7 easy steps to create a digital content strategy
Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2024 8:33 am
Now that you have a better understanding of what a content marketing strategy is, let’s build one.
Here are seven steps that will help you engineer the perfect digital content strategy for your business.
Step 1. Set your business goals
You need to define the business goals that you want to accomplish with content marketing.
Do this in three stages:
Set your long-term goals
Identify your short-term goals
Determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish in 6-12 months?”
Do you want to build a healthy, active following on social media? Perhaps you’d like to improve sales. Or raise brand awareness.
Those are your long-term goals.
Short-term goals, on the other hand, are the stepping stones that will take you to your long-term goals.
Let’s say your long-term goal is to 3x your organic traffic in six months.
In this case, your short-term goals can be to ensure every single article is optimised for keywords with low difficulty but with reasonable monthly search volumes. Or that you won’t publish a single post without putting your SEO strategy in mind.
Your SEO strategy may include the following:
Create a list of low-hanging, relevant keywords
Build content topic clusters around those keywords
Publish SEO-friendly blog posts using topic clusters
Generate backlinks to your website
Another component you need in place is your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.
These are metrics for tracking progress and measuring results. More importantly, they will tell you if your strategies are working or if you need to try something else.
In connection to the example above, here are some KPIs that can help you gauge SEO performance:
Keyword rankings. Your search engine rankings for your target keywords
Organic traffic. The traffic are you generating from search engines
Inbound links. The number of websites that link to your site or how can our experts help you with your needs? specific metrics that these links possess
Remember, the example goals and KPIs above are applicable if your long-term plan is to get recurring search engine traffic.
The KPIs you need to track will depend greatly on the goals you determined. These will also decide the platforms you’ll use for performance monitoring and analytics. (More on this later.)
Step 2. Conduct audience research
Knowing your target audience allows you to fine-tune pretty much every aspect of your digital content strategy.
How your audience acts ultimately tells whether your content marketing strategy succeeded or not. After all, they are the ones who will visit your website, consume your content, and pay you money.
As such, your content should be tailored to their needs and preferences. You need to consider the language they use, their pain points, the platforms they use for content consumption, etc.
A direct approach to conducting audience research is to run surveys and interviews to obtain first-party data.
Run surveys using free platforms like Google Forms. It features pre-made templates you can use to gather feedback from your target audiences.
Here are seven steps that will help you engineer the perfect digital content strategy for your business.
Step 1. Set your business goals
You need to define the business goals that you want to accomplish with content marketing.
Do this in three stages:
Set your long-term goals
Identify your short-term goals
Determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish in 6-12 months?”
Do you want to build a healthy, active following on social media? Perhaps you’d like to improve sales. Or raise brand awareness.
Those are your long-term goals.
Short-term goals, on the other hand, are the stepping stones that will take you to your long-term goals.
Let’s say your long-term goal is to 3x your organic traffic in six months.
In this case, your short-term goals can be to ensure every single article is optimised for keywords with low difficulty but with reasonable monthly search volumes. Or that you won’t publish a single post without putting your SEO strategy in mind.
Your SEO strategy may include the following:
Create a list of low-hanging, relevant keywords
Build content topic clusters around those keywords
Publish SEO-friendly blog posts using topic clusters
Generate backlinks to your website
Another component you need in place is your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.
These are metrics for tracking progress and measuring results. More importantly, they will tell you if your strategies are working or if you need to try something else.
In connection to the example above, here are some KPIs that can help you gauge SEO performance:
Keyword rankings. Your search engine rankings for your target keywords
Organic traffic. The traffic are you generating from search engines
Inbound links. The number of websites that link to your site or how can our experts help you with your needs? specific metrics that these links possess
Remember, the example goals and KPIs above are applicable if your long-term plan is to get recurring search engine traffic.
The KPIs you need to track will depend greatly on the goals you determined. These will also decide the platforms you’ll use for performance monitoring and analytics. (More on this later.)
Step 2. Conduct audience research
Knowing your target audience allows you to fine-tune pretty much every aspect of your digital content strategy.
How your audience acts ultimately tells whether your content marketing strategy succeeded or not. After all, they are the ones who will visit your website, consume your content, and pay you money.
As such, your content should be tailored to their needs and preferences. You need to consider the language they use, their pain points, the platforms they use for content consumption, etc.
A direct approach to conducting audience research is to run surveys and interviews to obtain first-party data.
Run surveys using free platforms like Google Forms. It features pre-made templates you can use to gather feedback from your target audiences.