Digital Content Marketing Strategy: How It Helps You Grow

Digital content marketing strategy helps businesses promote their products, build trust with the audience, and create sales and long-term relationships.

The wide availability of digital tools helps with the content creation of your business while getting messages to the customers is more complex than ever.

What is Digital Content Marketing Strategy

A digital content marketing strategy is a plan that will direct your content to work with your business goals. A good content strategy will identify the correct audience, create proper messages, position your business and distribute your content on an appropriate scale. In the end, a good content strategy will always provide a measurement of your success so you can adjust your future efforts.

An excellent digital content strategy always attracts the right customers for your business and keeps existing customers satisfied.

Need for a Digital Content Strategy

If your competitors do not have a strategy, you do not need one. As that is very rare, and most likely competitors are heavily investing in the system of content marketing, then you have to create and apply yours right now.

Fundamentals of Content Marketing Strategy are:

1. Content solves practical problems

The first step is to understand what your business has to offer to stand out: what does it do better than the competition? The second step is understanding what you do that solves the audience’s practical problems. This provides an exact idea of what your content creation should focus on.

2. The right audience needs the right content

Finding the right audience is the name of the game in this step. To make content that sticks with the audience, you need to know the audience.

Content should solve the audience’s problems and not speak “about us”. All your efforts should go into finding people’s pain points to which you can offer a remedy through your content.

We can start with brainstorming questions such as: what are the needs of people, values, pain points, and what does the life which they live every day looks like?

The book Story Branding by David Miller explains the process in great detail and the exact method of creating a story out of any brand. A story that will be interesting for people, that people can relate to.

The standard mantra of marketing in the form of “make a buyer persona” often fails in real marketing because the same buyer persona on paper can cover a few completely different people in actual life.

The better step in finding relevant audience interests is to simply identify keywords, core values, primary motivation, and main objections. Then you have enough information based on which you can create content.

3. Become visible

Creating internal workshops where buyer personas are made and values brainstormed doesn’t solve the main issue that all companies face: very well-organized competition. The question is how to differentiate your content from competitors and be visible.

The easiest is to create content that the competition is not covering a lot and that parallelly helps people with their pain points. Focusing on the emotional drivers of users always helps with content.

People go online for different reasons, such as entertainment, social connection, or education.

You can use tools combined with your keywords to find why people go online in relation to your products, such as Google Trends, Answer The Public, Google alerts, Reviews on e-commerce sites, and social media. Companies that personalize their content have the most success.

Although society often speaks about innovation positively, too novel ideas are not well accepted, so finding existing content and improving it works excellently. Adding small innovations to any existing product always works better than having an entirely new product. An entire novel product can be too intimidating for people to like or use it.

4. Types of Content

Companies are trying to market themselves with many types of content, such as Social Media Content, Articles, Newsletters, Live Events, Webinars, Podcasts, Whatsapp/ Viber/ SMS messaging, and Leaflets.

Current trends are that video and audio (podcasts) are the focus bringing the most success, together with more complex writing in the form of articles. The type of content on which your company will focus will be the result of experimentation. It depends if you are a member of a small or a bigger company team which is more skilled at writing or video recording.

Articles should be the focus if team members are skilled at writing; it is even harder to find people ready to record themselves for TikTok.

Be careful with channels that are “not popular” in your team cause it might be that your audience actually likes the channel.

When you create content on social media, you do not control distribution or the platform, which means you could remain without anything, even due to a small platform change in how they distribute content to the users. So creating your own blog, your own website that will remain in your ownership makes more sense long-term. There are many “horror” stories of companies investing millions in their Facebook followers when a simple change of “what users see” from the platform side renders a few million followers useless.

Decide if investing in channels that you own will be a long-term priority. If you create your own site, you must take care of SEO and solve other technical issues.

You can always notice that top-performing companies use social media channels for marketing, but in the end, they pull users to some sites they own until they do not need any more social media channels.

5. Content distribution

Which social media platform should we use? Should we focus on newsletters or still use very efficient SMS messages? The answer is to go first with the platforms where your audience is most of the time, then expand it to other emerging platforms.

• You have to be aware that the advertised reach of social media companies often doesn’t respond to reality. Each platform has its statistics of the audience that mostly hangs on it. Although statistics and legacy media speak of the exodus of users from Facebook, a large percentage of people still use it.
• Instagram is a top sharing social media platform that would be on a steady stream of success in case Tik-Tok would not appear. Now Instagram is rapidly trying to look and feel more like Tik-Tok.
• Twitter, often not used in Europe, can create valuable connections with journalists as that platform is their favorite choice worldwide.
• LinkedIn targets business audiences but then depends on the type of product that you advertise. We often see companies post even food discount flyers on LinkedIn, utterly oblivious to the fact that LinkedIn uses algorithms to discover and suppress them silently. So the only ones who see such flyers are the person posting them and their job mates.
• TikTok is the fastest-growing platform in the world. In all the recent surveys, teenagers will always say that they prefer TikTok over Instagram, even when they use both platforms. Although the network is full of silly videos, and self-help gurus, nothing prevents anyone from creating helpful content.
• Pinterest is exciting and can have excellent content marketing potential depending on the products you will try to advertise. Also, at the moment of writing this article, Pinterest is trying to join the advertising race by releasing plenty of advertising features similar to other successful platforms. What is interesting about Pinterest is that people buying over Pinterest spend significantly more money than they do on other platforms.
• Community-driven platforms, such as Reddit, and Quora, have many users that actively contribute to the content. Even better than advertising on them, it is answering questions of the people seeking help.

How often should you post content? Depends on your competition efforts. Some standards say that posting on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tiktok should happen daily while writing article weekly, sending newsletters, or creating Youtube content every two weeks.

Using social media calendars as standup apps or other types of content calendars must be part of a standard operation to be efficient.

6. Content Brand Alignment

All your content and marketing efforts need to align with your brand. A brand is a feeling that people have when they see your content. The brand impression is an emotional experience of a person driven by emotions.

The main point of branding is to tell customers what they will accomplish if they associate with your brand and where it is taking them. Creating an audience for your brand requires time, sometimes years, but in the end, it is worth it.

7. Learning through measuring

Measuring success and then re-adjusting your efforts is key to success. Each social media platform offers some type of analytics, and a wide range of other tools are available as independent sources of truth.

The success of a Digital content marketing strategy depends on your ability to measure results and understand how each step of your efforts moves you closer or further from your goals.

Summary

A digital content marketing strategy is a plan that will direct your content to work with your business goals. To win over the competition, you need a system that will create content daily, measure, and re-adjust when necessary. The content you create must solve people’s problems while being customized to them and your brand.

Buyer personas in a workshop format can be deceiving, so use tools to get insights into what people are actually interested in regarding your brand and products. Get insights about emotions customers express concerning your keywords.

Identify where your customers are, then start with that platforms and move later to emerging platforms.

The main point of branding is to tell customers what they will accomplish if they associate with your brand and where your brand is taking them.

Measuring success and then re-adjusting your efforts is the key to success.

Article by Dario Sipos

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