Digital Content Strategy? This phrase is ubiquitous if you’re from the marketing domain. Content alone can not do anything; it’s not derived from marketing strategies. When we talk about Content, there come a lot of content strategies like social media content pillars that hold a vital role in creating optimized Content for the posts.
Everyone will agree when I say posting content alone isn’t enough to boost sales and make your marketing efforts effective. Pushing Content online without a direction, digital content strategy is like cooking food without salt. There is no use!
To yield results from your digital content strategy, you need a target audience, a long-term goal, and a purpose.
Which begs the question-
How can you make digital content strategy impactful to create a web presence?
Suppose you guessed a robust digital content strategy. You’re right.
A digital content strategy is a foundation for your website content, blogs, guest blogs, eBooks, articles, and more.
It might sound like a lot of trouble, but it’s worth it.
As a content marketer, a content marketing plan is essential to produce results. As soon as things start working and your content plan brings in more users, you’ll realize numbers don’t lie. Plus, you can be sure your competitor already has a strategy, so why should you be left behind?
Now that you know why a content marketing strategy is essential let’s dive into what it means and how to create an impactful one.
However, if you wish to get an impressive digital content strategy, give us a call; we’re just a call away from you!
What is a Digital Content Strategy?
A digital content strategy is a comprehensive plan that helps you achieve your business goals using Content. A digital content producer is responsible for performing digital content planning, leading to digital content strategies to create impactful results.
For example, one of your business goals can be to create online awareness – to achieve this goal. You need to create Content that highlights a heart-touching issue, addresses it positively, and generates audience response. Your strategy will focus on positive Content and in-depth SEO practices to create online awareness.
Let’s have a look at some of the questions you should have an eye for digital content planning process;
- Where should you publish your digital Content?
- How often should you publish digital Content?
- The platforms where you should share/promote/distribute digital Content
- The style/voice to use in your digital Content
- The audience niche you’re writing for
- Your content budget cap
- Your topic areas and target keywords
- And more
If you produce high-quality Content can create a trusting relationship with your brand audience in the long haul. Business branding services play a vital role in creating a result-oriented digital content strategy that cages maximum response from the users.
An excellent digital content strategy is the first step for “the attract and retain stage” in a buyer’s journey. In addition to attracting new customers, your content strategy also comes in handy for sale enablement and customer satisfaction.
Moreover, with 70% of marketers investing in content marketing – it should be one of the essential things on your list.
The Statistics For Digital Content Strategies & Digital Content Creation
Content marketing comes with a backend digital content strategy that involves creative Content and marketing strategies to create an impact! Marketers create an impressive digital content marketing strategy.
According to the infographics, more than 91% of the organizations in the US utilize a digital marketing content strategy roadmap to create engaging content for the website. With the increasing number of brands and Internet usage, marketers have realized the importance of digital content creation for the website and its importance to be an integral part of digital content strategies.
Image reference: Statista
3 Fundamentals For Building Impressive Digital Content Marketing Strategy
Do you know how you follow a map when you go on yearly hikes? Much like that, a content strategy acts as a map. It offers you the direction in which your content efforts should focus to create a maximum effect, so you know how to generate more ROI.
There are three fundamentals for a solid-proof digital marketing strategy. Let’s look at them.
1. Knowing Your Digital Content Strategy Goals
The first thing you need to decide is the goals you want to achieve by implementing a content strategy. The goals will drive your content strategy and outline it from the start. Identifying goals is the first fundamental of a strong strategy.
Your goals can be but are not limited to:
- Building brand awareness.
- Creating brand loyalty.
- Educating your customers.
- Boosting customer engagement.
- Recruiting talented employees.
2. Knowing Your Content Differentiation Factor (CDF)
The Content Differentiation Factor or CDF is the “it” factor of your Content. It’s the fundamental of your content plan that differentiates you from your competitors. It helps you stand out from the crowd and gives you a unique identity. It answers these queries:
- Why are you different from your competitors?
- How can you help your audience differently?
- How is your help better than any other brand?
Once you have your unique attribute, you can start finding relevant topics to create digital Content.
Knowing Your Digital Content Topic Area(s)
The essence of content marketing is to offer your audience the answers they’re looking for. You need to create value for your Content, and to do that, your Content should solve your user’s problems. The Content you create includes:
- Articles and blogs
- eBooks
- Informational videos
- White papers
- Infographics
- Images and more.
When you publish trustworthy and authentic Content, you build trust with your audience. Now, make sure when you start creating Content it:
- Relate to the products or services you sell.
- Speaks to your audience.
- Showcases your industry expertise.
You should know your topic area, find relevant keywords, and optimize your content according to it. Down the line, pick up topics related to your expertise. For example, if your expertise is “sports shoes,” then you can create Content for topics like:
- Exercising
- Sports events
- Dieting etc.
Here are some tools you can use to find topic areas:
- BlogAbout
- BuzzSumo
- Feedly
- HubSpot’s Website Grader
After reading this entire section, I hope you must be clear about how to create a content strategy for the brand. However, in upcoming sections, we’ll explore more about the unique digital content strategy you must dig in to boost your brand.
The 6 Steps of Creating a Digital Content Strategy
How can you create a robust digital content strategy? Here are six steps to help you piece together a good strategy. Let’s see what you have to do.
Step #1 – Understand the Digital Content Strategy Foundation Blocks
The foundation blocks of digital content strategies are the fundamentals I discussed in the last section. They are the essential requirements you need to meet to create your content strategy.
You need to get them right before you move forward. Here’s a recap of the fundamentals:
- Knowing Your Content Goals
- Identifying Your Content Differentiation Factor (CDF)
- Finding Your Topic Areas
Like we talked about them before, getting all these foundations accurate will assist you in creating a digital content strategy.
Step #2 – Know Your Audience For Whom You’re Creating Digital Content Strategy
The next step is considering who your Content is targeted at – the audience. Who are you creating the Content for? Who’s going to read it?
If you’re unaware of your audience, here’s what you can do about that:
> Thorough Audience Research
Before you create a content strategy, it’s essential to do thorough audience research to understand who will be viewing your Content. The audience research will help you identify:
- The content tone you should use.
- Types of content pieces to create.
- Content your audience wants to see.
How can you carry out proper audience research? The best advice is to talk to them. Pick people from your audience and ask them what they would like to see. There are quite a few ways to do this:
- Invite them over to a seminar or webinar.
- Carry out an online survey.
- Create polls on social media and ask your audience.
> Create Audience Personas
An audience or buyer persona is like a guide you can read before every content piece is created. The sheet has all the in-depth facts about your audience. The tool helps you know your audience personally and keeps you focused when you create Content. This is what the buyer or audience persona may look like:
To create the persona, you need to ask a lot of questions from your audience that should revolve around the headings in a persona. The easy trick is to write down your questions then ask to create a good persona. Many saas websites creators first understand the customer persona and then create an optimized website enriched with features & functionality. However, if you wish to read about the do’s and don’ts of saas content marketing, please feel free to read our blog.
Step #3 – Learn to Use SEO
If you didn’t already know this, SEO is the seasoning you need for your Content. Your content material should be SEO optimized to make a difference online; hence, knowing and implementing SEO is very crucial.
When buyers go online, they search for specific keywords; for example, “buy cheap shoes online” – your job is to make sure your website link appears on the first page.
You guessed it; your SEO content is responsible for making your website reflect on the first page.
SEO starts with simple keyword research. Keywords are short phrases or terms, and here’s how you should choose them:
- The keywords should be more than three words (long-tail keywords)
- Choose keywords with the low competition or low difficulty.
- Make sure the keywords are brand-relevant.
- The keywords should be the ones your buyers are searching for.
Basically, find your sweet spot between relevant keywords and the competition – something you can still rank with.
Now, let’s discuss the process of finding keywords for your digital content strategy:
- Start by defining your industry. For example, “buy shoes online.”
- Now add more terms to the keyword. For example, “buy shoes online from sales.”
- Use a tool to see the keyword variations you can use.
- Check keyword difficulty and density – avoid any difficult, competitive ones.
Various tools allow you to do proficient keywords research like SEMrush, KWFinder, and Ahrefs.
Step #4 – Curate Online Authority for Your Website
If you can build online authority for your website, you are a quarter of the way there!
Your online authority has a ripple effect:
- Shows your industry-specific expertise.
- Build trust with online users.
- Transforms website visitors into leads and then into long-term customers.
- Creates the website’s DA (Domain Authority).
- Generates high-quality backlinks.
- Helps your content rank and reach more people.
All these effects reflect content marketing, which is why it’s necessary to build your online authority during strategy development.
You can start building your authority from the web pages and content pieces you want. Focus all your efforts there and start building. Make sure to keep maintaining your website Content.
Tips for building authority:
- Keep your website fresh with new content like blogs.
- Make your website design user-friendly, smooth, and as flawless as possible.
- Publish the best SEO content pieces.
- Work qualitatively, not quantitatively.
You know, without a digital content strategy, you’re just paddling without any upstream. According to CMI’s B2B Digital Content Strategy research, more than 63% of the markers claimed that content creation challenges are real, and companies collapse because of poor digital content strategies. At the same time, 51% claimed that the issues were general with digital content production. Moreover, 79% of the content marketers claimed that digital content strategy takes place either in documents or undocumented.
Step #5 – Creating Content
Here’s the easy part of your content development strategy; the content creation bit!
You have your buyer persona, keywords, topic areas you should cover, and content goals. Let’s look at how to create Content.
> Create SEO Content
Time to put your keywords into the Content.
- Create Content based on your keywords.
- Find topics based on the keywords.
- Add them into your metadata, page URL, headings, first and last paragraphs, and overall Content.
- Add them as naturally as possible, and you can even add internal links to them.
Make SEO-rich Content rank higher on search engines!
> Work With a Workflow
You need to make content creation systematic so that you always have something to publish on the website.
A proper workflow will act as a stem to your content strategy. The key is to lay out the steps for your team to create Content – the process will make the overall execution easier. Start with these steps:
- Ideation – Find content ideas and topics to match your content goals regularly.
- Creation – Research, draft, create, edit your content, add images and videos.
- Preparation – Schedule Content weekly and publish it accordingly.
The steps should help outline a workflow to add Content consistently.
> Map the Buyer Persona to the Marketing Strategy
The buyer persona you created before wasn’t just for show – this is where it comes in handy. Match your buyer person with your marketing lifecycle to understand where the buyer is during the purchase journey.
When you understand the buyer’s position, it helps you curate Content accordingly, without the fluff. You can address customer concerns at the right time, and they will feel heard. Curate content for each stage of the marketing lifecycle.
> Match the Topics to Your Content Goals
The best way to ensure your content helps you achieve your goal is to make it purposeful.
When your content has a purpose, it instantly connects with your goals and takes your business towards more online success.
You can create mini-goals that help you create better Content – of course, not every mini goal needs to be met, but they can be anything like:
- Boost SEO rankings.
- Build connections and make sales
- Create brand awareness
Have a look at the type of Content you need for each mini-goal mentioned above:
The next time you start writing Content, make sure it achieves at least one purpose to fuel business growth. If your content idea doesn’t meet these goals, ignore it and move to the next.
> Do Guest Blogging
Guest posting and blogging are a way to boost your online authority. When you suggest a guest blog to another website, it leads to more audience to your website.
When you approach third-party websites for guest posts, remember these tips:
- Only talk to websites related to your niche and industry.
- Read the third-party website’s guidelines and follow them.
- Contact authoritative websites to increase your own authority.
- Make sure the website’s domain authority is higher than 30.
Step #6 – Manage and Maintain Your Content
The final step of your content strategy should be to manage and maintain every content piece you have created.
Don’t think just because you posted some content online; your job is done – it’s just getting started.
Promoting and managing your great Content is an ongoing process to keep the momentum strong in the future.
So, what can you do to manage and maintain the published Content? However, if you wish to read about unique content management systems, read our fantastic blog, which contains all the necessary information regarding cms.
> Set a Budget to Promote Content
To ensure your digital content strategy works, you will need outside help, like investment and resources. Here are some things you’ll need to set a budget for:
- Hosting your website.
- Content creators (writers, editors, proofreaders, etc.)
- Tools for keyword research, email marketing, topic research, etc.
- Analytical tools to measure website and content performance.
Budget everything from the beginning for smooth content creation and refrain from saving money on essential tools.
If you decide not to invest because “it’s just content,” you could lose a competitive edge. Invest and stay persistent with your Content. A website manager is responsible for performing all of these activities & keeping track of digital content strategies proposed by the marketer.
> Market Your Content
The only way you can target and attract users is by leveraging SEO. Apart from SEO, think of ways you can promote and market your Content. Here are some ways you can try:
- Internal link your blogs to other blogs on your website.
- Email your subscribers about the new content you publish.
- Promote your Content on social media.
- Invest in PPC and social media campaigns for the best content pieces.
> Maintain Your Content
When I say maintain your Content, I mean constantly monitoring it and making it better. You can’t expect your content to improve SEO rankings or make a difference if it’s outdated.
You need to audit, track, and measure the results of each content piece you publish online. Without this practice, you won’t know what’s working for your brand and how you can generate more ROI.
How Can You Maintain The Quality Of Your Content? – Checklist For Digital Content Strategy
Let’s have a look at some of the core points one should know before they plan their digital content strategies;
- Refresh your old Content – Refreshing old blogs is one of the vitals; digital content strategy. Many of your blogs are probably outdated but don’t delete them; in fact, update those according to your new digital content strategy. Add new information, make it sound professional, and align it with your brand.
- Track and measure your Content – You need to know how your Content is affecting your marketing efforts. Here are some things to track: Organic traffic, visitors, engagement, bounce rates, page views, click patterns, comments, likes, shares, etc.
- Add visuals – Make your Content appealing by adding visuals like videos, images, and infographics. People find the Content pleasant to look at if you add visual aid.
- Include factual data – When you make a claim, make sure to add the source to it. If your fact-based data has back up, people will find it easy to trust you.
- Format to perfection – Your digital content strategy needs to be focused more on readability, for which you need proper formatting. Users could get bored of your content piece if it lacks proper headings or is bulleting.
Digital Content Strategy Examples
Some of the core digital content strategy examples are as follows;
- Blogging
- Social Media Marketing
- Visual Digital Content Marketing
- Ebooks Digital Content Strategies
In Conclusion
You can’t expect to excel at digital content strategy without a proper strategy. Your strategy is a foundation for your efforts, and it guides you towards maximizing ROI.
As quoted in CoSchedule’s State of Marketing Strategy Report, marketers who prioritize a digital strategy have a 313% more chance of achieving success than those without a strategy.
That’s an incredible figure, right? It shows how vital the role of a digital content strategy is when you start content marketing.
