Have you ever considered content curation as a means to complementing the content that you create?

Content curation can and does help to cement your position as a marketer that understands what they are talking about (and with it, thought leadership) and many marketers are starting to see the benefits that it can bring over more traditional content marketing techniques.

If you think of content marketing as being mainly about using content (whether it be found, created and/or shared) to meet the needs of your audience and to fulfil your business goals, then content curation is more about gathering relevant content together and then presenting it to your audience in a way that is more optimised and targeted.

Think about content curation as doing away with the practice of just sharing random pieces of content as and when you stumble across them. Rather you are going to have your audience first and foremost in your mind and planning ahead as to which types of content and which topics you want to cover.

So, now we know what content curation is and how it compares to more traditional philosophies on content sharing, let’s have a peek at some of the ways in which leveraging the power of content curation can benefit you and your marketing efforts.

Industry Knowledge

It should go without saying that with content curation your overarching goal should be the education of yourself, your team and most importantly your community. It takes a lot of time and work to keep up-to-date with a constantly shifting online marketing landscape and content curation is a great way to make the process much simpler.

By packaging together all of the relevant and recommended content that covers a particular subject, you make it much easier for your readers to sort the wheat from the chaff.

However, it’s not enough to simply share the content. Content curation also gives you the opportunity to explain your thoughts on the material and why you think that it is worth the time and attention of your audience. In fact, you should never just share content without offering some insight as to why, and some explanation of annotation should be considered best practice when it comes to sharing content.

In providing a steady stream of reliable, valid and relevant information you will establish your website and social media platforms as places to go for anyone wanting to learn more about your corner of the industry. By backing up your brand with solid evidence from external sources you will increase the credibility of your business and the trust that your audience has in it.

This will in turn build brand loyalty as customers will appreciate that you don’t just care about making yourself look good but also about their needs as well. Not only this, but content curation will also bestow your brand with a personality of its own and I’m sure that we don’t need to tell you that a brand with a personality is infinitely more likable than a faceless one which is little more than a logo.

Thought Leadership

I bet you thought that becoming a thought leader was almost exclusively related to creating your own content didn’t you? Well, you may be right that becoming a thought leader is related to your ability to deliver information based on your own knowledge, expertise and experience, but that is not the entire story.

A real expert also knows when to yield to the expertise of others and knows where to find the best information is also a part of thought leadership. Being able to admit that you don’t know everything and instead pointing people to other experts will make you appear even more humble and credible.

A thought leader may be incredibly knowledgeable about their industry, but anyone who claims to know absolutely everything about a topic is probably lying (or, at best delusional).

By curating existing content as well as creating your own, you will further cement yourself as someone who not only knows a great deal about their field, but also as someone who is constantly searching for a consuming new knowledge and sharing it with their audience.

This gives the impression of someone who is never satisfied to tread water and is always looking to improve their knowledge base and themselves. If that doesn’t sound like the behaviour of a thought leader, I don’t know what does?

So, there you have some of our thoughts on content curation and the benefits that it can bring to your business when compared to more conventional content marketing methods. Let 2016 be the year that you stop just randomly sharing content willy-nilly and instead begin to curate your content in a more focused and audience-centric manner.

Do you curate content for your business and, if so, what benefits have you seen from it? Have you witnessed your audience grow as a result and has engagement gone through the roof?

Or maybe you have stumbled across some no-noes of content curation.

Please let us know either way.