What is Digital Content Strategy and How To Build Effective Plan?

As a digital marketer, you would be scratching your head and working round the clock to get to the top of the search results page.

You might have also created various marketing strategies for that and also created valuable and high-quality content for your target audience.

But, still, you can't get the success that you have imagined! So, where does your digital strategy lack?

The answer is- a robust digital content strategy plan.

To work right you should have some sort of digital marketing plan set up for your site. Without that solid foundation, your blog posts will not do anything for you and they'll be a waste of time even if you know how to write good things on the internet.

So, how do you create a digital strategy for your content marketing?

This article will share cover everything about the digital content strategy, its components and why does it matter so much?

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is a process that helps organizations create, manage, and distribute valuable digital content. It’s a way to ensure the organization’s digital content is aligned with its organizational goals and strategy.

It helps organizations create a more efficient and effective content delivery system.

So, how does content strategy help you?

The answer is- it helps you create content that engages your audience and makes them loyal to your brand.

When the content is well written, engaging, and informative; then they'll be more likely to share it with their social media contacts or post it on their own blogs or sites.

People often confuse content strategy with digital content strategy. However, the two terms are slightly different.

Meaning of Digital Content Strategy

Digital content strategy is a subset of the content strategy.

A digital content strategy is a systematic approach to developing and managing a company's online presence. In short, it is the process of developing and implementing a marketing strategy for your company's website and other digital media platforms.

Imagine your car as content marketing. Now, the engine of this car is the digital content strategy.

In other words, the digital content strategy drives the content marketing campaigns.

The content strategy at a high level acts as a guide that tells people what, why, and how they should develop the information for their business.

The best part is that it's not difficult to create the digital content strategy, but it requires proper planning and execution. A digital content strategy at its best can teach how to leverage the digital channels to distribute and deliver the content.

In a nutshell, the digital content strategy helps you to create an effective content marketing plan. It is also known as the program of action that guides all your activities and campaigns.

A digital content strategy works much like a roadmap for content creation. The digital content strategy is the primary plan of action that creates a workflow for developing and delivering content to maximize ROI and generate revenue.

The digital content strategy answers questions like:

• Where should they publish content?
• How often should we publish content?
• What are the content channels and distribution channels?
• What is the tonality of your content type?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are the main topics and target keywords?
  

A comprehensive digital content marketing strategy involves all stakeholders in the company including senior management, product development team, marketing staff, legal teams, etc.

Why Digital Content Matters?

Today’s buyers are increasingly going online to find their next professional services partner. While in some cases this means they searched online for their problem and Google returned a list of possibilities, in other cases, it means they searched online for information on how to solve their problem.

Digital content is becoming more and more important to today’s buyers. It gives them the ability to find information in an efficient and timely manner, regardless of whether they are looking for a solution or just information. This makes digital content a great marketing tool.

The ability to create, distribute and consume digital content has created an entirely new way of selling professional services.

Today’s buyers are no longer satisfied with being handed a list of names and phone numbers when they have questions about their problems or needs.

More importantly, digital content matters for two utmost reasons:

One is for building an impression on your target audience and potential customers and the second, to rank on the first page of the search engines like Google and Bing.

Also, this leads to increased brand awareness and helps achieve the business goals.

It helps you to establish an effective communications strategy that will be implemented in your company’s marketing programs, public relations activities, and other promotional activities.

Components of a Digital Content Strategy

Digital content is not only on the pages on your website. It's also often found online in other places, like services or platforms that might be hosted by someone else.

Digital content strategy is a process of identifying and selecting the best digital assets to create and deliver to your customers.

The elements of a digital content strategy include:

Topics and messaging

A solid content strategy lays more focus on the content topics and the message it wants to send to the buyers. For this, you need a solid buyer persona and an in-depth keyword research strategy as well.

When you create content for your buyers, think about how it can help them in all the stages of purchasing an item or service from you - especially at each stage where they may have some potentially painful choices to make (e-commerce purchase; service contract; and maintenance).

Content Types

It is important to understand the different types of content that are available on your website

This will help you determine which type of content suits your business best and which kind will be more successful.

When you're creating a blog post, think about how it can help you connect with your customers and how it can solve a problem for them. There are a number of digital marketing content that you can use to engage an audience and build brand trust.

These formats include blogs, video content, whitepapers, ebooks, podcasts, email newsletters, social media posts, webinars, case studies, and the list goes on.

Content distribution channels

The distribution channels for your content will help you to make sure that your message reaches the right audience at the right time.

You have great content but you need a medium to be noticed and found by your buyers online.

Furthermore, make sure that you are using multiple content distribution channels to promote your content. Let's say, you are using the website to publish SEO-friendly blog posts. You head to YouTube for creating short videos and promote your blog.

You can promote your blog posts and videos by sharing them on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

You need to choose a platform and set up your posts in advance.

Make sure that you are using multiple channels to promote your content in order to reach the right audience at the right time. This will help you to create a consistent flow of content that will keep your audience engaged.

Set up Content Calendar and a Schedule

Creating a content calendar will help you to stay on track with your goals and objectives.

It will also help you to create a schedule for creating new content, which in turn helps you to be more productive. You can use this calendar by marking down the days when you are going to create new content.

You can even use a tool like Google Calendar to help you in setting up your schedule and manage all the activities related to your content marketing plan.

There are no rules on how often you should publish your content. It depends on the factors such as:

• What are your goals to achieve and publish the content?
• Who is your target audience?
• How many resources have you got and what is your budget?
• How much time are you going to spend on content marketing?
  

Metrics & KPIs

You need to set up a metric for measuring your progress in content marketing.

Metrics help you figure out if your content marketing campaign has paid off or whether you need to change the direction.

Each month or twice a month, you should check your metrics and goals.

You need to track how many people have viewed your content or how many shared it? How much revenue did you generate from a particular content?

You should also consider making changes to the metrics which you think are not worth tracking.

If you are going to measure your success in terms of revenue generated from a particular content, it is better to use a KPI instead.

Content creation and curation

This is the biggest component of a digital content strategy. The right type of content can help you reach your goals with maximum impact, both now and in the future. However, this is easier said than done.

You need to have a clear idea of what variety of content you want to create and how it will help your business.

How to Create a Digital Content Strategy?

Every business owner needs to understand how to build a digital content strategy that gets results. The best way to do this is to create a content strategy that drives your organization's objectives.

Use this digital content strategy framework to join all the pieces of content strategy together.

Make your clear goals

The first step in creating a digital content strategy is to plan out the long-term vision of your business. It is also known as “The Strategic Marketing Plan”, which lays down the overall marketing objectives for your

The foremost thing is to have a clear and well-defined goal. What business objectives are you going to achieve using your content marketing strategy.

The idea creates a digital content strategy that drives your organization's objectives. It will also ensure that you have clear and measurable goals for the different types of content that you plan to produce.

Here are some content marketing goals:

• Increasing blog organic traffic.
• Improve your social media engagement and gain more followers. (For example, increasing re-tweets, Facebook followers of Linkedin engagement).
• Subscribing to the email newsletter to build an email list.
  

Know your Target Audience

Before you start creating content, it is important to know who your target audience is. Know what kind of people are reading your blog and how they interact with the blog.

Remember, the objective of the content is to get you buyers and not highlight your achievements. The content is not your executives. It should incline and resonate with the buyer's persona.

This includes:

• Addressing the pain points.
• Realize their goals.
• Also, understand how will they get the information.
  

Perform a content audit

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, it is time to perform an audit. A content audit involves the analysis of current content strategy and making necessary changes for improving performance.

In addition, it helps in identifying gaps that may exist in your current approach and planning accordingly. Content strategy audit should be carried out by an experienced content strategist.

The main goal of the audit is to understand how well your current content strategy aligns with the company's business objectives and goals.

Content auditing is an indispensable part of your marketing funnel strategy and every organization must try to achieve it.

Do content topic research

The next step is to do content topic research. Content topic research involves the analysis of the buyer's behavior and the motivations behind their buying decision.

This helps in understanding how people are interacting with your brand, what they like about it, and why they buy from you over competitors.

A topic that you are writing about must be:

• Relevant to your audience searches.
• Relevant to the industry and
• Relevant to what you are selling
  

Find the closely related topics and subjects that you would use to address the buyer's persona.

Promote your content

As a part of your digital content strategy, the last thing to do after publishing your content is to promote it on various social media and among your email lists.

Create an editorial calendar for your social media posts as well as the microblogging sites like Medium to promote your new or old existing blogs.

Also, you can send out regular emails to your list of subscribers that highlight your video and case studies or whitepapers you've recently published.

By combining the above digital content strategy with your buyer's persona, you can get to the road of success.

Is Digital content marketing the “next big thing”?

Digital marketing is growing, with spending across search, display, video, and email expected to grow to ​$120B by 2021

Digital content marketing is the new trend in marketing. With social media, blogs, videos, and podcasts, it is becoming easier to reach out to your audience and interact with them. It is a very effective way of reaching out to your audience and connecting with them.

Many companies and brands are using digital marketing and digital marketing agency to their advantage. There is a large number of people who know how to use digital marketing, but not many understand the real power that it holds for them.

There have been a lot of changes in trends in digital marketing over time and each of them is going to drive some sort of changes to the scenario.

Digital marketing has seen some major changes in the last couple of years. Digital marketing is on its way to becoming an important part of any business strategy, and there are many digital marketing tools that help marketers to manage their online presence.

With content being more focused and Google being more oriented towards such things, digital content marketing will definitely undergo changes.