Digital content strategy: creating one that drives results

Digital content strategy: creating one that drives results

Content strategy can be a confusing topic. When you take two words as ubiquitous as "content" and "strategy," it's inevitable. Often, content strategy is used interchangeably with content marketing or confused with copywriting. In reality, though, it encompasses more than either of those. 

What is a digital content strategy?

A broad definition of content strategy is a plan for the development and ongoing management of the content a company creates and shares with its audience. For Mobiquity, digital content strategy goes a bit deeper and is considered an integral part of a successful digital product. That’s because with a digital product, quite often the content is the product.  

A broad definition of content strategy is a plan for the development and ongoing management of the content a company creates and shares with its audience. For Mobiquity, digital content strategy goes a bit deeper and is considered an integral part of a successful digital product. That’s because with a digital product, quite often the content is the product.  

Some key components of a digital content strategy include:

1. Goal setting - For a content strategy to be successful, you have to first understand what you’re trying to achieve. Common goals include increased brand awareness, website traffic, or leads in your sales funnel. Be as specific as you can be so that you can measure your success down the road. You’ll also want to be sure that you’re set up properly with tools like Google Analytics before you get started so that you’ll be in good shape when you’re ready to dig into the metrics.
2. Understanding your target audience - Before you start creating, it’s important to thoroughly understand who you are creating for, their pain points, and what kind of digital content will resonate with them. This could be done through custom research, live interview, or even internet research.
3. Planning - There’s a lot that goes into planning, but to give you a high level idea of the key aspects, we’ll highlight a few important aspects. First, you’ll want to have some method of generating content ideas. This can be as simple as an ongoing shared document for capturing and ranking ideas, or as formal as having a content council. In addition, utilizing a content calendar or project management tool, you’ll want to plan with all relevant team members around what content you’ll work on and publish during what time periods.
4. Content creation - Using what you know about your target audience and business goals, create digital content that will help you connect with potential customers and generate your desired outcome. It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that to be successful in the long run, it’s incredibly important to create high quality content. Make sure you are the place your audience goes as an authority in your field.
5. Publication and promotion - Making sure your content can be found by your target audience and search engines is a key part of the success of your content. While a full promotional plan is not typically included in a digital content strategy, you’ll want to be sure that you are considering relevant promotional channels and teams as part of your process.
6. Measurement - Once you launch and promote your content, you’ll want to revisit your original goals and key performance indicators to see how your content measures up. Based on what you find, you may want to make revisions to your content or promotional strategy for the future. 

What do we mean by content? 

Before we get too far along, let's talk about what we mean by content. In the context of digital content strategies, the types of digital content covered include anything that conveys meaningful information to another human. This includes page copy, blog posts, video content, audio recording, content from social media platforms, imagery, blog articles, alerts and notifications, and more. All of these elements come together to impact the way a brand is expressed to its audience and therefore all of these need to be strategically coordinated. 

Why is a digital content strategy important? 

Digital content strategy is important because failure to consider content as an integral part of digital product development can lead to misalignment between design, copy, and visuals, resulting in friction for the user. ​Lack of strategic content consideration can also lead to misalignment between the final product experience and the overarching business strategy. Ultimately, this can impede the product's ability to deliver the necessary value to the organization.​ 

To be successful, a digital content strategy must work with visual design so that users can find what they need when they need it. It must also take into account the broader goals of the company and make sure it is furthering those objectives.  

7 signs that it’s time to create a content strategy 

Any company with a digital product or property should have a digital content strategy. But don't feel bad if you don't - only the minority of companies have a strategy that contains all of the important elements that guide an effective content strategy. 

There are some key indicators that it may be time to revisit and improve upon your content strategy. These include if you: 

• Are in the process of launching a new digital product or property or migrating to a new experience 
• Don't have a content strategy or are concerned you may be missing a key piece. (in either case, we can help!) 
• Don't have a comprehensive idea of what content exists or where it exists 
• Have a lot of content and don't know what to keep, update, or remove 

• Know there's a problem with your content but you're not quite sure what it is 
• Feel like you are constantly focused publishing on what's urgent but not what's most important to the business 
• Suspect there's a gap between what your target audience is looking for and what you are creating 

The list is potentially endless, but these are some top indicators that the time is right to re-examine the strategy behind your content production.  

The 6 Essential Steps to Building a Digital Content Strategy 

How can you create an effective content strategy? There are an infinite number of ways to start and we’ve found the following steps work well in most cases.

1) Project kick off: getting started on the right foot 

How you tackle the first stages of your digital content strategy work will depend heavily on where you are starting from. For example, is the organization on board with devoting the time and resources it will take to redesign the way content is brought to life? Are you an external consultant of the organization? In either of these situations, kicking off the project so that everyone is on the same page with the objectives and output is key. 

This could include a kickoff meeting, a project brief, agreement on the cadence of updates, or alignment on scope and goals. One way to determine the best way to kick off is to consider where you anticipate challenges along the way - is there something you could do at kickoff to get ahead of those hurdles? The most important thing is to make sure important stakeholders understand the scope and value of the content strategy work you are about to embark on. 

2) Research and information gathering 

Before you can do too much else, you need to get the lay of the land. A lot of this will be investigating what exists today, seeing how content is organized, and identifying opportunities that may exist to deliver a better user experience. Key considerations in this step include:

• Examine the business plan and existing research 

You'll want to identify what documents already exist that outline the strategic goals of the organization and also anything that guides the content creation process. The ultimate goal of all content creation should be to further overall company objectives, making it imperative that you understand the high-level business strategy. 

When it comes to content creation guidelines, you'll want to understand if there has been any persona development since it's crucially important that you understand exactly who each piece of content is targeting. If any prior research has been done that could impact persona or content development, you should gather that in this stage. Additionally, if there are any pieces of example content, templates, strategy decks, or other foundational work, that should be considered at this time, as well. 

In addition to persona development, are there brand guidelines, user segmentation, voice and tone work, or other key guiding documents? If so, you'll want to be familiar with those. 

• Make time for stakeholder interviews 

In addition to checking live content for yourself, you'll want to get information and content ideas from the stakeholders who know the business and current content best. You can identify who those people are in the kickoff process and set up time to talk to them one on one. Understand from their perspectives what they think is and isn't working, what opportunities exist and what their content creation and management program would be like in a perfect world.

• User research can be helpful 

If budget and time allow, doing primary user research will give you a perspective that you can't get anywhere else. Understanding users' unbiased opinions of the content they see and their feedback on what's confusing can be invaluable in building out your plan.

• Analytic reports and auditing are crucial 

Finally, you'll want to pull any relevant analytics you can find from sources like Google Analytics, your content management system (CMS), customer relationship management platform (CRM), social media, email marketing platform, and any other place where content is served to your target audience. 

Analytics will feed into a key document that is almost always a part of a content strategy: a content audit. This requires taking the page level data that you pulled in the previous step and looking at what existing content is performing the best against your most important KPIs. You'll be looking more closely at this information in the synthesis and goal setting step - ultimately, you'll want to create some theories around why some existing content is doing better than others so that you can test against these later. 

3) Synthesis: documenting your digital content strategy 

At this point, you'll likely have quite a lot of information. It’s time to dig in and get your hands dirty. You probably already have ideas about what needs to be done and now is the time to formalize those thoughts. Every digital product or experience is different so there's no way for us to give you a one-size-fits all template. We recommend, however, that you consider a few key areas in your plan: 

• Structure 
  • What is the goal for content within this organization? How can and should it contribute to business goals? 
  • Is the way that content is organized today working well? Are there needed changes? 
  • Is the mix of content types helping to achieve organizational goals? If not, what needs to change? 
• Substance 
  • What content is most successful? How can this be leveraged? What content is unsuccessful? Can this be remedied or does some content need to be removed? 
  • What problems have you found with existing content? What's the best way to remedy them? 
  • What additional content is needed and how will we bring it to life? 
  • What keywords should we be ranking for? 
  • What content gaps have you identified - are there topic areas that should be covered that are not? 
  • Are there established user or buyer personas and do they still feel up to date? 
• Process 
  • How seamless is content production? What changes to the process or additional resources are needed? 
  • What problems do you see with the way content is being approached today? 
  • What's working/not working with current processes? (planning, creation, approval, publishing, promotion) 
  • Can the content team accomplish what they need to with their current resources and structure? 

Key documents to consider creating 

• Content strategy statement. A content strategy statement is a boiled down statement that communicates what content needs to accomplish for your business. Content creation can often be seen as more art than science, but at the end of the day, content must be moving your business toward its goals. This is your opportunity to make your content goals clear to the content creation team and the larger organization. 
• A content calendar is a concrete way to start mapping everything you need against your content creation goals. It's also a great way to gauge how realistic your digital content strategy is and if you may need more resources to execute it in the timeframe you desire. This should include how you will be publishing content, and how content will be promoted, with specific timing. 
• Content templates and briefs make sure content is consistently created in the future, especially when there is a large or varied group of people involved in the activity. These can include key information on who will write and approve each piece, the target person, what action we want them to take, the goal of the piece of content as well as key SEO information like URL slug, keyword, length, tagging and linking information. 
• A process flow chart of how content will be created. Who will create each piece, who will edit, approve, and post? 

• Topic mapping that outlines topic areas of your digital content strategy as well as how they connect. What's a logical way to introduce these topics to your audience? How should they be connected on the site? 
• A measurement plan should outline how you will measure your progress toward business goals. This includes your most important KPIs and target conversion rates and how you will contribute toward these important benchmarks. 
• A content marketing strategy that includes the marketing vehicles that will be used to promote each piece of content. It can be as simple as a grid with the appropriate channel selected or be more in-depth depending on how the content strategy project was scoped, as well as your skills and responsibilities. 

4) Execute! Your digital strategy comes to life.

This is where the rubber meets the digital content strategy road! Depending on your capacity as the content strategist, this may be the time when you roll up your sleeves and make it happen or the time when you hand over your plan to the team and hold your breath. (Or possibly a hybrid of both!) Either way, be ready and available for a few questions and maybe hiccups along the way. Luckily, you've done your homework and can figure out a solution to whatever comes up. 

5) Plan for the long haul 

A digital content strategy isn't a once and done, fixed document. It should be a living breathing part of how teams meet their goals. It's important to revisit this strategy often and adjust what's no longer accurate, relevant, or impactful. 

There are many ways to do this, but a few important steps include regular evaluation of your analytics. See what content is performing to expectations and what might need some revisions. Once you understand what's resonating with your audience you can incorporate more of what's working into your plan. 

It's also important to regularly review all content. Some companies make it a point to revisit content once a year. A good way to tackle this is by looking at all your historical content created in that month, this way you never have to look at all of it at once. Often a quick review will reveal some opportunities to update references, statistics, check that links are still active and working and add any new content that has become relevant since the original content was created. Not only does this create a better user experience for your site visitors, but Google and other search engines reward content that is regularly updated with higher rankings. 

6) Celebrate your content strategy victories! 

If you've created a solid digital content strategy, and a concrete measurement plan, you should have some wins to celebrate in no time. Make sure that people across the organization understand how content played a role in that new customer, closed sale, or recent PR mention. By making sure that you understand the value that your strategy is bringing to the table, and sharing it with others in the organization, you'll have the best chance possible at getting more resources to fuel your content engine. 

What are some of the tools required to bring a digital content strategy to life?

When designing a digital content strategy, it’s helpful to consider the tools that can help with creating high quality content and its distribution, analysis, and management. Here are a few we find useful across different stages of the content lifecycle:

1. A Content Management System (CMS): Platforms like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla enable you to create, edit, organize, and publish digital content on your website without needing extensive technical knowledge.
2. Content Creation Tools: Different types of content require different types of creation and editing capabilities, including:
   • Graphic Design: Adobe Photoshop, Canva, or Adobe Illustrator for creating images, infographics, and other visual content.
   • Video Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie for editing videos.
   • Audio Editing: Audacity, Adobe Audition, or GarageBand for editing podcasts or audio content.
3. Social Media Management Tools: Platforms like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social help schedule and publish content across various social media channels, monitor engagement, and analyze performance. Social media platforms can be really valuable for generating awareness of your content and brand.
4. Email Marketing Software: Email is still one of the most important content distribution channels available. Tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or HubSpot enable you to create, send, and track email campaigns to engage with your audience and promote your content.
5. SEO Tools: SEO should be an important consideration throughout the content creation process. Platforms such as SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs provide insights into keyword research, backlink analysis, and website optimization to improve your content's visibility in search engine results.
6. Analytics Platforms: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or similar tools help track and analyze website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy.
7. Project Management Tools: Tools like Trello, Asana, or Monday.com facilitate collaboration, task management, and workflow organization among team members working on content creation and distribution.
8. Content Collaboration and Approval Tools: While Platforms such as GatherContent, Contentful, or Airtable can help streamline the content creation process, many teams start with Google Workspace or Sharepoint. The important thing is to have a system that enables teams to collaborate, review, and approve content in a centralized environment.
9. Content Optimization Tools: Tools like Yoast SEO (for WordPress) or Grammarly help optimize content for readability, SEO, and grammar to improve its effectiveness and user experience. These can become essential tools when it comes to executing your content strategy.
10. Content Distribution Platforms: Platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, or LinkedIn Ads enable you to distribute content to a wider audience through native advertising, sponsored content, or paid social media promotion.

These tools, combined with a well-defined digital content strategy, can help streamline content creation, distribution, and analysis, ultimately driving better results and achieving your business objectives.

We can help!

Content strategy is an important part of how we bring digital products to market. Contact us to learn more about how we can help with your digital content strategy!