When it comes to marketing, content writing serves to promote brand awareness as well as move brands’ target audiences to conversion. In fact, almost 87% of marketers employ content creation to catch the attention of potential customers. This is why companies, brands, and digital marketers now choose to form in-house content writing and curation teams or outsource content writing services in Hong Kong and around the world – to build their databases and compete with other brands.
However, the internet is home to billions of articles on different topics and industries. With that, it’s almost impossible to produce original content without any basis from other authoritative websites. This is why brands are now starting to employ content curation – a content strategy aimed to compile and collate relevant information and sources that are relevant to a brand’s audience as well as applicable to the brand’s area of expertise. In this article, we will discuss how content curation influences a brand’s relevance, as well as promote the brand’s authoritativeness on certain topics related to their business goals and the services they offer.
Why Is Content Curation Important in Digital Marketing?
Compared to content creation, content curation utilizes existing information and articles, imbues them with a different perspective that is uniquely the brand’s own, and in turn produces content that is organized and original to their audience and customers who are interested in those specific topics. Some of the benefits of employing a content curation process for content production are:
- Improved SEO-ability of the website – Content curation introduces quality content to your website, as well as a high number of backlinks, which may help your site rank better on search engines and improve your authority.
- Improved reader experience – When you’re curating content, you’re basically providing readers with an organized overview of concepts sourced from other websites. In a way, you may be presenting a summary of relevant information, a reading guide, or a research report that may make a reader’s experience more pleasant than having to read multiple articles.
- Sets You Up as a Thought Leader in Your Industry – With curated content, readers are given access to important information and relevant news that are useful to them. Once you establish yourself as a thought leader with great credibility, readers will know that when they visit your site that you will only have useful content that is valuable for them, promoting site loyalty with your readers.
This is also why digital marketing in Hong Kong and in other countries all over the world has started shifting to content curation strategies to offer readers and potential customers with tailored information. But remember that content curation is not merely collecting information to present to the audience. This also means that you must add value to the topics that you are trying to present and how these topics are relevant to your industry and to your brand.
In addition, remember that content curation works hand-in-hand with content creation, since your readers also need access to new perspectives and the latest developments in your industry instead of only getting info that has been around for years.
How Do You Do Content Curation?
Having curated content comes as a product of a comprehensive content curation process: from zeroing in on your audience to sourcing important information from some of the most trustworthy sites. If you’re planning on curating your content to provide readers with valuable information, here’s a content curation process you can adopt:
Know Who Your Readers Are
If you’re only starting your content creation journey, you first need to know who you’re writing for and which subset of the population you’re trying to accommodate. If you’re an established brand, you more or less know who your target audience is and what type of content they want to see on your website or on your page.
For example, if you belong to the tech industry, you’re probably writing for the tech-savvy group or potential clients looking for an intro to your tech brand. You need to focus on informational content or tech updates relevant to your products or catalog.
Choose Your Avenue for Your Curated Content
The next step is to know exactly where you want your content to go, be it on an on-page blog, a social media feed or a newsletter. This is basically how you’re going to reach your audience. If you think that your readers are active on social media or if you’re targeting younger generations, you may want to utilize social media platforms to promote audience engagement and social sharing.
If you’re looking for SEO optimization, you might want to utilize on-page blogs. With curated blog posts, you can incorporate keywords relevant to your industry, which may increase your visibility on search engines. If this is what you’re planning, you can collate topics and information from other trustworthy sources and reproduce them in an organized, easy-to-understand article. Your audience wouldn’t need to pore over hundreds of articles to get the information that they’re looking for during their search.
For a more targeted medium, you can also try newsletters wherein content is sent to readers’ email addresses on a regular basis. However, to properly capture your readers’ attention through newsletters, you need to have catchy headlines or subject lines as well as optimized send schedules. On average, newsletters have an open rate of 21.33% – less than one in four people click on content. You can improve this rate by optimizing your title, adjusting audience reach, revisiting emails lists regularly for active email addresses, and focusing on relevant and important topics to include in every release.
Source Articles From Trustworthy Sources
Lastly, you need to put in place an effective content curating process to filter information that may be relevant to your audience or readers. This will help you produce articles that are organized, easy-to-understand and significant, which may improve clickthrough and ranking for the industry that you’re targeting.
Fortunately, numerous tools at your disposal can make curating content easier and faster, including Feedly, Flipboard, Curata, and Sniply.
A Few Reminders for Effective Content Curation
To effectively utilize digital content curation, there are a few reminders that you need to heed to avoid any issues or to stop your curation from being counterproductive to your site’s ranking. Here are a few tips you need to follow:
Don’t forget to cite and credit your sources
When it comes to content creation, citing and crediting your sources appropriately is part of the ethics of writing for the web. Curating content doesn’t mean that you can directly lift content without giving credit. If you’re writing about a certain topic that has been discussed by websites that have authority, it’s important that you cite and reference each excerpt to the appropriate writer or creator through external links. Some creators may even reciprocate your backlink by adding you to their next content.
Do not lift articles off the internet and pass them as your own
While content curation is basically collating information from various sources, this does not equate to getting full articles from a website and passing them as your own. Lifting articles is not only unethical but is also illegal in some formats, especially without proper citation. In addition, this may also negatively impact your ranking since you’ll be producing duplicate content.
Do your own research and verify the information before publishing
Remember that not everything on the internet is true. Avoid spreading misinformation and unverified facts by doing your own research and verifying the information that you’re planning on including in your articles. It’s your responsibility to do your own due diligence to safeguard your brand’s image as a thought leader. You don’t want to be tagged as an unreliable source or a purveyor of misinformation.
Employ Content Curation and Creation With Truelogic
Producing content for the web is complicated, especially for beginners. Brands often prefer to put out original articles as much as possible to keep conversations going. Unfortunately for content creators, original content may be hard to produce especially when almost all brands in different industries are also competing for the spotlight. With content curation, you only need to source reliable content, organize information, and present it to your audience.
If you’re unsure how you can employ this strategy or improve your brand’s visibility and authoritativeness through content, there are numerous digital marketing agencies with enough experience in tailor-fitting content for your brand, including Truelogic Hong Kong. Partner with us and let us run you through the intricacies of digital marketing and content creation for better conversions and brand awareness.
