Digital Content Strategy: The Step-by-Step Guide You Need

If you are a business owner, C-suite executive, or decision maker, then you know your brand is everything! With the increase of businesses in the digital space, a solid digital content strategy can make or break you. This means if you don't have one, you need to implement one immediately. If you do have one, you need to evaluate it regularly.

Let's breakdown what a digital content strategy is, steps to creation, implementation and evaluation.

Understanding Digital Content Strategy

Digital content strategy encompasses the planning, creation, distribution, and management of content across various digital platforms. This will help you achieve several things: brand awareness, website traffic, leads, and conversion.

Your digital strategy starts with your business goals and objectives. A digital content strategy is more than writing blog posts and updating your social media accounts. A strategy helps you create a cohesive and value-driven plan that assists with your SEO and branding.

Your digital content strategy starts with your audience. Knowing who your audience is and what they want will help you create better content for them. Understanding their wants, needs, and the platforms they are on. Keeping in mind that your content format should align with the platform it is on.

FACT: Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.

Digital Content Strategy: Steps to Creation

A well-executed content strategy can have a profound impact on brand growth. Here's how:

1. Building Authority

Building your brand authority starts by delivering consistent high-quality content. Start by developing content pillars to keep your brand message clear. Providing authoritative, insightful, and educational content that will assist in earning the trust and respect of your audience.

Brand authority takes time to establish, therefore consistency and evaluation of opportunities is key. Your authority helps with a few factors. It sets you apart from your competition, builds trust with your audience, establishes credibility and attracts new customers.

2. Increasing Visibility

Content distribution is key to reaching your audience. Leverage various digital channels to achieve this. Social media, email marketing, SEO, and native advertising.

To increase your website's visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) you will want to focus on SEO. Some new business think this is something that can wait until later on, but it is crucial to growing awareness, the sooner the better. You may spend time developing content that people won't even see.

Many businesses use social platforms because of their popularity instead of their alignment to their target audience. Keeping in mind where your target audience absorbs content and how they receive it is imperative for visibility. Organic reach continues to decline due to several factors such as user behavior, algorithm changes, content saturation and competitors. Apply a boosting and ad strategy along with your content in order for it to reach your audience.

Email marketing is still an effective tool for increasing visibility. It is measurable, trackable, and allows for specific targeting of your audience. With privacy being a concern for most, ensure you use email distribution channels that people have opted in to.

Native advertising seemlessly blends into the surrounding content of the platform it is on. This helps establish instant credibility as it is on a channel that has succeeded in authority. Native ads are targeted to specific audiences and focus on relevant factors such as: interests, behavior, and demographics.

3. Engaging Your Audience

Creating content that drives conversations, is emotive, and poses a question, such as polls and surveys, will drive connection. With deeper connections, your audience will become loyal to your brand.

Engagement shows that a brand values the relationship with their audience. Nurturing these relationships through engagement is valuable to establishing trust.

Replying to post comments almost immediately helps followers see you as a person and more than just a brand. People want to feel that others genuinely care for and value their feedback. Commenting with a meaningful response and signature of the person responding is an easy way of humanizing your brand.

We like the example below from a post that Burt's Bees responded to when a customer had a question. While we feel they should have responded quicker, their response made the customer feel heard and had a signature from the person responding.

4. Driving Conversions

The ultimate goal of marketing is to drive conversion. Conversions come in many forms; clicks to your site, lead form completions, newsletter sign-ups, new followers, etc. Your digital content strategy should be a guiding point for prospects through the sales funnel. Providing them with the information they are seeking and securing the conversion you need for your business.

Taking necessary steps in the digital marketing funnel to drive conversion is key. These steps are known as:

1. Discovery
2. Interest
3. Appraisal
4. Confirmation

Digital Content Strategy Implementation

Now that we've covered what a digital content strategy is and the steps to creating it, let's discuss implementation.

1. Develop a Content Calendar

Consistency is key in digital content strategy. Create a content calendar outlining your publishing schedule, topics, platforms and key milestones. Using the content pillars created in the initial steps, it will make the development of a content calendar effortless. The calendar also helps you stay organized with your content and objectives.

Developing a monthly content calendar keeps content fresh and relevant to the month activities, events, and updates. You can use this as a guide and duplicate as you move throughout the year.

2. Create Compelling Content

Creating content is often a challenge for most new businesses, but it doesn't have to be. People value UGC (user generated content) and behind the scenes photos or videos. UGC can be as easy as a screenshot of a zoom call you are on. Even a selfie of you traveling to a meeting, or a photo of you at a speaking engagement.

Utilize graphic design platforms like Canva, photoshop, or Kittl. These offer templates that you can customize, along with adding your branding colors, fonts, and logos.

Write original blogs, not AI-generated, and that adhere to SEO best practices. Utilize videos, infographics, and prioritize quality over quantity to stand out amongst others in the digital space.

3. Analyze and Optimize

Use data from social platforms and Google analytics to understand what content your audience prefers. Social analytics provide great insight on the day of the week and time that your content is performing best.

Regularly monitoring the performance of your digital content strategy by using analytical tools and metrics. This analytical data helps determine the optimizations that need to be made. These optimizations could be topic based, length of content, time or day, and will vary by platform.

Using the data and improvements you learn from these metrics will help various aspects grow and succeed. These aspects could be your website traffic, social media growth, engagement and conversion rates.

4. Competitive Research

As you grow your digital content strategy you want to keep an eye on your competition. Social analytics provide insights into how you measure up to a competitor. You also want to monitor any content gaps that they be filling to meet your customers' needs.

Evaluate their follower growth, content schedule, areas of publication, keyword opportunities, and trends.

5. Performance Benchmarks

Performance benchmarks vary by industry but the most important ones are your own. Evaluate performance of your digital content by looking at key metrics, such as: CTR, Reach, Impressions, CTR, and engagement. Ideally, your benchmarks trend upward, however, if you see a decline, this is an indicator of needed optimizations

Conclusion

In today's world a well-executed digital content strategy is essential for brand growth and marketing success. A business will lose its way in the competitive landscape of the digital world without it.

Developing a digital content strategy that grows a brands authority, increases visibility, harnesses engagement and drives conversion is a must.

Follow the guide steps or contact Media Rebel for a free consultation on how we can assist you.

Remember, defining your goals and knowing your audience is key to creating compelling content. Leveraging digital tactics such as email marketing, social media, native advertising, and SEO to grow visibility.

Embrace analytical data and benchmarks to optimize results that will grow your brand and customer base.

For more on Media Rebel's mission and what drives us, read our blog here.