To create a digital content strategy, you first need to understand your goals and who your target audience is. Once you know those two things, you can start creating content that is interesting and useful to them.
One digital content strategy might not work for all types of companies, so it’s essential to tailor your strategy to your specific goals. Every company is different and requires a unique digital marketing strategy backed by a team of digital marketing professionals.
What might work for one business might not work for another. This is particularly important when evaluating your competition because the competition might have different goals and offer different services.
So, how do you create a digital content strategy that drives results?
Overview
How to Create a Digital Content Strategy that Drives Results
Above all else, successful digital marketing involves two things: data and good judgment. Both are equally important and paramount to propelling your company to the top of the digital food chain in terms of increasing organic traffic, lead generation, and online sales.
While content is still king, good content is more than a smartly written blog post or a visually appealing infographic. It’s about posting the right thing at the right time in the right place. It’s about leveraging available data points to take the guessing game out of your marketing strategy and replace gut feelings with actionable information. It’s about creating a continuously evolving and updating profile for each of your top buyers, so you can continue to match that profile to existing users throughout the internet, identify high-quality leads, and figure out the best way to attract them to your product or service.
To do all that, you need a digital content strategy. A digital content strategy is your company or business’s personalized and up-to-date playbook on content ideation, creation, and promotion at any given time.
An effective content strategy involves five stages–research, creation, distribution, promotion, and measurement.
- Chris Rice, Senior SEO Strategist
The key to creating an effective digital content strategy involves understanding your audience and what they want to see from you online. It’s also important to create content that is shareable, engaging, and original.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Be original. Don’t just regurgitate what everyone else is saying. offer a fresh perspective.
- Know your audience. Who are they and what do they want to see from you?
- Create shareable content. Make sure your content is easy to share and includes social media buttons.
- Engage with your audience. Reply to comments and questions. create a dialogue.
- Promote your content using your multichannel marketing strategy.
- Don’t forget to sell
By following these tips, you’ll be on your way to creating a digital content strategy that works for you and your audience.
Be Original
The most effective digital content strategies involve originality. The more original your content strategy and voice, the more likely you are to stand out from the competition.
If you’re not sure where to start, consider your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP). What is it that makes your brand different? This can be used as a starting point for creating original content.
It’s also important to create content that is timely and relevant to your audience. This means creating content that addresses their specific pain points and needs.
By being original, you’ll be able to create a content strategy that is uniquely yours and helps you stand out from the competition.
Know Your Audience
The more you understand your audience, the more effective you will be in attracting their attention. This is key if you’re looking to create a digital content strategy that works.
When it comes to understanding your audience, consider their demographics such as age, gender, location, and interests. This information can be used to create targeted content that appeals to them.
It’s also important to understand what they want to see from you online. What type of content are they looking for? What format do they prefer?
By understanding your audience, you’ll be able to create content that is tailored to their needs and interests. This, in turn, will help increase engagement and conversions.
Create Shareable Content
If you want your content to be successful, it needs to be shareable. This means making it easy for your audience to share your content using their social media profiles.
One way to do this is to include social media buttons on each post (take a look at our below). This makes it easy for visitors to share your content on their preferred social media platforms, which can help your content reach a larger audience.
Another way to make your content more shareable is to create content that is visual. This includes infographics, videos, and images. Studies have shown that content with images gets 94% more views than content without images.
By making your content shareable, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience, attract high-quality backlinks, and improve the visibility of your brand.
Create content that others can use and link to as a resource for their audience.
- Eric Sachs, CEO
Engage With Your Audience
The best digital content strategies involve engaging with your audience. This means responding to comments and questions in a timely manner.
It’s also important to create a dialogue with your audience. Ask them for their input and feedback. This will help you create better content and improve your chances of success.
By engaging with your audience and promoting your content, you’ll be able to create a successful digital content strategy.
Promote Your Content Wide (Multichannel Marketing)
One of the best ways to promote your content is through multichannel marketing. This is a strategy that involves promoting your content across multiple channels.
Some of the most popular channels include search engines, social media, email, and paid advertising. By promoting your content on multiple channels, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience and attract more business through your overall content marketing strategy.
It’s also important to create a consistent message across all of your channels. This will help create a cohesive brand identity that your audience can easily recognize.
By promoting your content on multiple channels, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience and create a successful digital content strategy.
Don’t forget to Sell
All too often, business owners forget to actually sell their products or services. While it’s important to create quality content, you also need to make sure you’re including a call-to-action (CTA).
Your CTA should be clear and concise. It should tell your audience what you want them to do next. For example, if you’re promoting a new product, your CTA could be “Buy Now.”
Make sure your CTA is prominently displayed on your website or blog. You can also include it in your email marketing campaigns and social media posts.
By including a CTA in your digital content strategy, you’ll be able to increase sales and conversions.
Measure Your Results
The only way to know if your digital content strategy is working is to measure your results. This means tracking your traffic, engagement, and conversions.
There are a number of tools you can use to track your results. Google Analytics is a popular choice, as it’s free and provides you the ability to take a deep dive into your results month after month, year after year. Here at Sachs Marketing Group, we also use a handful of premium tools, including Ahrefs and Semrush, in an effort to gain access to big data for SEOs and the latest in website auditing technologies.
By measuring your results, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what’s not. This will allow you to make necessary changes to your strategy.
The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Content Strategy
A digital content strategy must be all-encompassing for your business without becoming unnavigable or endlessly obtuse.
The goal of any digital content strategy is to create a plan of action for developing, deploying, and distributing content that effectively translates into sales and a positive reputation. This often requires modern web design, research-backed search engine optimization, PPC advertising, and social media development month-to-month.
Here are some things you will want:
- Your digital content strategy needs to be accessible. Design documents, audience and buyer profiles, content plans, content schedules, and updated data analytics – these should all be continuously updated and uploaded in .docx. Excel format on the cloud, so your project managers, content creators, digital marketers, and social media experts can refer to them repeatedly to review the entire strategy or access a specific piece of information.
- Your digital content strategy needs to be well-organized. Create separate documents for each significant part of the strategy, including who is being targeted, what they’re being targeted with, when content should be uploaded, and how content should look.
- Your digital content strategy needs to be rooted in actionable data. Provide references to updated keyword and competitor research to illustrate why the strategy is currently focused on a specific service, item, concept, or trend at this point in time.
- Your digital content strategy needs to be up to date. More than anything else, expect to see each element of the strategy updated on a weekly or monthly basis. Create week-to-week, month-to-month schedules. Revisit and revise your target profiles. Update your marketing goals to reflect your current growth rate.
Create the Right Toolkit
In practice, the individual documents and elements of a digital content strategy might look like this:
- Having a document dedicated to current short-term (month) and long-term (year) marketing goals, with updated info on current metrics. These metrics might include daily traffic, number of backlinks, domain authority, most shared content, number of social media followers, average engagement numbers per social media platform, etc.
- A document outlining the company’s ethos, product, service, and aim. If you’re selling the best mattresses, create a short mission statement that reflects your business’ commitment to helping people get the best sleep possible and helping customers reap the benefits of a mattress that improves productivity, reduces pain, and increases the quality of life.
- Having a document dedicated to providing guidelines for content creation. Think text and image tone, examples of what to write and what not to write, formatting rules for infographics and branded content, video editing information, social media posting guidelines, and so on.
- Having a week-to-week content schedule. This document outlines the current week’s planned blog posts or articles, press releases, major social media posts, the weekly quota for shorter social media posts, and planned video/image content (clips, Shorts, Reels, infographics, etc.).
- Documenting current data research on the following:
- Current trends and keyword considerations.
- Competitor analysis.
- Current website metrics, including page traffic, your most popular pages, bounce rates/dwell times.
- Social media growth rates.
- Customer survey results (what should your company focus on? Where do your customers’ concerns lie the most?)
- Audience information – who is clicking on your content the most? Who is reading and watching your content the most? Demographics and unique traits.
- Buyer profiles – what kind of person do you need to target when creating a call to action? What are your buyers looking for the most when they buy something from you? What interests them the most from your content?
- Lead generation info (what content converts the most? What content draws in the most leads?)
- Regular content audits, determining what does and doesn’t work, axing campaigns that aren’t bringing in results, understanding what sets apart content that seems to work best, separating evergreen from trend-based/seasonal content metrics, and using existing data to figure out what direction your strategy needs to take.
- Ideation documents – a place where you can spitball ideas, share titles and campaign concepts, pitch new content, and bring things to the table to consider for the next round of campaigns.
- A document outlining this week’s promotion plans. What’s being shared where? What are you including in this week’s newsletter? What’s being tweeted about? Which post is going to be featured and converted into an Instagram carousel?
An established digital content strategy is not just a set of centralized ideas kept in the head of your marketing lead – it’s an encompassing and accessible set of documents continuously updated based on information gathered through various data analytics software.
In practice, that means measuring and improving.
Work With the Right People
Digital content strategies are not created overnight. It helps to partner with an experienced marketing team when creating your first set of documents and digital marketing tactics.
An experienced team can take over the development of a coherent plan, and help you find the right talent to execute it.
If you find this content helpful, please share it with your team or join the discussion by adding a question or comment below.
