As content marketing evolves from a product-oriented approach to a focus on telling stories and providing non vendor-specific information, marketers are acting more and more like journalists rather than salespeople.

Stuffing content with keywords or feverishly building backlinks is out, while crafting compelling narratives and striving for quality over quantity is in. Readers want relevant, credible information that will help them in their project, job and career; therefore, content that focuses too heavily on product or company information will fail to engage them and keep them coming back for more.

Creating content that meets these higher standards helps build trust. But it isn’t easy, which may explain why many companies are now hiring a content executive to oversee their content strategy. Curata’s recent survey shows that 43% of marketing organizations have an executive leading their content marketing efforts.

Many organizations also crowd source content from customers or other corners of the organization, license content, or outsource content to agencies or freelancers to round out their internal content creation efforts.

These approaches can help supplement your in-house, dedicated team’s created content; however, not all brands have the money for outsourcing or licensing content, and varying quality levels can also make these strategies impractical.

For many organizations, the antidote is curated content, which involves finding and linking to relevant third-party content while adding additional context or commentary to put your own spin on the topic. Readers want to hear from their peers and other third-party sources.

Everything you publish shouldn’t be focused on your product, your opinion or your insights. Top-notch marketers know that content shouldn’t be egocentric. (e.g., check out this video regarding what content marketing leaders at Xerox and Kimberly-Clark have to say about this)

Here are a few reasons why curated content should be part of your content marketing mix:

You can’t do it all yourself. Even if it were possible for you and your team to create a high enough volume of content from scratch, readers want more variety in their content. They want to hear from multiple reputable sources and curating content allows you to present more than one perspective. Presenting multiple perspectives also does a better job of building trust than writing from a purely egocentric perspective.

You’re not the expert on everything. If a topic is trending and you’re not the expert on that area, you can curate from third-party experts that can provide a credible point of view. If a news story breaks and you don’t have time to create something from craft, you can still comment on the story via curation. It’s not possible for you to cover every topic under the sun, so curation allows you to publish on a diverse array of topics and helps position you as an expert.

Now that we’ve convinced you of content curation’s value, here’s a look at five best practices:

1. Assign responsibility

Decide who will take ownership of content curation and have that person identify appropriate content and determine how it will be annotated and shared.

2. Attribute to the original source

Fair use requires that you credit the original source, and in content curation that typically means including a link.

3. Add your own voice

Don’t just regurgitate what another person said. Annotation involves not only summarizing or quoting the original piece but adding your own opinions or perspectives. This allows you to create value for your readers adding deeper insights. 

4. Market your marketing

Once you’ve published curated content, promote it to your audience so it gets read and shared.

5. Leverage technology

Use content marketing software to help find, organize, annotate, share and analyze the most relevant and highest quality content for your audience. For ideas, check out the content curation tools section on this massive list of content marketing tools. 

Download this ebook for step-by-step instructions on how you can put modern marketing techniques to use to grow your business.