Content is the backbone of digital marketing
Content is at the core of every successful digital marketing plan. It’s how you engage and connect with your target audience: on your website, on social media, and on other digital channels. It’s a low-touch tool to help nurture prospects and move them closer to a sale. And it’s an incredibly valuable way to delight customers and make sure they become repeat customers.
However, if you’re publishing content without a digital content strategy, you’re doing what we call “random acts of marketing.” Throwing out a bunch of content and hoping someone reads it never produces results.
That’s why content strategy is important. If you’re new to the process of creating a digital content strategy, this article will provide the evidence for why you need content strategy, explain exactly what content strategy is, and what information you need to get started.
Why you need a digital content strategy
According to research by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), organizations with a documented content strategy are “more effective in nearly all areas of content marketing.” In fact, three times more businesses with a documented content strategy report that their content marketing is “very effective” or “extremely effective” as compared to peers without a strategy.
Publishing content without a digital content strategy is widely regarded as the biggest mistake in content marketing:
“It’s amazing, but I still see companies that post for the sake of posting, with no specific goals in mind and no plan for the type of content they want to create. They’re unhappy with the lack of results, their teams are frustrated with the lack of direction, and they aren’t even sure what they’re trying to achieve.” (Source: CMI)
Sound familiar?
You can drastically improve your marketing effectiveness by starting with a carefully researched, planned, and documented content strategy for digital marketing.
So what exactly is a content strategy and how do you adopt the right one? Keep reading to find out.
What is a digital content strategy?
Defining a digital content strategy is simple: it’s a plan for using digital content to achieve specific business goals. It’s a detailed plan to put the right content in front of the right audience at the right time, and to measure its effectiveness. A content strategy is a living document that will be constantly updated and tweaked to improve results.
We’ll talk more about what goes into a content strategy below. But first, let’s talk about decisions and information that guide your content strategy.
What to do BEFORE creating a digital content strategy
Any type of business strategy must be backed by goals and driven by essential data and insights. Here are the prerequisites that should influence your digital content strategy.
Set goals
What specific outcome do you want from your content marketing? These are some of the most common business results you can achieve with the right digital content marketing strategy:
- Grow website traffic and attract qualified leads for your sales funnel
- Increase brand awareness and reinforce brand identity
- Promote thought leadership
- Nurture sales prospects and shorten sales cycles
- Support other sales and marketing activities, such as events
- Improve customer retention and satisfaction
- Build an audience for content revenue streams
Understand your target audience
Who do you want to engage with your content? To create content that both reaches and resonates with the intended audience, you need deep insights about them that go far beyond demographics. For example:
- What do they care about?
- What motivates them to take action?
- What are their pain points that relate to what you do?
- What does their buyer’s journey look like, and who is involved?
- What resources do they trust to inform buying decisions?
- Where do they spend time online?
- How do they search online for information related to their pain points and purchase decisions?
Before you can develop the right digital content strategy, you’ll need to develop buyer personas and conduct SEO keyword research to get this information.
Analyze your competition
People are increasingly bombarded with content, especially online. To get noticed, you need to do better than your competitors.
To guide your content strategy, you’ll need to take a hard look at what your digital competitors are doing successfully, as well as where they are failing or not doing enough. Armed with buyer intelligence, you can also identify content gaps that others are overlooking.
Identify your unique differentiators
How does your brand, product or service offer value that others don’t?
This is a tough question for some companies. But understanding the answer, especially in a crowded industry, is very important for success with content marketing.
Why? Because the most successful content ideas focus on the intersection between what you want to say and what your audience wants to know. Buyer persona research and keyword research tell you what people want to know. Your differentiators should drive what you want to talk about.
Next steps: what goes into a content strategy?
Now that you have the information needed to guide your digital content strategy, the next step is to understand what to include in your content strategy.
Our next blog will explain the essential elements of a content strategy. Don’t miss it!