Having a digital content strategy is paramount to building a successful website. You need a well-researched approach to create the best content for your audience and increase traffic.
You’ve arrived at the right place to learn this, so read on to gain a comprehensive understanding of digital content strategy, its key components, and the practical steps to implement the best strategy.
What is a digital content strategy?
Digital content strategy refers to your approaches to creating, managing, and distributing content. It’s the roadmap for planning and creating content for your target audience.
For example, if you launch a new sports blog, you need a plan outlining your target audience, the topics you’ll cover, how often you’ll post content, and how you’ll make money blogging. These details constitute your digital content marketing strategy.
The digital content industry is intensely competitive, so you need a well-thought strategy to differentiate your website and build a fanbase.
Why does digital content strategy matter?
Your digital content strategy gives you a structured approach to creating and distributing engaging content for your audience. It aligns your content creation goals with your audience’s needs instead of posting random content that may not bode well with your audience.
The main reasons include:
Focused efforts
Digital content strategy involves setting clear objectives for your content. These objectives can be to boost sales, raise brand awareness, or build a social media following. Whatever the case, your digital content strategy provides a clear focus instead of creating content with no firm goals.
Efficient work
Having a clear strategy makes content creation more efficient. You’ll know your objectives and can quickly generate ideas to fulfill them. Coherent goals help you create high-converting content that can be monetized effectively.
Consistent experience
A clear strategy translates into a consistent content experience for your audience. All your content will use similar messaging, slogans, creatives, and stories. This consistency helps audiences relate better to your brand, building loyalty you can monetize with ads, affiliate marketing, or product sales.
Better metrics
Digital content strategies give teams clear metrics to evaluate their work. For instance, if your focus is boosting sales, revenue is the primary metric to track. If building brand awareness is the focus, website traffic and social media mentions are ideal metrics.
Better metrics make tracking return on investment (ROI) easier for content creators. Then, resources can be dedicated to the type of content generating the highest ROI.
Key components of a digital content strategy
Business goals
Business goals drive your digital content marketing strategy. For example, if your goal is to double annual sales, your strategy will focus on creating content to raise brand awareness and boost sales.
You can have many other business goals, such as boosting your market share, customer satisfaction, profitability, and sustainability. These goals determine how to plan and create content for your target audience.
Target audience and personas
The next component is your target audience and personas. You should have a clear picture of who your content speaks to. What is your audience’s pain point, and how do you intend to help them solve it? What is your target audience’s demographics?
For instance, if you sell kitchenware, your target audience is individuals passionate about cooking and experimenting with food recipes. This audience likely consists of people between the ages of 26 and 41 who browse extensively for food recipes. Understanding this demographic makes it easier to create content for them, such as creative food recipes.
Content plan
You need a firm plan for your content creation efforts. What type of content will you create? It can be blog posts, videos, and podcasts. What are the priority topics and keywords for blog posts? What messaging guidelines will you follow, and how often will you post new content? These are typical questions to answer during content mapping.
Content operations and workflows
This part involves deciding how you’ll generate content and distribute it. Suppose your focus is creating engaging blog posts. Each new post can be drafted as a Google Docs document. Then, you’ll review the post to make relevant corrections.
When an article has been reviewed and corrected, you can paste it into your content management system (CMS) and publish it as a blog post.
You can also have workflows for
- Distributing content. Decide which platforms your content will be posted on. For example, videos can be posted on both your website and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Some publishers choose an omnichannel approach whereby new content is shared on all relevant content distribution channels.
- Editorial and approval processes. Decide the number of times a new piece should be reviewed before publishing.
- Roles. Determine who is responsible for creating different content formats. For example, you can assign someone to texts and another to images and videos. Each team member should have a clear role in the content creation process. If you are managing the flow solely, it’s a great idea to plan and prioritize your tasks.
- Regional experiences. If you have a global, multilingual audience, you can apply different approaches on translating content for different audiences and what information to add or omit for each audience.
- Monetization. Decide how to earn money from your content. You can earn money through advertising, affiliate marketing, or direct product sales. Adsterra is a stellar choice for publishers seeking to monetize their content with ads.
Content infrastructure
Your strategy includes a detailed outline of your content infrastructure. For example, if you’re focused on blog posts, consider what CMS you’ll use to manage and publish the posts. WordPress is the most popular CMS, but many other options are available, like Blogger, Squarespace, Hubspot, Wix, Medium, etc.
Decide which tools you’ll use to analyze your content engagement. For a blog, Google Analytics is suitable for analyzing your viewers’ location, time spent on your site, and the most viewed posts. Other factors to consider include content translation tools, social media sharing tools, video hosting platforms, and monetization platforms. Adsterra is an ideal monetization platform for content publishers, offering high-paying ads across diverse niches.
Adsterra empowers publishers to monetize their content with advanced, high-performing ad formats like Popunders and Social Bar. Join the cohort of first-rate publishers who are making money with Adsterra.
Content distribution
The final stage is your distribution plan. Most businesses adopt a multi-channel strategy that involves distributing content on different platforms. For example, a clothing store can post high-quality photos on social media, promote its catalog via email, and discuss fashion via blog posts. This multi-channel approach enables the store to get more engagement and boost sales.
Decide which channels you’ll distribute content on and which ones to prioritize. You should focus on the channels where you find the most customers.
How to create a digital content strategy
Step 1: Conduct a content audit
A content audit is the first step in developing your strategy. It will give you an accurate idea of your audience’s needs. Audit your websites, social media pages, and other content channels to see what your audience engages with.
Your existing high-performing posts give you a great idea of what works for your audience. Suppose you run a tech blog and observe your how-to guides getting the most views. It’s a signal to focus on these guides to drive further engagement.
If you’re starting from scratch with no existing content, you can audit your main competitors’ content. Check which posts generate the most likes, shares, and views. What are the popular topics and content formats? This information guides you in setting an effective digital content strategy.
Step 2: Define your goals and objectives
As mentioned, digital content strategy involves setting and working to achieve specific goals. You should pen firm goals for your content, such as improved brand awareness, sales, social media followers, or blog traffic.
Your goals should be measurable and not vague. For example, instead of aiming for increased sales, it can be a “50% sales increase over the next 12 months.” Instead of aiming to improve traffic generally, set a specific goal like “100% traffic growth in the next 8 months.”
Consider what metrics to evaluate at each stage of working towards your goals. For example, if you aim for 100% traffic growth, page views, average session duration, bounce rate, and unique visitors are the primary metrics to evaluate.
Step 3: Identify your target audience
After your audit and goal-setting, the next step is to identify a specific target audience. Your target audience is the demographic that will best respond to your product or service. It varies in age, location, income level, gender, occupation, and many other factors.
Suppose you run an online store for power tools. Your target audience can be homeowners who enjoy building things. It can also be professionals in the construction sector who use power tools for their daily jobs. These audiences are more likely to interact with your content and buy your products.
When choosing a target audience, consider who’ll benefit from your products the most. Which demographic commonly experiences the problems you want to solve? For instance, if you run a health blog focused on physical therapy, athletes are more likely to watch your content because they experience physical injuries at higher rates than the average population.
After figuring out your target audience, you can easily determine the best channels to find them. For example, if you’re targeting people aged 40+, you’re more likely to see them on Facebook than on Instagram.
Step 4: Choose your content types
After setting your goals and target audience, the concluding step is choosing the type of content you’ll produce. The best choice depends on your audience and your existing capabilities.
For instance, if you’re a small brand with limited resources, you might not have the time or funds to produce stunning videos. In that case, you can choose blog posts because they’re easier to create and monetize. That said, you can seamlessly monetize blog content with Adsterra ads.
Adsterra connects content creators to high-paying advertisers in various niches, including iGaming, E-commerce, and Software. Join now and boost your ad earnings.
Ideally, start with one or two content types before branching out. You can start with a newsletter or blog before expanding to videos or podcasts. You can begin with one social media platform before expanding to others.
If you try to do everything at once, you might become overwhelmed and lose productivity. An incremental approach helps you test which content formats work best with your target audience and focus on these formats.
Step 5: Analyze and refine your strategy
Digital content strategies involve constant evaluation and refinement. You should continually evaluate the results and, based on these evaluations, know when to improve.
For instance, if your goal is a 50% sales increment in the next 5 months, monitor your daily, weekly, and monthly sales and compare them to previous periods. If you observe undesired results, it’s a signal to tweak your strategy to improve the outcomes.
Don’t hesitate to try new things, such as new content formats and target audiences. No content strategy is perfect; instead, it depends on many factors that continuously change. Continuous improvement is a crucial part of your digital content marketing strategy.
Digital content strategy example
Jake From State Farm
State Farm is one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. It sought to win customers in a fast-growing and competitive insurance market and drew up a unique content strategy.
In 2011, State Farm launched TV and social media campaigns featuring Jake, a friendly character who never stopped talking about the benefits of State Farm’s insurance packages.
Insurance is boring at face value. After all, it’s a generic service where customers don’t observe much difference between providers. However, Jake infused warmth and friendliness into the customer relationship, giving State Farm clients something they can relate to. Jake-themed ads have continuously run on social media and remain popular over a decade after the initial campaign launch.
Jake from State Farm is one of the most successful TV and online media campaigns ever. State Farm leveraged this digital content strategy to win customers and boost its brand appeal. It demonstrates how companies can use creative content formats to win over their target audience.
Frequent mistakes to avoid in digital content strategy
Valuing quantity over quality
Publishers often make the mistake of prioritizing content volume over quality. Churning out as much content as possible can be tempting, but it isn’t the ideal strategy. Your focus should be on how to write powerful website content, regardless of the volume.
It’s better to post one high-quality article weekly than five average-quality articles. High-quality content spurs better audience engagement, not quantity.
Neglecting SEO
Publishers often fail to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO), causing less engagement than they ought to get. Search engines are the leading traffic generators for websites, so you should put in considerable effort to improve your search rankings.
SEO efforts include adding relevant keywords to your articles, inserting alternative text descriptions for all images, internal linking, and optimizing your site’s speed and mobile experience. These efforts improve the chances of appearing on the first page of search results.
Conclusion
Anyone creating digital content needs a clear strategy. Your strategy should include defining goals, identifying your target audience, and choosing your content distribution channels. This way, you’ll focus on specific objectives and strive to achieve them.
It’s also essential to have a clear strategy for monetizing your content. Ads are an effective monetization method, and Adsterra is your ideal ad network. With over 15,000 reputable advertisers across diverse niches, Adsterra provides endless opportunities to make money from your content.
