Content marketing is the key to online success—but where do you start? The first thing you need to do is devise a digital content strategy for your company.
What is a Digital Content Strategy?
A digital content marketing strategy is the management of all of your digital media. It helps your company deliver consistent digital media content that engages your target audience. A content strategist can guide what, when, and where you will be publishing your content.
More than that, a digital content strategy helps manage your team’s responsibilities. A clear digital content strategy not only will arm your company with a detailed plan for distributing content, but it will also lead your team’s tasks. In time, your content creation process can manage itself and help manage your team.
The Must-Haves
A Unified Mission
No digital marketing strategy is worth anything if it is not directed toward a goal. Figure out what your company seeks to gain from content marketing. Does your company want to improve engagement and add more backlinks to your website? Or does your company want to enhance readership?
The content goals that your company sets will shape your entire digital content strategy. It is important to set realistic goals. You know your company best so set a goal that you know that you and your team can accomplish.
Make sure that your whole team is on board with these goals. Create a unified front before you head into the battle of digital content marketing.
Well Defined Audience
Without a well-understood audience, content marketers would be wandering around in the dark. Understanding your audience demographics will inform the digital content types that you produce.
Try to picture your regular customer and develop a couple of different profiles of who that customer generally is. An easy way to do this is through online surveys, focus groups, interviewing your customers, or by taking a look at your competitor’s audience. Understanding your buyer personas is integral to knowing what type of content you should develop within your content strategy plan.
The next step is to understand what appeals to someone that falls into one of those profiles. You can do this kind of audience research in a number of ways. The easiest way is to directly ask your ideal customer either face-to-face or online what they are looking for. What appeals most generally to your ideal customer will inform the content you produce.
Consistent & SEO Driven Content
Content is king, so long as it is propped up with key terms related to your content, you will steer organic traffic to your company’s website. To find these keywords, do some research into what your ideal buyer personas are searching. Once you have your keywords or key terms, integrate them into your content to optimize it.
Now that your content will be SEO driven, it is important to be consistent with it. This means that your company should create a content calendar and posting schedule to regularly deliver information to potential consumers. This schedule should apply to all of your digital content—including blog posts, social media updates, emails, and other forms on online content.
Content, Content, Content
So you regularly produce and post SEO driven content, that’s it for content then, right? Wrong. The content itself is what is going to create a larger turn-over for your company. You need content that is relevant, engaging, and informative. Know your topics and provide reliable content that will help develop a rapport with your audience. Don’t forget about using a specific voice and tone to your advantage. You want your content to build brand awareness and set you apart from your competitors.
Your content needs to be relevant. It can’t be off-topic articles with links to your company website. Instead, your content should:
- Be applicable to your audience
- Be suitable for your products
- Show your company’s personality and expertise
Your audience wants to see that you are the expert on your own topic area. This is also where you can set your company apart from your competitors. By showing your company’s personality, you will relate to your audience more in a way that your competitors might not.
Choose a great title for your blog to encourage readership. Without an enticing title, your ideal customer might not click on your content, no matter how informative it is. Put thought into your titles to encourage turnover.
Social Media and Online Marketing Strategies
If you have been creating and delivering high-quality content on your own website already, it might be time to tie it in with other forms of marketing strategies—like social media and email marketing.
Social media can take your company’s digital media strategy to the next level. You can repurpose your digital content into new marketing streams. For example, you republish your content by reformatting it into a social media post.
Any new content that you publish should be promoted and shared on social media. You should also produce attractive lead-ins on your social media. This will give your audience an idea about what the content you are sharing is.
Social media can also be used to connect you to existing or potential industry influencers. Influencers can create a larger reach for your company. Be sure to spend some time to build a relationship with influencers so that you can continue to reap value from their exposure.
Implement, Rinse, Repeat
Publishing regular, high-engagement digital content requires some trial and error. Your digital content strategy may require some tweaking to get it just right. After executing your content strategy for a couple of months you should assess how well it has been performing.
A good way to evaluate the success of your digital content strategy and marketing efforts is to use analytics. This allows you to examine who your audience is, how much they are engaging with your content, and what content they engage with most.
Focus on what you did right, but do not ignore what you did wrong. A lot can be learned from your mistakes. Compare your best performing content with your worst to identify where you might have gone wrong.
You don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. Your underperforming content can still be used. Try reformatting and revising it to re-publish across all of your platforms. Often, things will work out better the second time around.