Curation is an important aspect of any B2B marketing strategy if you develop and share content. You're curating everything from a blog post to sharing an interesting story from an industry outlet or influencer across your social medianetworks. However, content curation can be used for more than just providing a new perspective to your content.

Curation allows content marketers to create more convenient, meaningful content experiences for their target audience while expanding thought leadership, reinforcing their content calendar, and enhancing production efficiency, thanks to today's vast amounts of information and short attention spans. Content curation enhances and extends your content marketingresources by leveraging the power of current owned, social, and third-party media. This does not imply that content curation is completely free. Rather, it's more cost-effective than creating brand-new content and helps you realize the full value of what you already have.

To make sure we're on the same page, here's my definition of content curation:

Content curation is the process of gathering, selecting, categorizing, commenting on, and presenting the most relevant, high-quality material to fulfill the needs of your audience on a certain topic.

Curated material isn't just a compilation of other people's work; it also includes references and connections to additional resources. While content aggregation may appear to be similar to content curation, it lacks original commentary. Content curation provides editorial value by incorporating your 360-degree brand with a personal perspective and comments. Sharing or gathering other people's work isn't the same as curating content. Content curation can include completely new, original content that you're releasing for the first time.

3 Reasons To Curate Content

According to studies, there are three main reasons to include content curation in your content marketing strategy:

• Content-related resources are scarce among marketers. The inability to develop enough content, people resources, and budget constraints content marketers.
• Customers look for information about purchases on their own. This frequently occurs before marketers are aware that their clients are shopping. This applies to both B2B and B2Cclients.
• Promotion does not produce excellent results on its own. You can't keep pushing your own content and expect to rise above the noise.

Curate The Work Of Others

For example, Kevan Lee of Buffer wrote The Ideal Length of Everything Online.

Stine Andersen, Brand Movers, chose it (Denmark)

Lee makes a fantastic piece of curated material by compiling the finest of other people's research. He organizes the data so that readers can get a quick summary of the most important studies. Lee also adds value to the content by including his own analysis, which he does as a good content curator. All sources get Lee's affection in the form of a link. He takes it a step further by including an infographic as a roundup.

Tips to put into practice:

• For your audience, gather relevant research on a significant topic. By sharing other people's research, you can establish yourself as the go-to expert.
• Feel free to add your own thoughts. Don't merely dangle the information for your viewers to figure out.
• Add images to handpicked content to make it more useful. To draw in more attention, Lee included an infographic. Consider the different types of mediayou can utilize, such as photos, videos, and presentations.

Draw Attention To The Greatest Photographs In Your Field

The World's Coolest Offices is an excellent example of how tocurate photographs and personalize them. To entice readers, choose photos that are colorful and intriguing. In this scenario, the photographs are arranged in such a way that readers are compelled to keep clicking.

This story was curated on Huffington Post, where it gave full credit for the piece and referenced the original, which adds to its curatorial merit.

The Huffington Post has perfected the art of content curation as a vital aspect of generating newsworthy and appealing information at an extraordinarily quick rate every day, according to Ristic. While the editorial team at Huffington Post creates a lot of original content, it also curates current information on human-interest topics.”

Tips to put into practice:

• Use the power of images to your advantage. To encourage more involvement, use visuals to draw in your viewers.
• To your ongoing content, add a curation section. Consider yourself a publisher, and select some of the best online content for your readers.

Keep An Eye On Your Comments Section For New Ideas

Dumenco compiles feedback from a previous piece that drew a lot of social likes and comments. By mentioning and linking to his prior piece, he brings new traffic to it. He makes use of user-generated content and offers credit to those who deserve it. It's a terrific piece of content that's simple to read and share.

Tips to put into practice:

• Look for high-quality information that your target audience is interested in among your most shared and discussed posts, speeches, and other social media activity.
• Create a cross-link to an older piece of material. Remember to return to the original post and include a link to the new column. This aids in search engine optimizationand keeps your content up to date.

Collaborate With Influencers To Create Spectacular Content

This is a traditional list post that gathers feedback from ten sales influencers. It's excellent content that gives readers the impression that they're getting the inside scoop from a group of experts.

The terms "winning salespeople" in the title pique the interest of the target audience while also providing an added incentive for these influencers to share the post with their followers.

This is an example of selected unique content. Aside from a brief introduction and conclusion, this content is entirely contributed by contributors.

Tips to put into practice:

• Collaborate with influencers in your field to generate curated content. Take a page from Lee Odden's playbook for Epic Curated Content. Create a theme and reach out to influencers.
• Sweat it out on a fantastic title. Titles are important. Make certain that your hand picked material attracts readers.

Make The Mundane And Uninteresting Universal And Enjoyable

Every content marketing playbook should include this example. It's even on BuzzFeed. It demonstrates how to make a mundane industry, such as trucking and transportation, interesting to the typical reader.

According to Turner, BuzzFeed explains how the trucking and transportation sector affects the average person's life in a variety of ways every day in a digestible, easy-to-understand fashion. While transportation isn't glamorous, it is essential to practically every other business.

Tips to put into practice:

• Make product connections for your audience. Don't presume that your readers are well-versed in your field. Make connections that are evident and straightforward.
• Encourage your readers to have a good time. A stand-up comedian is not for everyone. Find hilarious GIFs that relate to your products and brand by following BuzzFeed's lead. Tim Gunn from Project Runway is even featured.

Get Your Audience To Participate

Michael Brenner, a B2B Insider, urged his audience to contribute their best brand content marketing hubs. It's a good illustration of content curation. You don't have to do everything yourself. The goal is to strengthen your bond with your target audience.

Tip for action:

• Directly solicit feedback from your audience. Brenner made it simple for his audience members to engage. All they had to do was provide the names. He basically outsourced his content's research process.
• Make it as simple as possible for people to participate. Recognize that just about 10% of your audience will contribute to your efforts. Streamline the work to increase participation.

Create A Curation Column That Is Updated On A Regular Basis

Unverified Voracity is a frequent feature on MGoBlog, one of the most popular and entertaining college football blogs. Curated content is an effective strategy to establish thought leadershipin a given field.

Unverified Voracity, like any good piece of curated content, is more than just a collection of college football links. Brian Cook, the owner of MGoBlog, adds a lot of his own humor and comments.

Tip for action:

• Make a name for yourself as a tastemaker in your field. Make a comment on what's new in your category. Cook has some advice for you: Incorporate a sense of humour and individuality.
• Assemble and organize the data. Curation is more than a collection of hyperlinks. Add value to your audience's experience.

Collect Ideas From Others

Every conference producer and participant should bookmark this curated compendium. It's a wonderful way to express your gratitude to those who presented. If at all feasible, grab a photo of the presenter or some unique comments that aren't currently being shared on Twitter.

Tip for action:

• Post-event wrap-ups can help live eventsreach a wider audience. Highlights or statistics from a conference or presentation can be curated. Of course, you must add your own commentary in order to avoid simply copying other people's work.
• Give your target audience some context. Many marketers overlook this important part of content curation. You must respond to the question, "Why is this content essential to me?"

The Curation Kitchen Staples: Microcontent

Quotes. Tips. Commentary on social media Videos from third parties. Gifs. Memes. Curated microcontent, whether used as seasoning in a long-form blog article or modularly in short-form social content, provides your content its flavor. This is the most basic sort of curation, and it is used in all others. And, as Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, previously said:

“Snackable content can often be managed and repurposed like ingredients to create a main course. On their own, short-form content like quotes, tips, and statistics are useful for social network shares and as added credibility to blog posts, eBooks, and articles.”

Microcontent is simple to use and integrate, allowing you to add more depth and insight to a topic, establish credibility, and spotlight industry leaders.

When does microcontent curation make sense? Whenever the content is relevant to the topic at hand. Microcontent bolsters your narrative and establishes credibility with your audience by providing proof points.

Roundups, Listicles, And Resource Hubs: The Curation Classics

The quintessential content curation approach is gathering vital bits of information and ideas and putting them into an easily digestible style. The idea is simple: you're collecting intriguing snippets from various sources on a given topic and putting them in one place.

Relevance and value are the core themes of this curation approach (and any content tactic for that matter). It has to be topically relevant to your audience, and it can't just be a random collection; it has to be useful.

The most popular of the curating classics are news roundups. We've all seen them and most of us have a few favorites, so I won't spend too much time on them. (A shameless plug for our weekly compilation of digital marketing news.)

Traditional curation is primarily a game of awareness and engagement. This type of curation can make it easy for your audience to find insight and inspiration—and reduce the amount of time they need to spend on the hunt. If you want to provide your audience with a helpful resource that hits the points quickly and showcase your brand as a thoughtful expert in the space, this type of curation can make it easy for them to find insight and inspiration—and minimize the amount of time they need to spend on the hunt.

Mashups Of Thought Leadership: The Next Level Of Curation

Curation isn't only about compiling a comprehensive, searchable database of information or resources, or peppering original content with numbers, quotes, or videos. Curation can help you become a thinking leader.

Trend-focused works are excellent examples of this type of curating. Taking inspiration from traditional curation forms, this type of content tries to uncover one or more trends or patterns by combining gathered information with your knowledge and skills.

This could be small-scale or large-scale, with a single notion providing supporting content or a tie-in, or your opinion on a collection of connected trends, facts, or insights. A good example is this article from *SAP's Digitalist Magazine.

This type of curation, however, isn't limited to discussing trends. A mashup curation strategy is used in many of our blog entries to educate and engage marketers, as well as define our opinions and marketing approach.

This is seen in Nick Nelson's latest piece on how to produce clear, succinct material. A basic principle is that we should use our words intentionally, and Nick was able to demonstrate this with his extensive knowledge and some relevant third-party ideas.

Also, we don't merely mean collecting data from third-party sources when we term "curation." You can curate your own material; it's just called repurposing most of the time.

Here's a wonderful example from Salesforce. This recent post addresses a significant market trend (lack of consumer trust), uses microcontent from Salesforce's own research (the Trends in Consumer Trust study report), and then creates fresh content to tell a story for a specific audience (retailers).

Curating and repurposing influencer content is also a significant opportunity. The ideas that influencers share with you are likely to have consequences and applications in other areas.

When mashups make sense for curation: If you want to establish thought leadership on a topic, mashups should be part of your content strategy. Mashups allow you to enhance an idea, perspective, issue, or opportunity by incorporating existing information as a starting point or as the cornerstone of your interpretation.

For The Win: Content Curation

You're already conducting some type of content curation, regardless of your editorial strategy. Curation, on the other hand, can be made a more purposeful and effective element of your overall B2B content marketing plan.

Material curation may bring value and convenience for your audience and writing staff, whether you produce an ultimate list with statistics from numerous sources, provide high-level takeaways from an event or study, or repurpose your own content to develop thought leadership.