How to Create a Digital Content Strategy
A content marketing strategy isn’t just about your digital content-it’s also about the strategy surrounding your content. Why? Because a strong content strategy can help guide your content team’s activities, equipping them with clear responsibilities, an editorial calendar, goals, metrics and an integrated plan for deployment.
Before You Create Digital Content
Content strategy informs content creation. So, before you create any content, there are several strategic concerns that need to be considered, including:
- Choose the type of content you will create. There are many different types of content you can create for your brand. Some of the most common and useful types of content include infographics, logos, press releases, pitches, whitepapers, case studies, landing page, SEO pages and blog posts-each of which serves a different purpose. One of the keys to effective strategy is to align the type of content you create with desired outcomes.
- Set goals and objectives. Ideally, your strategy should identify specific content goals like increased SEO value, more backlinks to your website, improved readership, increased engagement, additional leads, etc. Goals should be practical and attainable-an editorial calendar is a great tool for keeping track of your content and goals.
- Plan how you will reach your audience. How are you going to distribute that whitepaper? Which publications do you plan to target with your contributed article pitch or press release? These are the types of questions you need to answer before you create content. The distribution and amplification of content is a critical part of content strategy. In today’s omnichannel marketing environment, the best strategies identify multiple channels and touch points for high value content.
After Digital Content Has Been Created
Many brands drop the ball when it comes to optimizing their digital content and content strategy. However, optimization is important for measuring results and making changes to improve the impact of your content with target audiences.
- Leverage social media insights and analytics. Social media increases brand awareness, builds a loyal foundation of supporters, and creates opportunities for dialog you with audience(s). After you have shared content via social media channels, the next step is to measure its success. Did you see the desired results? Was your content shared, liked, thought-provoking? If not, delve deeper into what went wrong. Was it the content? Did you share it with the wrong network? By identifying your content’s social shortcomings, you gain insights that will improve your reach in subsequent social content campaigns.
- Perform A/B testing. A/B testing a simple way to test changes you make to your content such as a new landing page. It validates whether the change improved your conversion rates, which take the guesswork out of website optimization. By consistently performing A/B testing on key pieces of content, you can increase revenue, leads, downloads and more.
- Track your reach. Track your reach through KPIs such as unique visits and more detailed analytics that illustrate user behaviors. Bounce rates, click rates and heat maps are great tools for identifying how your audience in interacting with your content on a more meaningful level.
Want to take the guesswork out of creating a digital content strategy? Walker Sands is here to help. Fill out the form or call us at (312) 267-0066 to get started today.