Building a solid digital content strategy has become much more challenging. In the post-era of Web3, the offer of content throughout digital channels has exploded, boosted by AI generators.
Achieving sustainable visibility on the digital landscape is a modern puzzle for active brands. We often help companies step back and rethink their content strategy’s fundamentals and goals. Here is our guide on how to create a content strategy that works.
What is a digital content strategy?
Definition
A digital content strategy involves planning, creating, distributing, and managing content elements across various channels. What sounds easy in theory can often become messy in real life.
What has changed:
It is easier than ever to create and produce content. The “influencer” generation has shown brands how easy it is to create content.
– AI tools have led to a profusion of duplicate content. With a quick prompt to ChatGPT, everyone can fill in a blog quickly.
– Quality has eroded while quantity has exploded. Even a web expert and veteran like Google Search is struggling to push the capabilities of its algorithm to rank sites on a quality scale.
Strategy is often the missing piece in this definition. A good content strategy has to focus on the customer journey: awareness, acquisition, retention, and advocacy.
The components of a digital content strategy
An excellent content strategy considers its environment and adapts to the brand and business goals.
Before detailing the steps to build your strategy, here is a short memo list of all critical items to consider:
- the audience: their needs, their pain points, their expectations.
- the SEO potential and your keyword strategy
- the content planning and dashboard
- the content rhythm along the months
- the content format
- the content production tools
- the selection of the proper distribution channels
- the creative to promote your content
- the content performance tracking
Who usually builds the digital content strategy
Across our consulting projects, we have often been asked who would be in charge of this strategy. If the question arises, your digital content strategy might not be off to a good start.
Beyond the official hierarchy and job title, we believe there are more opportunities than responsibilities. Ultimately, sure, your content writer (or a third party) will do the actual job of writing. But, most importantly, your company is usually a goldmine for content:
- Founder/owner: about the culture of the company, its origin, and its vision.
- CMO: about the brand values and marketing positioning.
- Product owner: about the products/services use cases.
- Client services: about the client testimonials and the frequently asked questions.
- All staff: about their journey, their feedback and ideas.
Chances are that if you gravitate your content to your brand and its market, all these inputs will be interesting.
Seven steps to create your digital content strategy
Step 1. Setting the goals and objectives
The first step in building your digital content strategy is setting goals. To create the right content, consider what you’re trying to achieve for your brand: brand awareness, generating leads, boosting customer retention, etc.
Also, make sure your content goals are aligned with your business objectives. The correct alignment will help define the proper content formats, rhythm, and distribution.
SaaS companies, for instance, tend to use detailed blog posts, white papers, and case studies to attract and convince their target audience.
Step 2. Defining the personas
The heart of the content strategy is a perfect understanding of targeted users, their needs, pain points, and expectations. We recommend a practical approach: producing quality content and addressing specific questions and problems. This approach is also the basis of Google algorithms: an expert site (often recognized on the SERPs) provides a detailed response to a concrete question.
A clear definition of personas is also an essential step in any great inbound marketing plan.
Because tons of content are already available, we advise you to add something that will speak to your persona and make a difference. This will help you build your digital brand over time.
Step 3. Planning the content
An excellent digital content strategy is a well-organized strategy. You will probably end up with hundreds or thousands of content elements, so be organized immediately.
Your content planning must be rigorous. Use a system that logs the content schedule, the materials needed, the constraints of each element, and the responsibilities.
SEO must be included early in your content strategy to make your content visible. Organic visibility is the key to your strategy’s sustainability. Most of the time, the SEO potential helps confirm the needs and problems of the targeted audience.
– the topics. These will align with your personas, brand, and business goals. They will serve as “clusters” to organize your content and be recognized as your centers of expertise.
– the keyword strategy. Each content element you’re producing must be pres-associated with the right keyword. Different SEO strategies are used; you must select the best keyword opportunities depending on your positioning.
Step 4. Creating the content
This fourth step is the operational and concrete step. If your content planning is practical, your content production should be regular.
We advise two things at this stage:
– keep on focusing on quality. Great content means quality articles, not tons of quick-light articles.
– gear yourself with the right tools. Good production requires good rhythm, and there’s nothing more frustrating than not having the good tools from the start. Between SEO tools, AI helpers, and writing checkers, be sure to have everything your team needs.
Step 5. Distributing the content
Along with a quality approach, we advise you to select the proper channels to distribute your content. The best channels are the ones where your target audience is active. Think about internal channels (blog, email campaigns), external channels (social media), and third-party platforms (PR).
One common mistake at this stage is to go for all existing channels in the digital ecosystem. Using the 20/80 rule, it’s better to focus on 2 or 3 channels that perform great and just have a mere presence on others. This will also help you focus on what brings the audience and, ultimately, the business.
Step 6. Monitoring performance
Multiple solutions exist to monitor the performance of your digital content strategy. Between social media analytics, web analytics, CRM, etc., you should be able to see which content performs well and which elements need improvement.
Use analytics tools to track key metrics such as page views, engagement, conversion, and customer feedback. Make sure to have one reference tool for your long-term analysis; there are always measurement gaps between tools (GA, Hubspot, Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.). The important thing is to select one key system that will serve as a future reference.
At this stage, we also advise focusing on SEO performance. Having engagement and traction is already a good sign, but ultimately, your organic reach has to be measured over time. If you’re doing things well, your organic reach will stop being a flat line.
Step 7. Increasing engagement
Because your plan has been created from the start, it does not mean that you can’t challenge it. We always work with a data-based approach and recommend you the same for this seventh step.
Three things you can do to improve your digital content strategy over time:
1. By identifying key content elements and attraction patterns, you can reproduce them and increase engagement. Use the good rankings that you get to create centers for expertise, iterate, and identify future articles to write. Your brand authority will get higher.
2. Work on your top content elements. You can improve and increase their performance if they drive an audience.
3. Remix your successful content, by taking a step back and gathering them into more in-depth guides.
Your digital content strategy template
About us: we’re a 360 digital consulting agency. We help organizations significantly grow by increasing their organic reach.
Looking to build a killer digital content strategy?
Get in touch with us and book a first discussion. We usually start with a first digital content strategy template, and help you take a step back.
