If you’re not moving forward in digital content marketing, you are going backward. 

You shouldn’t be content with last year’s successful content marketing.

To really see consistent results coming from your content marketing, keep your digital content strategy updated.

In this post, I will share six tips to create a digital content strategy that boosts your business growth consistently.

What is a digital content strategy?

A digital content strategy is a framework and roadmap to develop and promote different types of online content with an overarching goal of achieving business and/ or brand growth.

A content marketing strategy can include both inbound and outbound marketing tactics, including website content, social media marketing, and advertising.

Why do you need a digital content strategy?

There are proven benefits of content marketing, and the only way to make the most of those benefits is to work with a digital content strategy.

Otherwise, you would just be creating loads of content, but you won’t know if the resources you use to create that content are giving you the results you want.

As a business, both unbranded and branded digital content could be effective, depending on the level of brand awareness.

5 tips to create a digital content strategy that delivers results continuously

It is not enough to just create a digital content strategy.

The physical and online worlds are both constantly changing, moving at a rapid pace, and you need an agile digital content guide for your small business website that can deliver results consistently with your content creation and promotion.

1. Start with a solid foundation

The first step is to get the basics right of your digital content strategy.

You need to do the research, determine what you want to achieve, and how to create a content development plan to achieve those eobjectives.

4 quick tips to get started with creating digital content:

1.1. Define the objectives

Defining the objectives of your digital content strategy allows you to plan and get results purposefully.

For example, you would create digital content differently depending on whether your objectives were to generate leads, build brand awareness, or drive sales.

1.2. Study the data

A successful content strategy and digital content creation rely on information and research.

You need to do a thorough audience analysis to discover what your audience thinks, what they want, and what motivates them.

You also need to understand your competition and their digital content strategy, to see what kind of content they create, and which ones are most successful.

Once you have done all the groundwork, you can create a digital content plan.

1.3. Develop a content creation plan

When you create a digital content plan, answer questions like:

How will the work be done? How much budget can be allocated for it?

Will you do all of it yourself, or hire professionals? What will the final results look like?

Writing out the answers to these questions allows you to simplify the digital content creation process.

Use a  website content strategy and template to create and optimize content across your entire website.

1.4. Know your story

All the products and content you create should reflect your brand story.

Your brand purpose, brand values, tone and voice, and brand imagery should be incorporated into your digital content strategy.

2. Monitor your competition’s activities

The events of the last two years have changed the global landscape.

Your competitors may have minimized their marketing activity or disappeared entirely.

Others have pivoted to new products and services.

Finally, entrepreneurial-minded individuals have started new companies and are now vying for your customers.

Accordingly, the content marketing efforts of your competitors also could have reduced or changed course, and you could have now new competition who’s creating really good content.

So you need to track who your current competition is and analyze their content performance.

You can use SEO tools like SEMRush, SE Ranking, SEO Powersuite, etc., to learn more about your competitors.

Analyze the content for your business topics and learn what type of content is visited most often by your audience and create similar content for your social media platforms.

The key elements you need to know about competitor’s digital content:

2.1. Keywords

Analyze which keywords are driving the most traffic to your competitor’s site.

Check out the volume and keyword difficulty of all these keywords, and what topics the keywords can broadly be grouped under.

Most of the sophisticated SEO tools like Semrush have a ‘Content Gap’ feature that lets you find keywords that one or more of your competitors rank for, but your site doesn’t.

2.2. Top content

Determine which kinds of content your competitors are creating.

Are they focusing more on blogs, or more on audio-visual mediums like videos, podcasts, and webinars? Or a mix of everything?

Track which pages of your known competitors are getting the most traffic, and the source of that traffic. For example, is it paid or organic?

See if you can determine if your competitors are using a hub-cluster model to create SEO content.

You can also analyze if these pages are also getting a lot of social shares, and why they are so appealing to your audience.

Use your findings to create and update unique content that differs from your competitors and is ideally better. Content is one of the most important elements of your business website checklist.

2.3. Backlinks

Backlinks are an important aspect of SEO and organic traffic.

Inspect your competitor’s backlinks to see if you can also target similar websites with a link outreach campaign.

3. Update and repurpose your content

Your customers spend more time online and on social media than ever before.

They are constantly bombarded by content and have become adept at ignoring a lot of the digital content they see.

While some of your content is evergreen, it’s more likely that things are constantly changing and you need to keep updating your content.

Competitive businesses use a lot of webinars, video content, and animation.

Using new ideas and content mediums is more likely to attract new customers.

Here are some tips:

3.1. Repurpose your best performing content

Track your most visited and/ or shared content pages, whether they are on your website, Youtube, or any other content platforms.

Reach a wider section of your audience by repurposing the existing medium to others. For e.g. an existing long video can be broken up into smaller sections and shared on social media, can be turned into a written blog, converted into a podcast, and used as the basis for a webinar.

3.2. Use interactive content

Interactive tutorials or webinars are very effective in driving engagement.

The more you interact with potential customers, the more likely they’ll keep going back to your site.

Another example of interactive content is live videos that let you entertain/ educate your visitors while answering their comments and questions.

3.3. Update your old content

Choose a few pieces of evergreen content and keep updating it with the newest and most relevant information.

While this is the easiest to do with blog posts, you can also update videos or add to them.

3.4. Continuously create fresh content

You have to produce fresh content on a regular basis to stay connected to your audience.

When viewers visit your site or social platform, they should always see something new. This is the only way to keep them engaged and check out your website or channel often.

Make it a habit to engage every day.

Develop eye-catching content on your website, social media, and all other content platforms where you host your content.

Related: What makes a good website

4. Use a content calendar for content creation and distribution

Strategic content marketing and a content creation plan must follow a content calendar.

A calendar outlines essential factors. It lets you keep track of:

• What content you’re creating
• When you’re creating it
• Who is creating it
• Which site(s) you will publish the content on

Make a content calendar the starting point for your content campaigns.

Then, based on the calendar, you or your marketing team can keep track of the organization’s broader marketing activities.

So, for example, you can decide when to push out and promote new products. In addition, you can work hard to ensure that all digital and promotional content aligns.

5. Monitor and track your content metrics regularly

When you set the goals and objectives of your website and of your digital content strategy, you must have defined the metrics with which you were going to measure the success of that strategy.

All of them need to be monitored on a regular basis.

Google Analytics lets you track the age group and interests of your website visitors, along with their engagement on your site.

Use this data to make necessary changes in your digital content strategy.

You can keep track of everything by creating a dashboard that compiles your KPIs. Having a dashboard allows you to see everything at a glance.

Some key content metrics you should track:

5.1. Website traffic

Use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors you get on your site and the type and source of traffic.

For example, do you get the most traffic from organic searches, social media, email marketing, or other websites?

Are most of your site visitors new ones, or are there lots of repeat visitors?

5.2. Website engagement

Google Analytics will also provide you data on how your website visitors engage with your content.

For example, which content pages do they visit the most, which page do they spend most time on, how many pages they see on your website.

When you track such data regularly, you will know which content is working, which is less effective, and how to update your content to make it more valuable for your audience.

5.3. Social shares

The number of shares your content gets is also a big indicator of how attractive your content is for your audience.

If some pieces of content are not getting enough traction, either update them or remove them altogether and create fresh content that is more engaging.

5.4. Conversions

Your content is only the marketing material that will encourage your audience to connect with your business, to take an action.

The goal could be either to get your audience to purchase something, to contact you, or even to provide you their email address.

Either way, you should track these metrics to see if your digital content strategy is successful.

6. Hire professionals to boost your content performance

Creating a successful digital content campaign is challenging.

That’s why you should consider working with professionals who have a lot of experience.

If you have the budget, you can hire a freelance professional (like yours truly 😉 or an agency to create/ update/ monitor your content.

The biggest advantage of hiring professionals is that you save time which you can allocate to running your business.

If content marketing is not your forte, then you don’t have to spend hours learning and working on it, with your progress being very slow.

Leaving it to the experts means that they do the heavy lifting for you and get results much quicker than you can (since it is their expertise, after all).

They can also track your content performance and goals and offer you advice on revising or tweaking your strategy to get the results you want.

But of course, it depends on your business goals and budget: how much you want to grow, and by when.

Those were 6 tips to help you create a digital content strategy that works for you in the long run, consistently.

What about you? Have any tips to add to this list? Do share in the comments!