A Simple Guide To Create Successful Digital Content Marketing Strategy
Whether you have just started to plan your content marketing strategy or you have been using the same method/approach for a quite while, it is never too late to review your content marketing plan - to make sure that the content you are providing is up-to-date, informed, unique & engaging for your existing & potential customers/leads.
Did you know that around 2 million blog posts are published every day? The Internet is filled with insane content and planning your content with a well-researched digital content marketing strategy is surely going to help you cut through the irrelevant & random articles. Your content marketing strategy influences the way customers look at your brand and approach for your offered products & services. But it is quite weird that 63% of the businesses don’t even have a sound, data-driven & brand-oriented documented content marketing strategy. They feel overwhelmed when it comes to thinking of:
- What type of content should they produce?
- How often should it be done?
- And where can they post it? etc.
If you are also in a dilemma, we are here to help you answer those questions. In this post, we will explain how you can create a successful digital content marketing strategy. Just remember, content marketing is important for SEO and acts like a magnet that draws potential leads to your business, giving you a chance to convert them into sales. Without a content marketing strategy, you are simply running a website with no solid customer base.
What is Digital Content Marketing Strategy and Why Is it Important?
A digital content marketing strategy is a process of increasing website conversions through a set of personalized & evaluated content strategies, stating steps to research, create, publish, and promote a piece of information that is appealable & valuable to the customers. Let us tell you that a digital content marketing strategy is different from a content strategy. How? Content strategy only focuses on creating and distributing the content, rather a digital content marketing strategy is not limited to written articles & blog posts but is concerned with any form of interactive content such as pictures, videos, infographics, audio files, and podcasts, etc.
Lead generation is one of the most critical goals for businesses. The more leads you get, the more opportunities you can get to convert them into sales. Here digital content marketing helps businesses as the lure for customers and this calls for hiring professional content marketing services. Instead of wasting money on prospects, pay a little bit of attention to drawing them with solid content.
How To Create Successful Digital Content Marketing Strategy - A Step-by-Step Guide
You might know that you need a result-oriented content marketing strategy for your business, but you don’t know where to start. Here, we have created a step-by-step guide you can follow. Let’s dig in:
Determine Your Goal -
A good starting plan for your digital content marketing strategy plan is to set out a goal, making it easy to focus on what’s more important & what’s not in the process of creating a plan. Ask questions like, “Why do you want to create a content & content marketing plan?”, “What’s your focus for developing a content marketing plan? ”Etc. Know your goals before starting. It will help you plan well & evaluate performance.
Know Your Target Audience/Persona Research -
For your digital content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to know who your target audience is for your content. Also known as a buyer persona, it is a brief of a typical customer stating their concerns, issues & needs, etc. Knowing your target audience will help you generate more relevant, informative, and appropriate content depending on their requirements. Your digital content marketing strategy would be incomplete without buyer personas.
Evaluate Your Current Position -
The next step is to assess your current position as a plethora of businesses are already having content out there such as social media content, podcasts, videos, etc. Therefore, you need to figure out what you should change about your content that would help you to meet your goals. To do that, you can either conduct a content audit or look at your competitors to compare your existing content.
- Run A Content Audit - Content audit generally means tracking, assessing & analyzing the usefulness & relevance of all your existing content pieces, such as blog posts, guest posts, social media posts, web pages, and so on. You will get to know where you need to improve underperforming content & how to update them. It guides you to take notes of areas on your website that aren’t well-optimized for SERPs and helps you set new SEO rules to be implemented, such as adding keywords to the headings on your site or inserting links to other web pages, etc.
- Perform A Competitive Analysis - Keeping an eye on your competitors will give you an idea of the strategies they are adopting to market their content, and the type of content they are producing so that you can find out how to set yourself apart. Find out their strengths & weaknesses and the most successful pieces of content. Know how content marketing can increase B2B sales.
Create a Content Marketing Plan -
Although a digital content marketing strategy is not similar to a content strategy, planning a strategy for the content your brand produces should be a part of your overall content marketing plan. Figure out the type of content you want to create, topics to cover, and where you will publish it.
- Keyword Research -The step is essential for which you can hire professional SEO services. If you are using content that is not appealing to your buyer persona, you are losing website traffic opportunities. Try including low traffic keywords and choose keywords being used by your target audience to find content on your site.
- Create Content -Find your well-ranked competitors and follow their format but make sure to create a unique title that is not generic. Cover the points your competitors are missing to make your content stand out in the crowd. Adopt a pleasant writing style & the tone that your target audience is speaking in. Avoid long paragraphs or jargon and make the content more interesting by adding bullet points, images, and videos. Don’t forget internal and external links within your content.
- Promote Content - You need to promote your SEO blogs both on-site & off-site with maximum backlinks to generate revenue. While planning a digital content marketing strategy, your end goal should be getting your content to the maximum number of readers. Insert relevant keywords, run ads or hire content marketing services to help your content rank and draw organic traffic from interested consumers.
Best Channels For Content Marketing -
You need to find the best channels to publish & promote your content otherwise you won’t get satisfactory results. For example, to share a whitepaper, the best platforms are LinkedIn or Twitter but to share videos, the best platform is YouTube. Take a look at the top social media platforms to promote your brand.
Create Content Calendar -
This is another important part of your content strategy which will help you know when you should publish your content on any platform you are using. This is why using a content calendar holds vital importance. It can help you get all your content scheduled. Just simply put the dates for each piece of content especially if you are publishing too much content. But if there is a plethora of content, you can go for task management tools.
Analyze the Performance of Digital Content Marketing -
Tracking your content performance is essential to know whether your marketing efforts are ranking or not so that you could rearrange your content to get ranked on SERPs. Know about some top SEO tools to monitor your websites. If you’re using advertising strategies, consider Google Analytics. Here, using matrices is a great idea to track & evaluate the performance of your ongoing digital marketing content strategy.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) -
Setting key performance indicators will enable you to know the success of your brand’s digital content marketing strategy. They will help you know which tactics are working and which aren’t in your content marketing plan. Using KPIs in your content marketing plan include page visitors, time spent by a visitor on a page with content, number of social shares, lead generated, and number of comments & other engagements.
Choose A Content Management System -
Selecting an appropriate & suitable content management system (CMS) will help you create, manage, and track your content. The important areas of a CMS include content creation, publication, and analytics such as WordPress.
Now you know how to establish a step-by-step digital content marketing strategy for your brand. It helps you stand out from other content marketing leaders who are trying to manage to reach their audience.