We all know that content is a must-have for brand awareness, recognition and promotion, but it can be very time-consuming. It’s easy to spend hours upon hours brainstorming with your team, researching keywords and topics and creating blogs, social media posts and videos. It also can be hard to find the internal resources to do everything you need to create and execute a robust content strategy. Fortunately, content curation can help.
What is Content Curation?
Content curation is the process of selecting and distributing relevant, high-quality articles and information on a particular topic. The overall goal of content curation is to engage and inform your audience while inspiring them to convert.
Why is Content Curation Important?
While content curation is not a replacement for creating your own materials, it can be a great way to supplement your editorial calendar and bring in a fresh perspective to your site. Curated content should include a mix of source materials including original pieces and third-party content, like news publications, industry journals, blogs and the work of thought leaders. It should include formats such as news articles, graphics, photos and videos. Curating content for newsletters and emails allows companies to keep their audiences informed and up to date-on topics that matter to them.
There are many additional benefits to investing in content curation. It can:
- Increase credibility
- Improve cost-effectiveness
- Allows you to position your brand as a thought leader in your space
- Help you stay relevant
- Connect you with industry leaders
Need more reasons to invest in content curation? Find your inspiration in these real-world content curation examples.
7 Examples of Content Curation to Inspire You
1. AdvisorStream
AdvisorStream is an award-winning marketing platform that helps financial advisors grow their practices by building trust and credibility with clients through content. Their platform promotes highly engaging and personalized communications while using licensed content from reputable publishers like The New York Times Licensing Group to drive engagement and conversions.
NYTLicensing worked with AdvisorStream to provide a selection of premium articles from the world’s best business publishers, expanding AdvisorStream’s content offerings. The company was able to add articles from both The New York Times and the Harvard Business Review to drive its’s brand credibility and provide users with valuable information. The content bolstered AdvisorStream’s lineup of trusted resources and substantially enhanced its ability to deliver on one of its platform’s core value propositions – to help advisors grow their business through lead capture.
From January to June 2020, AdvisorStream experienced a 200% increase in views from licensed content and a 260% increase in lead capture on its platform.
2. BuzzFeed
One of the largest digital media companies in the world, BuzzFeed is a great example of a brand that provides fun, interactive and actionable content from a wide variety of sources.
Even though BuzzFeed has an in-house team of writers and journalists who produce original content, a huge portion of its newsfeed features curated content from around the web. The selection is so vast that it can almost send readers into information overload. With the click of a button, a reader can gain access to world news, discussions on the latest movies and TV shows, recipes, celeb gossip and more.
BuzzFeed also excels in creating digestible curated content. It is known for listicles filled with graphics, videos and gifs that areeasy for anyone to scroll through on a desktop or a mobile phone.
3. Moz
Moz is a digital marketing platform and SEO software-building tool that helps brands increase website traffic, rankings and visibility within search engine results pages. The company provides analytical software to a variety of businesses, and has become known throughout the digital marketing industry as a thought leader and a rusted source for great content on marketing best practices.
The Moz blog includes posts written by Moz employees along with a variety of pieces by thought leaders in the SEO and marketing space. Moz is also known for its Whiteboard Friday series, one of the longest-running video content series about marketing. Viewers regularly see both employees and guest speakers give their views on marketing best practices.
One interesting aspectof Moz’s content curation strategy is its program to include readers in content creation i. Moz offers writers the opportunity to establish a profile on the Moz site where they can market themselves and score points by creating high-quality content for Moz.
4. Inc.
Inc. started as a print magazine, but has since built out an impressive online presence by adopting a powerful digital marketing strategy. Its wide-reaching content program combines in-house writers with special contributors who provide a fresh educational perspective for readers through commentary, opinion or advice pieces.
Inc.’s focus is business-related content, but uses a variety of formats, including republishing content from Quora. Quora’s team selects answers to questions that would interest Inc.’s entrepreneur-minded audience, which helps Inc. provide more content to readers than it could with just the in-house team.
5. Estadão
Estadão is a daily newspaper published and distributed throughout Brazil. Part of Estadão’s mission is to provide readers with information relevant to their lives. It posts content in categories like politics, sports, economics, technology, finance and culture.
In 2019, Estadão hosted a live event inspired by New York Times journalism. The daylong program included an opening ceremony and a series of 10 different panel discussions and three presentations inspired by The Big Ideas from The New York Times Licensing Group.
The Big Ideas asks the world’s leading thinkers to contemplate a single issue. In this case, Estadão played on the Big Ideas question “What is Power?” to present an event that tackled contemporary issues in Brazil. The different topics discussed included the power of technology, the power of society, the power of networks and the power of the economy.
By leveraging The New York Times’s editorial journalism and brand, Estadão was able to sell 493 tickets to opinion leaders, secure premium sponsors and involve the United States Embassy, which provided simultaneous English translations throughout the event.
6. Morning Brew
The Morning Brew curated newsletter promotes itself as “the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable.” It is a free daily newsletter that aims to “give you need-to-know-info in a way you didn’t know you needed.”
The Morning Brew includes both domestic and international news along with entertainment stories and any other need-to-knows for the day. Every morning, readers get a Morning Brew email newsletter in their inbox,sprinkled with a mix of serious articles and quick tidbits meant to entertain.
The Morning Brew serves its reader by including editorial-style content alongside sponsored content. It provides quick summaries of the most important news articles of the day (including links to sources), letting readers decide if they want to read a quick tidbit or go on a deep dive into the subject matter at hand.
7. Digg
As a news aggregator with a curated front page, Digg works by selecting stories for specific audiences. Overall, Digg is a social networking website that features user-submitted news stories. It promotes anything from widely respected news sites to obscure blogs.
Digg also builds its own list of stories that are going viral across the Internet. As a result, Digg is chock-full of interesting curated content from a variety of different sources on topics ranging from science and technology to politics and world affairs.
Final Thoughts
Content curation can bring a host of benefits to your business. It can save, you time, help you make a good impression on potential consumers, connect to your target audience and fill up your editorial calendar without the need for in-house resources.
Curating content can help any brand show readers that they are up-to-date on current trends and values while also providing useful content from a different perspective.
NYTLicensing has a variety of different content curation packages that can help your business come alive. Harness the power of our world-renowned journalism to inspire your audience, elevate experiences and engage new customers.
