Why Startups Should Curate Content

If you decide to focus exclusively on creating original content, you’ll be unable to cover all the important trends in your niche that are critical to your customers. By bringing together your original content with curated content, you can round out your coverage with valuable 3rd party content. Furthermore, by combining your content with others, you can add a new level of richness and flavor to your content marketing efforts.

Curation is an excellent way to establish your startup as a thought leader in your space. If outsiders view your company as a key source of industry information, you will quickly build your brand recognition, as well as develop trust and goodwill among customers. In addition to the branding benefits, curation grounds you in a domain, learning the field as you review and share content with others. This helps ensure that your expertise remains relevant and at the leading edge.

Many startups are competing in frontier, niche markets. In these markets, it’s unlikely that there are established, consolidated sources of high-quality information. By being first to market as a content curator in your space, and by hosting curated content on your website, you can quickly rise as a primary destination site for those interested in your industry.

Instead of curating content, you could create all original content, from authoring blog posts to white papers. But for startups in particular, it’s difficult to find enough time to produce enough original content in-house and it’s equally challenging to allocate funding for contract writers. By complementing your original content with curated content, you can accelerate your content marketing efforts using fewer resources. In this way, content curation is an ideal approach for the lean startup.

The amount of material available online is so vast that many topics have already been well covered by others. In this case, you’re better off pointing your audience to other articles and sources versus creating a nearly redundant article on your own website. Your customers will appreciate you sharing high-quality content and you’ll also gain the attention of the 3rd party source, potentially sparking a new relationship in your industry.

Since you can only post so much original content, content curation can help you sustain daily and weekly momentum with your content marketing efforts. While original content will attract new customers, curated content will ensure your audience is regularly engaged and your company is top of mind. In short, curated content will ensure customers remember you if and when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.