The first step in your content curation strategy is to establish clear goals because all of the other details depend on it. Once you know exactly what you hope to achieve through content curation, you can start making decisions on how to achieve that goal. Your audience is bombarded with content constantly, so without clear goals, you’re just adding to the noise.
There are many different goals for content curation. Here is a list of possible goals you may have. As you read through them, try to identify those that sound most suitable for you and narrow these down to one.
Brand Awareness
The content you create and share can help you spread brand awareness. Through high-quality and unique content, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and someone worth listening to. You can position yourself as a thought leader. While brand awareness doesn’t lead to sales directly, it helps to put you on your target market’s radar, which translates to sales and other types of engagement later on down the road.
Informing Your Audience
The purpose of your content curation strategy may simply to be educate or inform your audience. You can tell people about what’s going on in your industry or educate them so that they can make better buying decisions.
Lead Generation and Nurturing
Content curation can be part of your sales funnel. Through keywords and social media sharing, people can find your curated content and become prospects. You can nurture these leads by offering various types of content you’ve curated based on your ideal customer’s interests or their progress through your sales funnel. This content can help you qualify prospective buyers.
Engagement
As we mentioned in the introduction, curated content adds to your opportunities to interact with your audience. If your goal is engagement, you can seek out content that will get your audience commenting and interacting. Look for content that stirs up a debate or encourages interaction.
Sales
Rather than just lead nurturing or brand awareness, your goal may be to use content curation to directly drive sales. Part of your content curation could be sharing product reviews or other information to help your customers make the final purchase. Your goal could also be to up-sell or cross-sell to customers who have already purchased from you.
Customer Retention and Loyalty
Your aim may be to retain the customers that have already purchased from you. One way to do this is through an exclusive newsletter, which can include curated content. This content keeps your customer tuned in and paying attention, thus increasing the likelihood that they will buy from you again.
Pure Entertainment
The purpose of your content may simply be to keep your audience entertained. You can pull content from various sources and present content to your audience that you think they would enjoy reading or watching.
Adding to Your Created Content
Finally, the purpose of your curated content may simply be to add to the content you’re already creating. You can create a more robust editorial calendar by “padding” the content you produce with that of others. Just make sure that it’s high-quality content and that you add something to it. Simply adding filler content can have a negative effect.
Tips on Setting Good Goals
Using the above ideas to get you thinking, identify the major goal of your content curation strategy, and create a statement that clearly defines it. For example, “My content will intrigue my readers and start conversations, which will turn my Facebook page into a forum of lively discussion. This will result in more brand awareness, more engagement, and more traffic.”
Make your goal measurable. This will help you decide whether it has been achieved or not. For the example above, you could set a metric such as “an increase of 50% in comments on my page over the next month.”
Finally, set up a system for monitoring your results. For example, you can use Google Analytics to measure traffic or a social media dashboard to easily see social media activity. Set aside a regular time in your schedule to monitor results.
