How to smartly manage B2B content curation

There are benefits to be gained from including curated content in your B2B content marketing plan. Among other things, curated content builds trust and relationships, provides validation, is highly efficient, and aids learning and professional development.

But how do you source content which your audience will deem relevant and valuable? How do you determine what’s curation-worthy? What’s the right ratio of created versus curated content? And how can B2B marketers manage the inherent risk?

Allow us to enlighten you.

Source appropriate content

There are countless tools available to assist you to curate content efficiently and effectively. From simple to complex, free to subscription-based, there is software to aid with content storage, segmentation, keyword monitoring, personalisation, categorisation, repurposing, aggregation, and distribution.

It’s up to you determine which tools are right for your circumstances.

Feedly is one we at Market Expertise rely on daily. We use Feedly to aggregate countless RSS feeds, allowing us to effectively curate content for clients across a multitude of social accounts.

Keen to know more? Check out Hubspot’s list of the top content curation tools.

Determine what is curation-worthy content

For content marketing to be effective, the content must be consistently high-quality; it must be both relevant and valuable to your audience.

That statement applies to both the content you create, and the content you curate. You won’t build your brand and grow your business by curating mediocre, irrelevant or stale content. Quite the opposite, in fact.

When curating content, the challenge, therefore, lies in separating what’s valuable from what’s valueless.

Your success is contingent upon you:

• having a clearly defined audience
• understanding what is, could be, or should be, relevant and valuable to your audience.

Importantly, when curating content you should look for both style and substance. Yes, the content must be technically or topically relevant to your audience – that’s a given. But to be genuinely valuable, the content must also be appealing and engaging.

Curated content should educate, inform or inspire. Therefore, in addition to vetting for relevance, pay attention to the format, tone, style of writing, production values, and use of imagery, illustrations, and graphics. Is the content interesting and inviting?

Find the right balance of created versus curated content

What proportion of your total content should be curated? There’s no precise formula and the answer will depend upon your particular industry and organisation. However, experts do agree on two things:

• you should curate more than you create, and
• promotional material should comprise the smallest percentage of your total content.

Manage the risk

In 2017 high profile brands including Verizon, Walmart and The Guardian suspended advertising on Google and YouTube after their ads appeared alongside extremist and offensive content.

Similar, albeit less extreme, risk applies when curating content.

From a reputational standpoint, you need to avoid associating your brand with radical ideas, fake news or even satirical content. Maintaining the trust of your audience is essential.

From a business standpoint, you’d prefer not to promote your competitors.

And from a corporate affairs perspective, you may wish to remain apolitical and avoid particular subjects.

Three ways you can manage content curation risk:

1. Educate the people who are curating content so they understand how to check for legitimacy, how to verify content and sources, and are alert to who and what to avoid.
2. Maintain a list of blacklisted bloggers, publishers and keywords.
3. Take advantage of the functionality that is built into the leading content curation tools. Feedly, for example, allows you to mute words and sources.