art curator is not only to select which works of art to display and how to place them within the museum. It’s also to annotate art with narratives on “didactic labels” that describes the source and significance of the art.

Templates and Examples for Content Annotation

For demonstration purposes, let’s consider an article from the Atlantic Wire. It’s about a family who searched for “pressure cookers” on Google who were later visited by the police. In the rest of this post, I will describe templates and techniques to help annotate curated content. Here are some examples, along with the pluses and minuses of each technique.

As we dive into each technique, I’ve created this handy reference chart to help determine which annotation strategy is right for you.

Strategy 1: Abstracting

Many novice curators simply excerpt a portion of an original article by reposting the title, the first few sentences, and perhaps an image from the article, as shown below. Less ethically conscious curators may even unknowingly share a full-size image and lengthier excerpt. This puts them at risk of copyright infringement by sharing too much of the original content.

Now We Know Why Googling ‘Pressure Cookers’ Gets a Visit from Cops

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?

Effort: LOW

You basically just cut and paste. Many content curation tools can do this for you.

SEO Value: LOW

You’re not at risk of duplicate content because you’re only sharing a small portion of text. But it doesn’t help you a whole lot either.

Value Add: LOW

You’re helping uncover and surface relevant content for your reader, but not providing much other value in terms of commentary or annotation.

Strategy 2: Summarizing

In this example, a curator writes a short synopsis of the article. While abstracting may also result in a summary of the article, the author is writing a completely new summary not found in the article.

Now We Know Why Googling ‘Pressure Cookers’ Gets a Visit from Cops

The Atlantic Wire reports on how a family received a visit from the police after searching on Google for ‘pressure cookers’ and later for ‘backpacks.’ In light of the Edward Snowden PRISM and XKeystore revelations, many suspect this is an outcome of the NSA’s PRISM program. What’s more disturbing according to the article, is that such searches are conducted a hundred times a week.

Effort: MEDIUM

The curator writes an original summary of the article.

SEO Value: HIGH

If done correctly, the abstract is all new, original content that can’t be found on any other page online. This is considered unique content for a search engine. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity to insert additional keywords.

Value Add: MEDIUM

For the end reader, the value add by the curator is moderate. The curator is helping to condense a larger article into a quick read, but it’s offering no new information or perspective on behalf of the curator.

Strategy 3: Quoting

Quoting is a popular method of annotating a third party article using the <blockquote> html tag commonly used on sites like Daring Fireball and Slashdot. A curator finds an interesting block of text from the article that doesn’t necessarily summarize it, but has an interesting perspective. Then they wrap their commentary around it. In many ways it’s similar to “pull quotes” you may have seen in print magazines that illustrate some provocative and interesting aspects of the larger article. Curata follows this practice on our curation industry blog, Content Curation Marketing.

Now We Know Why Googling ‘Pressure Cookers’ Gets a Visit from Cops

The Atlantic Wire reports on how a family received a visit from the police after searching on Google for ‘pressure cookers’ and later for ‘backpacks’. There’s a humorous explanation as to why they purchased a pressure cooker and the police’s line of questioning:

They were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked…

It’s scary to think of a world where an innocent online search can get you a visit from the cops. On the other hand, there is a legitimate concern that this behavior was reminiscent of the Boston Marathon bombings. Where do we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?

Effort: MEDIUM

The curator first has to read the article and find an interesting quote, then add their commentary around it.

SEO Value: HIGH

The value is relatively high because there’s a good deal of original commentary, but it’s mixed with a quote that came from another article.

Value Add: HIGH

Quoting is valuable for the reader because it lets them focus on just a key part of the article and quickly understand the curator’s point of view before reading the full article.

Strategy 4: Re-titling

With re-titling a curator simply creates a provocative title that expresses a point of view and may get a lot of click-throughs. It’s particularly effective if you’re sharing on social media. A great example of a content curation site that solely re-titles content for editorial spin is the Drudge Report. Re-titling can also be used in conjunction with other annotation techniques listed in this article, but sometimes may be enough by itself. It’s also very useful for mobile curation sites.

Where did the 4th Amendment go? Search on Google and get the cops at your doorsteps

Effort: LOW

All you do is change the title.

SEO Value: MEDIUM

By creating an original title, you can incorporate your own keywords and use curation to help your search ranking. At the same time, there’s very little content for search engines to index.

Value Add: LOW

The curator is adding little value because they have so little screen space to express their perspective.

Strategy 5: Storyboarding

A curator stitches together multiple pieces of content such as article abstracts, videos, tweets, and audio clips to tell a story interweaved with their own commentary. At the end you come up with a mash-up and narrative for a larger story. Here’s an example of one created about Google’s Moto X Smartphone.

Effort: HIGH

You have to outline your idea ahead of time. Then scour the web for multiple pieces of content, not just a single article. Then write a cohesive commentary.

SEO Value: HIGH

Storyboards are good clickbait and have the capacity to incorporate a lot of original keyword-rich text. However, sometimes embedded content such as javascript-based embeds and videos can’t always be indexed by search engines.

Value Add: HIGH

While heavily relying on other’s content, you are essentially creating new long form content with a lot of your perspective.

Strategy 6: Parallelizing

With parallelizing, a curator takes a piece of content seemingly unrelated to their topic of interest. They then write a summary explaining the significance of the third party content and how it relates to them and their audience. For example, imagine a Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology provider curates an article and relates it back to their business. (See example below.) It’s great for topics where there isn’t a lot of directly relevant content to begin with. Furthermore, it enables a curator to tie their point of view to a larger issue in the vein of “newsjacking.”

Why you should use a VPN tunnel for all your searches online

The Atlantic Wire reports on how a family received a visit from the police after searching on Google for ‘pressure cookers’ and later for ‘backpacks’. This highlights the growing need for stronger encryption of searches by setting your browser defaults to use HTTPS and SSL encrypted connections. Fortunately Google offers this, but many other search providers do not. Furthermore, Google does not by default load its search engine with HTTPS enabled, so most laypeople do not know it’s available.

With the increase in cases like this where an innocent family was harassed by the police based on their Internet search behavior, hopefully the general public will be more sensitive of the need for encryption. At the end of the day though, simple HTTPS does not suffice for most sites. The best approach is to use a dedicated VPN tunnel so all your traffic is encrypted and anonymized.

Effort: MEDIUM

Parallelizing is similar to summarization, where the curator is writing a new summary.

SEO Value: HIGH 

This is high value because you can latch on to a larger story and newsjack those keywords. In this example, the curator tied VPNs to a larger story about Google searches and privacy, incorporating those words into their summary.

Value Add: HIGH

It’s high value because the curator is helping make an original connection with a seemingly unrelated article. It’s a unique point of view that’s unlikely to be found anywhere else, and can get visitors to keep coming back to you.

Annotation is Fundamental to Quality Content Curation

Now you’ve got the right technique for annotating curated content, I recommend you download Curata’s Curate Content Like a Boss eBook. It’s the ultimate hands on guide to effective content curation.

The Unlicensed Content Model

The first and most popular option is to use unlicensed content from around the web. In this model, a content curator does not seek explicit permission from the content authors. Instead the curator, keeping the fair use statute in mind, shares a small excerpt from the original text with clear attribution back to the original article. Readers of the curated content must go to the original publisher’s site to read the article in full.

The Licensed Content Model

The second model is to license content from the original author and republish the original content in its entirety on the curator’s site. The appealing aspects of licensed content are:

• It provides a seamless reading experience.
• There’s no risk of driving readers off your site.
• You don’t have to worry about fair-use or how much content you take.

The Downsides of Curating Licensed Content

While licensed content seems attractive, there are some obvious—and not so obvious, downsides to building a destination based on this model.

• Limited Selection. Licensed content severely limits your sources for third party content. You can only curate content from sources with whom you either have a direct publishing relationship or with whom your licensed content provider has a relationship. Most resellers of licensed content only have relationships with the largest mainstream publishers, such as the Associated Presses and Reuters of the world.

  As a result, licensed content is not an option for most content marketers, who focus on specific topics and niches—particularly B2B marketers who rely on specific trade publishers and blogs.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Publishers can’t have their original articles confused with duplicate content. So they contractually obligate those licensing their content to include special directives forbidding search engines from indexing the copies. As a marketer, this means licensed content on your site has little to no SEO value.

  For brands looking to simply engage their existing audience and provide a more seamless reading experience, licensed content may be the right option. But most marketers don’t just want to engage their existing audience. They want to grow their audience through search engine traffic. For such marketers, licensed content is not a compelling option.

  Some licensed content providers no longer include noindex directives, allowing search engines to index syndicated licensed content. They recommend you use a canonical directive instead. Licensed content providers claim this allows your copy of licensed content to be indexed by Google and avoid duplicate content penalties. This is true. They omit that Google down-ranks your page of syndicated content to the point it does not matter if it was indexed at all.

  Take a look below at an example of a licensed article, originally published by Ad Age. I’ve masked the identity of the provider in question intentionally. It’s on a licensed content provider’s blog. They claim canonical URLs help SEO.

  

  Using the “site:” keyword in Google I verified the licensed version was indexed. But take a look at the following above-the-fold search results for the title of this article. The original Ad Age version and a few others dominate the results. But in the first five search engine result pages (SERPs) I checked, the syndicated version was nowhere to be found. It may as well have not been indexed in the first place.

  

• Privacy. Licensed content usually comes with the stipulation that you include a provided pixel tracker with anything you republish. In turn, this pixel tracker can cookie your readership, measure the efficacy of the content, and provide analytics for the original publisher.

  This is not a salient issue for most marketers. But for marketers in regulated industries with strict privacy policies, or marketers sharing licensed content with an internal audience (e.g. competitive intelligence teams), it could be.

• Modification & Editorialization. When republishing licensed content, you are typically required to republish the original in full with no modifications or edits. This is so you do not misrepresent or distort the views of the original publisher.

  This means content curation best practices for adding your own perspective are difficult at best, if not impossible. Say goodbye to annotating content, or re-titling content to add value as a brand curator.

• Cost. Unlicensed content is free, while licensed content carries fees that can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars per year, depending on your breadth of content. Cost alone will exclude a majority of today’s content marketers.

Which one is Right for You?

If you can afford it, don’t need to attract new visitors via search engines, and can find sufficient relevant content from mainstream publishers, licensed content may be a good option. It’s generally high quality. From a reading experience perspective, there’s nothing better than providing the complete original content and keeping visitors on your own site.

But for most marketers, unlicensed content is the easiest, most useful way to feed the content beast. For ethical curators, unlicensed content is free, ubiquitous, diverse, and readily available.

Want to get started with content curation? Download the 5 Simple Steps to Become a Content Curation Rockstar eBook.

Content curation is the practice of finding, organizing, annotating and sharing the best and most relevant third-party content for your audience. There’s no doubt curation has become an integral part of today’s content marketing. The number of concerns surrounding the practice however, have created doubt in the minds of some content marketers before they understand the benefits of curation done right.

Curation Pros and Con(cern)s

Pros: Content curation allows marketers to publish fresh, relevant content at a higher volume than a 100 percent content creation strategy allows. The variety of insights content marketers can publish offers readers more diverse perspectives from their peers and other third-party sources. This makes your content more credible by positioning your organization as an objective, go-to resource. Not to mention it saves marketers time and money, and avoids burning out staff.

Concerns: Some marketers may be concerned that content curation means duplicate content, which may hurt search engine optimization (SEO). If content is duplicated, it would compete for search rankings. There’s also concern regarding whether content curation involves too much outbound linking, sending readers away from your site. When done right, however, outbound links and curated content can actually improve SEO.

Here are some do’s and don’ts for effective content curation SEO.

Content Curation SEO Do’s:

Do: Curate for your audience, not for search engine bots

A great marketer knows to always keep your target audience top of mind. Always. If people like your content, they will link back to you as an industry resource, helping your search engine ranking in the process. It’s far more effective than trying to game the system. As Google’s Matt Cutts says, “Good quality trumps SEO.”

Do: Be selective about your content

Make sure it consistently provides the most value possible for readers. Content you curate should be highly relevant to your topic, provide more perspectives for your audience, and be annotated with your own insights and opinions in order to increase its value. Share curated content on multiple channels (newsletters, social media, blogs, etc.) to ensure it reaches a wide audience and gains as much exposure as possible. The more popular your content is, the more likely it’ll show up in search results.

Do: Add your feeds to Google Blog Search index

If you submit your RSS feeds to Google Blog Search, Google will consider you a more credible source of information and know when you update content. Most importantly, Google will consider you as a dynamic “blog” source, rather than just a static website. This means they’ll re-crawl more often and your rankings will improve. In addition, you will not only show up in Google Search results, but Google Blog Search as well.

To do this, head over to https://www.google.com/submityourcontent/

Choose your content program:

Add your URL:

And submit your content to be indexed.

Do: Post your curated content to Google+ with backlinks

Contrary to popular belief, Google does not factor in shares on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to their search algorithms, because they don’t have licenses to that data. On the other hand, Google does consider activity on their own social media channel, Google+, when determining ranking status.

Do: Annotate your curated posts and add your perspective

Make sure the content you’ve written is longer than the excerpt you’ve taken from the original article. With curation, it’s best practice to give more than you take for two reasons:

• Ethics. Search engine optimization aside, you want to make sure you are ethically curating when relying on someone else’s content. For further reading, take a deep dive into the ethics of content marketing.

• Improve SEO by avoiding duplicate content. When you annotate curated pieces with your own insights or opinions, the content you write allows search engines to pick up the piece as a separate source of information. This means you’re not just taking and reposting content from third-party sources. Annotating also provides more context and insight for readers, increasing its value.

Do: Retitle all your curated posts

New titles ensure you’re not competing with the original article in search results. The content in titles is taken into deeper consideration by search engines than body text. Use this to your benefit by including your own keywords in new titles.

Do: Prominently link back to the original article in your curated piece

From an ethical standpoint, this allows readers to easily click on the original post for the full text, and gives proper credit to the author. Outbound linking also improves SEO. Links to quality content show search engines you’re a credible source with dependable information.

Content Curation SEO Don’ts:

Don’t: Repost the full text of articles

This is not only unethical; it hurts your SEO. If you repost too much of the original article—especially without annotating, search engines won’t be able to know which content out of yours and the original to index, or which version to rank in query results. Link metrics may also either be split between pages or designated to just one of the posts. If you do this excessively, Google may consider you a spam blog or “splog” for short.

Don’t: Curate from a single source over and over

Readers, and search engines, rank variety as value. If your site/blog has outbound links to a variety of sites, Google knows your site is not just a front and that your content is credible and information packed.

Don’t: Share duplicate full size images

When curating content, be ethical by using only a thumbnail size of the original image. Best practices for search engine optimization include altering the image alt text, adjusting image size, and creating a relevant image name. These are all things Google takes into consideration when ranking images.

Alt text is how search engines understand the image. For example, when you see a picture of a cute puppy, you’re able to recognize what it is by looking at the picture. But search engines can’t do this, so they need text to recognize the image and rank it appropriately. Include the keywords you want to represent your image in the alt text. For example, <img src=”cute-puppy.jpg” alt=”Cute Puppy” /> lets search engines know what the content in the picture is, so it’s easier for users to find it in search queries.

The size of images also counts, although indirectly. Google ranks pages on how long they take to load. Large images may slow down your page speed, which can affect your search rank. That said, make sure the size and aesthetic of your images matches the look and feel you want on your page—just be sure to balance size with speed.

Naming images can also help when optimizing for search. Before uploading an image, give it a file name to match its context, as well as the content on the page. For example, if you’re curating a blog about the USA Olympic teams and you upload an image of the hockey team, name it USAOlympicHockeyTeam.jpeg. Makes sense, right? This not only helps Google understand the context of the image, but also ensures that the image is relevant to the page copy. Because Google considers the content of the page as a whole, this helps boost your rank on search.

Things to Consider

Using nofollow attributes on hyperlinks:

A nofollow is a value added to the HTML of a link that tells search engines not to consider the link when ranking it in a search index. This keeps the link juice in your curated piece and gives less SEO credit to the original source. Nofollows are unethical because they unfairly take search credit away from the original publisher. Google may also realize you’re using too many nofollows and engaging in a practice known as “link hoarding” for which you may be penalized.

Curata would only recommend using nofollows for aggregated content. Aggregated content can hurt SEO because it’s duplicative with no original added insight. Using nofollows on aggregated content on your site can tell search engines to not credit the duplicate link.

Here’s a great infographic that dives deeper into the methodology of nofollows.

Using your domain versus a subdomain:

(curata.com = domain, www.blog.curata.com = subdomain)

• Domains: Keeping everything on your domain concentrates all inbound links in one place. This keeps everything tightly coupled to your brand and creates a base SEO for all the pages on your domain. This can help boost search results.

• Subdomains: Perhaps your blog platform is hosted on a different server than your corporate site, but you still want to retain your corporate domain in the URL. Subdomains can also be used to categorize between different branches of  your site, such as products, services or geographical regions.

• New Domains: New domains are also another option. These are not as tightly coupled to your original domain, so you can sometimes be more credible by appearing like a third-party resource. New domains can also be used as places to establish thought leadership on a certain topic and improve SEO. Curata uses Content Curation Marketing to provide an all-encompassing resource on content curation for readers.

Check out how these companies are using curation to boost their brand; some use domains, some use subdomains. Test yourself and see if you can tell which is which.

Using share bars/iframes

• A share bar, or iframe, is a sharing tool that often hovers over the third-party content. It typically includes your branding and a link back to your curated article. Here are some examples of share bars:

  • Hootsuite’s Owly Bar

• • ShareByCo’s Engagement Bar

• Pros: This can help improve the number of views on your curated content and increase your branding exposure. Share bars can capture more social media shares because they allow readers to share your curated content to their social pages with one click.

• Cons: They can be annoying for site visitors. If you’re going to use a share bar it’s best practice to give a reader the option to close it, otherwise it can intrude on the reading experience. Share bars can also unethically steal shares and linkbacks from the original publishers. Because the share bar does not display the original article’s URL, people who cite the content often mistake the share bar URL as the proper source. This erroneously gives the curator credit instead of the original author.

Check out this article for more information on the use of share bars and iframes.

Opening Links in a New Window/Tab:

• Pros: Readers are still on your site. Many publishers choose to have links open in a new window because they fear readers will click off on a third-party link and never return.

• Cons: Opening links in new tabs disables the back button, making it easier for readers to forget about your page. They may still have your tab open, but they’re no longer reading your information. We all know what our tab bar starts to look like when links are opening in new tabs. It makes the bar cluttered and disorienting when trying to backtrack to past pages. Having links open in a new tab can also be annoying for readers. They have the option to open tabs in new windows if they choose to.

Topic pages

• A topic page combines links (internal links such as blog posts AND links that are externally curated) about a single topic in one location.

• Tagging and categorizing content for topic pages gives readers an evergreen and information rich resource. Topic pages also help improve SEO for a few reasons.

1. 1. 1. Each topic page is focused around a specific term, so they’re keyword rich—which helps capture traffic from long tail search queries.
      2. Topic pages include links to all of these other indexable pages, creating higher SEO value in Google’s eyes. It’s also a different way of crosscutting your site content and creating more internal links.
      3. Your content is repurposed on topic pages, allowing you to get the most mileage out of it as well as reaching more readers.

• Check out this topic page for Barack Obama as an example.

• Green Data Center News, a content curation site focusing on technology and services for green IT and data centers, created a topic page on Barack Obama, linking to all the articles on their site that mention him. As a result, they’re the first search result in Google for “Barack Obama data center.” The internal linking on the page, as well as the ability to capture this long tail query, optimizes this topic page of curated articles for search.

In summary, content curation is an effective content marketing strategy to increase credibility, drive leads, and improve SEO. But you have to put the work in to curate content and not just aggregate. Annotate curated content with your own insights, change titles, link to credible articles, publish from a variety of sources, and always give more than you take when it comes to third-party content.

Need more information on content curation and how it can improve your content marketing strategy? Check out Curata’s 2016 Content Marketing Staffing and Tactics Study for information on how to improve the SEO of your content, increase leads and drive engagement.

]]> /blog/content-curation-seo-dos-and-donts/feed/ 22 /blog/the-definitive-guide-to-content-curation/ /blog/the-definitive-guide-to-content-curation/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2016 15:37:57 +0000 /blog/?p=4797 A hands-on guide to content curation featuring advice from over 30 marketing experts....Read More

Marketers in a content-driven landscape are responsible for producing huge amounts of content, day in and day out. But most of us don’t have the time, staff, or budget to publish enough great (or even good) content. We do the best we can, but it’s often impossible to stay ahead of the demand. That’s where content curation comes in.

This hands-on guide shows you how curation fills that gap, answering the following questions:

1. WHY content curation is a good idea, including a look at the new Buyer 2.0.
2. WHAT content curation is, and how it fits in the context of the overall content marketing mix.
3. HOW you can put content curation to work for your brand, including a detailed, step-by-step look at what, when, where, and how to curate effectively.
4. WHY you’re curating content in the first place—a full-circle look at performance, measurement, and optimization.

This guide also includes insight from over 30 content marketing experts, who each answer the question: What’s the single biggest benefit curation brings to content marketing?

For an even more in-depth analysis, download the full eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation.

Why Content Curation? 

The path to purchase used to be a straightforward line from point A (buyer need) to point B (conversion). It was easy for marketers to guide and even control a prospect’s journey along this narrowly defined series of steps.

As you know, all that’s changed.

Today’s buyer is hyper-connected in real time via multiple devices and channels to an inexhaustible avalanche of information. This buyer isn’t waiting for you to tell them what to do next. In fact, according to Sirius Decisions, 70% of the buyer journey is now completed without any sales involvement.

So, how are buyers making their purchase decisions, and—more importantly—how can you influence those decisions?

Enter content marketing.

Businesses are adopting content marketing to respond to this consumer environment. It’s a process for developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base.

However, as more businesses jump onto the content marketing bandwagon, it becomes more difficult for marketers to maintain the frequency and quality of content required to compete.

Content curation helps you compete effectively and efficiently, and provides unique benefits critical in today’s market.

Adding content curation to your content marketing mix delivers the following benefits:

• Improves Search Engine Optimization: Curated content becomes additional indexable pages that provide more doorways into your site via search engines.

• Establishes Credibility as a Thought Leader: Curated content from high quality third party sources helps you develop go-to web resources that improve your credibility and trustworthiness as an impartial authority on your topic.

• Supports Lead Generation: Curated content drives incremental site visits that increases the potential for landing quality leads.

• Streamlines Lead Nurturing: Curated content is easily repurposed via newsletters, emails, and other channels to make lead nurturing simple and consistent.

• Complements Social Media & Blogging: Curated content supplements your social media publishing schedule and helps facilitate social media conversations—not only with prospects and customers, but also with peers.

Quick Refresher: What is Curation?

Curata’s definition of content curation is as follows:

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares relevant and high quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.”

At its best, curation is…

• A person, not simply a computer algorithm.
• Being discerning, discriminative, and selective.
• Adding value: perspective, insight, and guidance.
• Not a one-time event or activity.
• A laser focus on your audience.

 

Key Points to Remember About Content Curation

• You can curate content from a wide variety of online sources, including trade publications, social media profiles, blogs, scientific journals, news outlets, and more.

• You can and should organize curated content using rich and tailored taxonomy, grouping and categorizing related content.

• You can share content with your audience via many different channels including websites, social media feeds, blogs, mobile apps, widgets, and email newsletters.

• Content curation is not aggregation, which lacks the human touch.

• Content curation is a fundamentally human process. At the center of it all is the curator—you—hand-selecting which content to share, determining which organizational method will increase accessibility and usability, and adding context and insight to aid your audience in gaining a deeper understanding of the content.

• Content curation is not content farming: a.k.a. the unethical pirating of third-party content and publishing of high-quantity, low quality content.

How Does Content Curation Fit into the Content Marketing Mix?

According to Curata data, best-in-class marketers create 65% of their own content and syndicate 10%. For the remainder they use content curation, as illustrated below.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Content Curation

There are five primary activities required for developing and maintaining an efficient, effective and ethical curation practice:

1. Define your objectives
2. Find your sources
3. Curate by organizing and editorializing
4. Share via a variety of channels and mediums
5. Analyze and optimize your content curation performance

1. DEFINE YOUR OBJECTIVES

Content curation can be used externally for marketing purposes, or internally for knowledge management and competitive intelligence. This guide is focused on the marketing side, but the majority of best practices covered are relevant for any use case, so let’s examine a few other possibilities:

Marketing
Share content to inform, educate, and influence your prospects and customers, simultaneously strengthening your brand’s position as a go-to resource and industry thought leader.

Knowledge Management
Educate an internal audience—such as a team of researchers, on a particular topic.

Publishing
Build an online destination that can be monetized via advertisements or sponsorships.

Competitive Intelligence
Inform internal stakeholders about relevant news. For example, you might use curation to keep your sales team up-to-date on your competitors and industry.

Before you start curating content, ensure that you have a clear goal in mind.

2. FIND

Picking Your Topic

Picking your topic is an essential first step in developing a successful content curation program. Unlike other parts of the curation process which are performed on a repetitive basis, picking your topic is typically something you only need to do once.

Of course a topic can evolve over time, but you can ensure you’re starting on the right foot if you engage in proper due diligence.

The Three Elements of a Perfect Topic

There are three factors to consider when finding the perfect curation topic:

1. Competitive Landscape: How much competition is there for this topic?
2. Audience Interest: Is my target audience interested in this topic?
3. Content Landscape: Is there sufficient content on this topic for me to curate?

Ideally, you’re looking for a topic that:

• Has relatively low competition, meaning it isn’t already widely covered.
• Is of specific interest to your audience.
• Has generated sufficient content in the market for you to curate.

This topic should fall in the middle of the venn diagram. Below, I walk through three tests that help you choose the perfect topic.

Test 1: Survey the Competitor Landscape:

To survey the competitor landscape, look at other sites that cover your chosen topic and ask yourself the following questions:

• Can I curate better than they can? Can you make your curation site more attractive to readers by offering greater depth of coverage, relevancy and/or consistency?
• Is there a better perspective or opposing point of view? Can you curate the same content from a different angle, highlighting a unique take on the topic?
•  Can I broaden or narrow my topic? Can you use increased specificity or, conversely, greater scope of topic to increase your content’s “discoverability”?

Test 2: Survey the Content Landscape

In order to create a successful curation program, you must have enough content to curate. Here are a few quick and easy ways to assess the availability of content:

• Plug your desired topic into Google News and sort your results by date to see how many articles are being created per day or week.
• Do the same exercise in Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• Review blogs that cover your topic, either consistently or intermittently.

Test 3: Determine Your Audience Interest

Even after your topic passes the competitor and content landscape tests, the most important hurdle still remains. You have to ensure the topic is interesting to your business’s target audience. If not, your curated content will fail to capture or hold your audience’s attention. To gauge audience interest, use the following methods:

• Use the Google Keyword Planner to measure the general level of online interest in a given topic.
• Use either interviews or a simple survey to get a sample of your customers’ opinions about your topic—how important it is, whether they feel they have information on it already, what specific questions they already have.

The perfect topic will pass all three tests: competitor, content, and audience. However, curators often need to work with a topic that is not quite perfect and only passes two of the three tests.

An example of a great topic can be found on IBM’s Smarter Planet. IBM uses the site to educate professionals about smarter systems. They first surveyed their competitors and the current technology landscape before deciding that their audience (mainly IT professionals) would be interested in news about smart systems.

Discovering Content Sources

Once you’ve selected a topic, you need to find content sources to curate from. There are two broad types of sources to find articles from:

• Known and Trusted Sources: These are sources that you, and likely your audience, are familiar with. If you’ve chosen your topic well, you should be able to find at least a dozen known and trusted sources by reviewing the content you consume via:
  • Trade publications
  • Twitter lists
  • Specific Twitter users
  • Industry blogs
  • LinkedIn Pulse
  • Scientific journals
• Additional Sources: To supplement go-to sources, tap into these additional places for relevant content:
  • Feed readers
  • Email newsletters
  • Public relations teams

3. CURATE

After you have selected a topic and gathered your sources, it is time to start curating. The first responsibility of a curator is to decide which of your sourced articles is worthy of your audience’s attention. Here are a few high-level criteria for making an initial assessment of an article’s value:

Relevant. Is this content relevant to my audience? Though it may be related to my topic, does it offer any additional insights to my
audience that they may not already know?

Credible. Is this content from a publication I trust, such as a reputable site or blog? Or is it from a low-quality site with no credible authority in my subject area?

Diverse. Does this content offer an alternative viewpoint? It doesn’t necessarily have to be one you or your organization agree with, just one that makes the discussion more interesting.

Validating. Does this content offer additional insight that validates my point of view?

Unique. Is this fresh content that provides my audience with new information or insight they haven’t found elsewhere? If this content is available elsewhere, is my site doing a better job of highlighting and contextualizing it?

 

How Often Should I Curate Content?

While the answer varies depending on your audience size and the cadence of your other communications, the Curata Content Marketing Tactics Planner shows 48% of marketers are curating at least once a week.

 

4. SHARE

All the work done so far—identifying, finding, and organizing your content—has been behind-the-scenes preparation for sharing your curated collection with your target audience. This is the moment of truth. As a content curator, you need to decide which sharing channels are best suited to your audience. However, if you are new to curating I suggest exploring your outreach options. In the following sections, I detail the pros and cons of these five sharing vehicles:

• A dedicated site
• A newsletter
• Social media posts
• Feed
• An on-site news widget

A Dedicated Site

A dedicated site is sometimes called a microsite, and is populated primarily with curated content.

If you choose to create curated posts on a dedicated site, follow these structural and formatting best practices:

New Title- Don’t be afraid to edit a title so it’s more relevant to your audience. And consider adding an image if there isn’t one, or replacing the image with something more likely to catch your audience’s attention. Use design tools such as Canva or photo libraries like Shutterstock or Death To The Stock Photo.

Summary/Added Commentary- Whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with the original content’s author, you should include:

• A brief summary of the article, including some context around why you curated it.
• A relevant quote from the original article. This is optional, but adds credibility.
• Additional insight, opinion, and/or context.

Link Back – Always include proper attribution.

A Question – Questions help contextualize the content and increase reader engagement.

Call-to-Action– Give your readers the option to learn more about the article’s topic and/or your company.

Email Newsletters

An email newsletter is a regularly recurring communication containing a digest of all your recently curated items, or a mix of curated and created items.

 

A good newsletter template should include the following:

Introduction – Let your audience know what you’re delivering.

Recent, original pieces – This can include blog posts, infographics, webinars, or any other content your audience will find useful and/or interesting.

Relevant, timely, third-party sources – You may include articles you’ve curated via your blog and social media profiles.

Call-to-action – Invite your readers to click through to learn more, download an eBook, request a demo, etc.

Contact information and share buttons – Make it easy for readers to reach you and share your content.

Social Media Channels

Social media promotion includes status updates with links to curated content, shared via platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

  

Twitter

Since it can be difficult to squeeze an entire message into 140 characters, we recommend starting a conversation with your readers by asking a question or voicing a strong opinion.

Facebook & LinkedIn

-New Title – Edit the title so it’s as relevant as possible to your audience.

-Summary/Added Commentary – Include additional insight, opinion, and/or context.

-Ask a Question – Encourage readers to get involved in the conversation.

-Link Back – Always include proper attribution.

Feeds

Feeds are real-time, standardized, automatic content syndication.

Embedded Widget

An embedded widget is a small pane integrated via code on your existing web properties that displays content delivered via a feed.

IBM has an “Around the Web” widget on the IBM Big Data Hub microsite, as seen below.

You can also embed a Twitter widget on your site to syndicate content exclusively from your Twitter Account.

For an even more in-depth comparison of sharing
channels, download the full eBook here —–>

 

 

5. ANALYZE

After you have found, curated and shared content, it’s vital to measure its success. Use this analysis to adjust your future curation strategy. But keep in mind content curation metrics differ from those generated by most other content marketing strategies, because curation relies on third-party, off-site content. 

Let’s take a look at metrics to pay attention to for content curation initiatives specifically, and just as importantly, misleading metrics to ignore.

Site/Blog Metrics

Metrics to Watch

Page Views and Visitor Growth. Similar to other content marketing campaigns, you can simply track traffic growth month over month in Google Analytics for page views and visitors.  As your site grows in terms of authority within your target audience by reputation, and in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), you should hopefully see a steady and healthy growth in traffic numbers.

Frequency & Recency. If you provide valuable content, your visitors will keep coming back to you as a trusted resource for a topic. If not, your visitors will click off to a third-party, and will likely never return again. Either way, the metrics will reveal this.

Visitor Counts measures how many times your visitors are coming back to your site. If the content you are curating is useful, your site will be good at retaining repeat visitors. 

Days Since Last Visit measures how often your repeat visitors are coming back to your site. If you are curating valuable content, this metric should reflect the frequency of your curation and publishing habits.

Metrics to Ignore

Total Site Visits. The most successful curators focus on a specific topic for a select audience. If you are doing a good job curating, you are likely doing this too. As a result, you should set your expectations appropriately when it comes to the total addressable site visitors. For a highly specific topic in a particular industry niche, even if you only have a few hundred visitors a day you may be doing a great job.

Comments. While comments on your curated content should not be ignored entirely, it should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s natural for your readers to comment directly on the original article where the content was written. If your comment count is low, that may in fact be alright.

Engagement, Bounce Rate & Visit Time. These metrics tend to be high on sites with large amounts of original content, where users can spend a lot of time onsite in a single uninterrupted session. However, with curated sites the content consumption dynamics are very different. Visitors often leave the curated site to view interesting third-party content, and return again to read more content. As a curator, you should not be overly concerned about engagement, bounce rate, or time on site numbers.

Email Newsletter Metrics

Metrics to Watch

Subscriber Growth. If you have a sign-up form for your newsletter on your site, list growth is one of the most important metrics to watch. A steady growth in subscribers demonstrates people visiting your site find your curated content valuable enough that they want the content pushed to them via email.

Opt-outs & Unsubscribes. On the flip side, keep an eye on opt-out and unsubscribe rates. If you find many of your subscribers are leaving there are a couple of things you can do. Email them less often—perhaps change from a daily to weekly list; segment your list by topic so the content is more relevant to them; pay more attention to the content you are curating—perhaps you are being too self-promotional; or be more consistent—you may be curating sporadically which makes you less trusted.

Click Through Rate. Monitoring your click through rate is important to see how valuable your content is in isolation. If your audience is clicking through on your curated content, it’s relevant, timely, and valuable. The converse is not necessarily true however: a low click-through rate can be deceiving. Many readers get value by skimming headlines, even without clicking through.

Metrics to Ignore

Open Rate. While curated newsletters typically enjoy the highest open-rates, more than lead nurturing or promotional emails, open rates are often misleading. Open rates for any email newsletter can only be computed for readers who click through on links or don’t disable images in newsletters. So if you see a 25% open rate, the actual open rate is likely much higher

Social Media Metrics

Metrics to Watch

Followership/Fan Growth. If you share your content over social channels such as Twitter or Facebook, a good metric to track is your followership or fan page growth. While a larger number of people may be viewing your content as they browse Twitter, the ones who value your content and want to continuously receive it will follow you (or may simply be hoping for a follow back).

Retweets. Another social media metrics to track is retweets. While this is a metric for any content marketer, curators can employ a little trick to better track the spread of their curation efforts. When you share a third party article on Twitter, retitle its headline. This allows you to share your perspective, make it more appealing—and also more cleanly track retweets.

Feed Metrics

Metrics to Watch

Views, Click-throughs, Subscriptions. To measure the success of a feed requires seeing if it’s being viewed and if people are subscribing to it. To track the consumption (views, click-throughs) and retention (subscriptions) of your feed, use feed analytic tools such as FeedBurner and FeedBlitz.

While many of the metrics above don’t markedly differ from typical content marketing metrics, curation does significantly change things by providing a different content consumption experience. New curators are often thrown off by strange and disturbing looking metrics such as bounce rates—which they should be ignoring. Hopefully this provides a quick overview of the best metrics for curation.

What’s Next?

The most effective marketing is no longer just about your product or even your customer’s needs. Today’s most evolved marketers understand their strategy needs to include a larger ecosystem that considers their entire market and industry. We hope, having read this guide, that you now have a better understanding of exactly how content curation helps you do just that.

For more content curation resources and a bonus 12-step content curation checklist, download Curata’s full eBook on the topic, The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation.

 

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Step 1: Survey the Competitive Landscape

When thinking about your curation strategy, content marketing, and content curation, your competitors are not the companies who sell similar products or services. Rather, your competitors are organizations who publish content on the same topic as you. Your content marketing competitors are usually other companies that publish content on your desired topic and also happen to actually compete with you in the marketplace as well. Trade publications publishing content on your desired topic competing for your audience can be considered content marketing competitors as well.

To survey the competitive landscape, look for other sites that cover the same topic. You may find some sites that cover your topic, but only some of the time—they may also cover other topics as well. That’s a good opportunity for you as a curator, because now you can hand-pick only the most relevant content from that source for your audience. You may also find a great blog dedicated to your topic, but which only publishes an article a day or less. This is another great opportunity for you as curator, because you can hand-pick that content and share it with your audience, along with other content you’ve found.

Your real competition is another well-maintained, curated publication on the same topic. If you find that one already exists, there are three things you can do:

1. Determine if you can curate content better than they can by being more comprehensive, more relevant, or more consistent. If you are able to do so, you will likely have a publication that is more attractive to readers.

2. See if there is a different perspective or opposing point of view that you bring to the table. Even if you tend to curate the same content, doing so from a unique perspective can be enough of a differentiator that you stand out.

3. Try to broaden or narrow your topic. If your initial topic was Offshore Wind Farms, you can try narrowing your topic to Atlantic Ocean Wind Farms, or broadening it to Wind Power. By doing so, your content overlap with your competitor’s will decrease, increasing your chances of standing out as the foremost resource on a topic.

Step 2: Survey the Content Landscape

Content curation—the process of finding, organizing and sharing relevant information on a specific topic, relies on third party content. In order to become a successful curator on a topic, you need to determine if there is enough content to curate.

For this part of your curation strategy, survey the content landscape with a variety of tools. Plug your desired topic into Google Blog Search and Google News. Next, sort your results by date and see how many articles are being created per day or week. Try the same in Twitter as well. You can also make a list of blogs that sometimes cover this topic.

Now, putting all of these sources together, can you curate at least four articles per day? You will find many more interesting sources once you start curating, but you should be able to curate at least four articles a day to start. If not, you may want to broaden your desired topic.

Step 3: Survey your audience interest

Even if you have a great topic that passes the competitor survey and the content survey, it needs to be a topic that will draw an audience—and not just any audience, but the target audience for your business.

One easy way of getting a quick sense of audience interest is to use Google’s Adwords Keyword tool. It’s designed for advertisers to measure search volume for various keywords for pay-per-click campaigns. However, it also doubles as a proxy for how much interest there is online in a certain topic. This is a good way of determining if there is interest in the topic you chose, but it’s not very useful in telling you if the audience interested in this topic is the right one for your business. To determine that, it often pays to go out and ask a sample of your customers if your topic resonates with them.

Putting it all together: The Curation Strategy Sweet Spot

At this point in your curation strategy, the challenge is to find a topic that passes these three tests. Once you have found such a topic, you have found the sweet spot that maximizes your likelihood of succeeding.

It’s easy to get stuck on a topic that passes two of the tests but not all three. Here are a few examples:

Passes competitor test and audience interest but not content test. Let’s say you have a great topic: “paper based liquid chromatography.” There are no other resources dedicated to this topic so it passes the competitor test. You know your audience is deeply interested in this topic and there is decent search volume, so it passes the audience interest test. However, it fails the content test—there’s very little third-party content on this topic to curate on a regular basis. One possible solution is to broaden the topic to “liquid chromatography” which has more content.

Passes content test and competitor test but not audience interest test. Let’s say your company sells outsourcing services and your target audience is VPs of Engineering at software companies. You choose a unique topic of “Next generation tablets.” There are no other sites dedicated to this, and there is sufficient content for third party sources. But the topic is flawed because it has nothing to do with your business. Though it may attract a technical following, it is not going to specifically attract VPs of Engineering who are interested in outsourcing services. A better topic might be “outsourcing management best practices.”

Passes the audience interest test and content test but not the competitor test. Let’s say you sell a secure operating system for iPhones that can be managed by enterprise IT departments. You choose the topic of “iPhone Business Productivity” tips and news. It caters to the right audience of iPhone-oriented business professionals. Furthermore, there is a plethora of content on this topic. However, there is an established publication on this exact topic that has dedicated full time staff that not only curates but creates content multiple times a day. It’s going to be an uphill battle to displace them. You may want to choose a less covered but relevant topic like “iPhone security issues in the enterprise.”

By choosing a topic that passes all three tests, you are curating around a topic that interests your audiences, faces minimal competition, and has sufficient third party content. Congratulations—you have nailed your curation strategy. Once you have identified this topic, you need to start curating, and Curata has an eBook that can help you there:

In this post I analyze the results of Curata’s recent survey of 1,000+ marketers to hone in on what these foxes are doing from a strategy, staffing and tactics perspective to kick ass with content. I share many of the staffing, process and technology benchmarks gleaned from the research, as well as what some of these foxes have to say about their own strategies. For a more in-depth presentation of the benchmark data and related guidance, download the entire eBook here: Content Marketing Staffing & Tactics Barometer.

Overview: Top 5 Content Marketing Strategy Areas to Focus On

We’re entering a new phase of content marketing. The marketers leading this pack are no longer focused on pure content volume or trying to hit the lottery with that one piece of content. These marketers—the foxes, are building the foundational elements of a practice that taps into the power of content to move an entire organization, versus simply a handful of people in a small corner of the marketing team.

More specifically, the foxes are focused on:

• Strengthening the content marketing team (e.g., 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing).
• Creating a content marketing strategy (check out The Content Marketing Pyramid to see how we do this at Curata).
• Building out content marketing processes (i.e., production, distribution, analytics).
• Investing in content marketing technology (75% of foxes are increasing marketing technology investment).

SCOTT ABEL
Founder, CEO, and chief strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc.  @ContentWrangler
“The single best practice that will set content marketers apart from the crowd is to focus on adopting intelligent content production efficiencies. The big challenge today is producing relevant content efficiently. It’s about scale, automation, and creating content the way factories create products: In a united, consistent, optimized way that provides the most bang for your content production buck.”

Survey Demographics

1,030 marketers participated in this survey. They were made up of:

• Participant Titles:
  • CMOs and VPs of marketing made up 8.7% of respondents
  • Marketing directors, managers and specialists were 45.9%
  • Marketing consultants and agencies were 16.7%
  • Marketing technology directors, managers and specialists were 9.1% of respondents
• Revenue:
  • 54.4% of companies were <$10M by revenue
  • 26.4% were $10M to >$100M
  • 12.6% were $100M to <$1B
  • 6.5% were $1B+

Content Marketing Works!

The new content marketing movement has had a significant impact on business, with 74% of companies increasing lead quality & quantity from their content. Marketing leadership is recognizing content’s positive impact, with 75% of companies increasing content marketing investment, and 43% increasing staff levels. However, the real work is just beginning.

Content marketing hype is coming to an end, indicating the beginning of its maturity across more organizations that will:

• Expand the strategic impact of content marketing efforts
• Fill skill-set gaps across teams
• Better leverage existing resources
• Get more rigorous on measuring content impact deep into the pipeline.

Content marketing is positively impacting the entire marketing & sales pipeline. Content continues to build awareness for organizations, and the best marketers are tapping into the power of content to more deeply engage leads, better influence sales opportunities and influence revenue growth.

CHRIS GAEBLER
Chief Marketing Officer, Arbor Works  @Chris_Gaebler
“Good content makes a point. Great content tells a story. Stories have tension and consider the humans involved. Start with the person, think about their struggles, and write.”

However, although content marketing has been growing significantly over the past three to five years, companies are only just starting to ramp up their efforts to take full advantage of the opportunities presented. As one example of the early stage content marketing is in, the average content marketing team consists of only three staff members.

Content Marketing is Still in the Infancy of Its Maturity

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs’ 2016 content marketing study identified 32% of companies as being sophisticated or mature. This is similar to the 29% of companies considering themselves leaders in Curata’s study (i.e., the foxes).

Although roughly a third of companies are leading the pack, all companies have significant opportunity remaining by improving their content marketing practices. This covers many areas across people, process and technology.

Investment Continues to Grow

75% of companies are increasing content marketing investment, with 43% increasing staff levels. The 42% of companies with an executive responsible for content marketing will increase to 51% by 2017. Skill-sets being beefed up include writing (i.e., journalists), design professionals, and others.

This growth in staff is exciting and sorely needed as we enter a new phase of content marketing maturity. No longer are content marketing teams solely focused on trying to create one ‘home-run’ piece of content that garners thousands of shares and page views. This become too much of a lottery play. Now we’re focused on:

• Building a content marketing strategy that yields high quality content on a consistent basis
• Paying more attention to customers’ needs along the entire buying cycle
• Increasing relevancy by developing content focused on specific verticals, company sizes, and even specific accounts (e.g., supporting account-based marketing)
• Tapping into the reach of sales teams through sales enablement
• Learning what does and doesn’t work to get better and demonstrate impact

ROBIN GOOD
Writer, speaker, change-agent, & publisher of MasterNewMedia.org @RobinGood
“What do I believe is the single best practice that will set apart the top content marketers from the rest of the field this year? The ability to move away from the classical article metaphor to create content that is not only useful, rich in resources, and well documented, but which also provides real information benefits to the reader, either in the form of a learning experience, of a starting point for new discoveries, or as a problem-solving resource. Doing this is not easy, nor is it going to save anyone time—quite the opposite. But those who invest time and resources to create such content will stand out for contributing something of such real value or inspiration to many that it will last to promote their brand for a very long time.”

What’s Your Content Marketing Spirit Animal?

When thinking about your own organization and its current efforts to thrive in the content marketing environment, do you think of your business as:

The Fox
Cunning, strategic, quick-thinking, adaptable, clever, and passionate, with the ability to use your resources for survival and growth.

The Wildebeest
Follows the pack, afraid of being left behind.

The Elephant
Strong, stable, and patient. Slow to shift to changing situations.

The T-Rex
Formerly powerful but rapidly on the way to extinction.

There are many different animals in the jungle, and some are better suited for survival than others.

MONICA NORTON
Senior Director of Content Marketing at Zendesk @monicalnorton
“The content marketers that stand out from the crowd are risk-takers. They experiment. They never get too comfortable. If they don’t fail once in a while, they’re playing it too safe.”

So at a high level, what are the foxes up to?

Content Marketing Strategy in 2016

The majority of marketers (75%), plan to “increase” or “significantly increase” their content marketing budget in 2016. Accountability for this investment will increase in the next six to eighteen months as more rigor is applied to content’s pipeline impact.

The ability to respond in real-time—and not only newsjacking—is becoming more and more important. However, good planning provides the foundation from which you can respond most effectively, which is why having a great editorial calendar remains crucial. You can find the best in the Ultimate List of Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Templates.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Marketing strategist & bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, and Newsjacking @dmscott
“Gone are the days when you could plan out your entire content marketing programs well in advance and release them on your timetable. It’s a real-time world now, and if you’re not engaged, then you’re on your way to marketplace irrelevance.”

Top 6 Content Marketing Challenges

1. Limited budget (including staff)
2. Creating enough content on a regular basis
3. Finding the best sources to create amazing content
4. Measuring the impact of content
5. Organizational culture
6. Promoting content

Companies continue to struggle with tapping into expertise across their organization to create compelling content, as well as recycling existing content into different formats across different channels.

Leading companies—the foxes—struggle with budget just like everyone else. However, they are more focused on finding sources for better content rather than creating enough content, and they don’t struggle as much with organizational culture supporting content marketing endeavors.

Other insight regarding these challenges includes:

• Limited budget and content, as well as source discovery, will become easier problems to resolve with organizational structure and process changes, along with content marketing technology.
• Measuring the impact of content is increasing in priority. The ability to measure the impact of content allows marketers to create more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
• Promoting content was ranked as the lowest marketing challenge. Promoting content helps marketers get the most out of what they create before creating more. Don’t forget to market your marketing, and don’t just leave it up to your social media team!

Guidance for addressing these challenges in this post and the related eBook are structured into a People, Process and Technology framework.

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: People

Leading marketers are focused on:

• Hiring a content marketing lead who will drive strategy and orchestrate the content marketing strategy across many marketing disciplines.
• Build out the team, focusing on the greatest skill-set gaps as detailed below.
• Improve staff alignment across the organization.

42% of Companies Have an Executive Responsible for Content Marketing Strategy

Do you currently have an executive in your organization directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy? (e.g., Chief Content Officer, VP or Director of Content)

Expectations for growth of this senior role were high in 2015, with 49% of companies expecting to have a lead for this role by the end of 2015. Growth has been slower than expected however. That said, this role exists at 42% of companies today with this expected to increase into 2017.

Of the foxes, 53% have this role in place today, versus 32% for the elephants and T-rex. Small companies with less than $10M in revenue, and large companies with $1 billion+ in revenue should see a 30% increase in staffing for the lead role in 2017.

Two thirds (68%) of these senior content marketing executives have global authority—a good sign given how important collaboration across an organization is for content creation and input, content reuse, and content distribution.

“Chief Content Officer” Not a Common Title for Content Marketing Executives

What is the exact title of the executive in your organization directly responsible for overall content marketing strategy?

The most common title for content marketing executives is Content (Marketing) Director or Manager—not Chief Content Officer. Most folks titled Chief Content Officer are in agencies or publishing organizations. 68% of companies have up to three people on their content marketing team, and 42.5% of companies are increasing content marketing staff levels this year.

29% of $1 billion+ companies are struggling to align content marketing strategy across their teams, while small companies are leading the pack in content marketing alignment.

What’s the Greatest Skill-Set Missing From Today’s Content Marketing Team?

JAY BAER
Marketing consultant, speaker, author of New York Times bestseller Youtility @jaybaer
“The best content marketers will think video first in every element of content marketing. Because if you have video, you have audio. And if you have audio, you have text (via transcription + editing). Video is now the seed corn for all great content marketing.”

Alignment Also Key Success Factor for Content Marketing Impact

Please indicate how aligned your content marketing strategy and tactics are across internal teams (e.g., campaign management; social media; marketing operations; product marketing; regional/field marketing).

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: Process

Leading marketers are focused on:

• Creating a content marketing strategy (step-by-step provided in this webinar)
• Completing a content audit.
• Focusing content creation on segments and accounts. (e.g., account-based marketing)
• Reusing content. (e.g., using the Content Marketing Pyramid as a framework)
• Creating and curating content.
• Measuring content’s impact.

A common theme among foxes is stretching the dollar.

They’re asking themselves:

1. What content do I already have?
2. How can I reuse and repurpose content?
3. How can I collaborate and curate?

Do You Know Which Content Exists Across Your Company, and Where It Is?

How often does your organization complete an audit of your company’s content?

37% of content marketers never complete a content audit!

Reasons to Perform an Audit:

• Know what content you have and don’t have
• Focus content creation and curation efforts on gaps in content inventory
• Prevent investing in duplicate content
• Identify and then replace or remove outdated content
• Determine which content can be reused and repurposed
• Improve quality of existing content

Content Marketing Leaders Create Content for Individuals (Account-Based Marketing)

BETH KANTER
Author, trainer & nonprofit innovator in networks, learning, and social media @kanter
“The top content marketers understand their audience and why they want to consume content, and create and curate high quality content that helps them reach their goals.”

29% of Leading Marketers Systematically Reuse and Repurpose Content

The Content Marketing Pyramid

Use the Content Marketing Pyramid to execute a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse and reach. For the full framework for developing and executing your content marketing strategy, download The Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.

JASON MILLER
Bestselling author, global content marketing leader at Linkedin @JasonMillerCA
“The one single best practice that will set apart the top content marketers from the rest of the field in 2016 is… doing more with less by extracting every last bit of value from your existing content while striking a balance between data, creativity and your own personality for content creation moving forward.”

The Best Marketers Create AND Curate Content

Almost two-thirds of foxes (leaders) are curating content, with a similar percentage outsourcing content creation. Companies not taking advantage of these strategies are missing a HUGE opportunity to better leverage resources and more deeply engage with users. The recommended content mix is: 65% created, 25% curated and 10% syndicated content. Target one-third of your created content to be outsourced.

What percentage of companies are curating content or outsourcing created content?

Additional reasons to outsource or curate content? To better leverage resources, improve the ideation process, better engage buyers through higher value content, and engage with your ecosystem.

What Exactly is Content Curation?

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.

Have you ever published a “best of” post, commented on and shared a link on Twitter, or posted a link to Facebook with your commentary? Then you’ve curated!

To be clear, content curation done right is not pirating. Follow these 6 tips to curate content ethically:

1. If you are reposting an excerpt from an original article, make sure your excerpt only represents a small portion of the original article.
2. Always identify the original source and drive visitors to the original publication. 3. Retitle all content you curate.
3. Don’t use no-follows on your links to an original publisher’s content.
4. Inject some creativity and your own voice into your curation efforts. E.g. provide context for the material you use, add your own insight and/or guidance for your audience.
5. Make your commentary longer than the excerpt you’re reposting.

To really curate like a rockstar, download The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation eBook.

Analytics

“Half the money I spend on advertising content marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – (with apologies to) John Wanamaker

The foxes are laser-focused on measuring the impact of content; to justify its impact on the organization as well as to drive continuous improvement. These leaders also get that content impacts the top, middle and bottom of the funnel if done right.

Content marketing leaders excel at performance measurement

JIM LENSKOLD
Marketing expert, international speaker, president of Lenskold Group and author of Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability @JimLenskold
“Marketers with ROI-based measures will gain advantages as they maximize their financial performance. Content measures must go beyond engagement and leads to show contribution to both incremental sales and increased customer value.”

Seeing the Impact of Content

Estimate the impact of your company’s content marketing investment on the following areas during the past 12 months.

Content marketing has had the greatest impact on the top of the funnel (TOFU) so far. However, the foxes are seeing significant impact on MOFU & BOFU as well. They are looking at metrics across the funnel, from leads generated and influenced at the marketing-owned stages, to sales opportunities generated and influenced.

Time to Raise the Performance Measurement Bar

Data-driven content marketing is possible, and can yield significant results. For example, Curata used its own content marketing platform, integrated with Marketo and SF.com, to demonstrate that long form blog posts generate 9 times more leads than short form blog posts. (full blog post here) Investing in marketing technology makes this process possible.

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: Technology

There’s no doubt that the number of technology solutions continues to grow, as evident by the below Content Marketing Tools Universe figure below. 75% of foxes are increasing marketing technology investment in 2016 to take advantage of these new solutions. However, a key step in getting the greatest benefit out of this investment is integrating new software into your existing tech stack. 40% of companies have either “moderately” or “fully” integrated their marketing and sales force automation systems, compared with one third in 2015. 59% of foxes are dedicating effort to MAP and SFA integration.

Summary:

Content marketing is impacting ALL stages of the pipeline. The foxes get this, and as a result content marketing is entering a new phase of maturity. Don’t miss the boat!

• Build your content team: both internal and external. Take a Center of Excellence approach.
• Identify opportunities to stretch your content marketing budget (e.g., repurpose and reuse content, tap into content curation).
• Raise the performance measurement bar to go beyond measuring page views and social media. Dive deep into marketing pipeline impact and sales pipeline impact (examples here).
• Tap into the power of content marketing technology: Establish a closed-loop content supply chain, and integrate with marketing and sales automation (e.g., the content marketing platform is complementing marketing salesforce automation). And above all, don’t forget to have fun with it!