In an algorithm-based ecosystem where your audience has total control over what they consume when they open their laptops or pick up their phones, you need to create something that encourages people to take action. Using digital content marketing in a way that truly resonates is the best way to achieve this goal.
To be clear, it can be difficult to figure out how to translate success with digital content marketing efforts into real-world wins. One of the major challenges with the digital space is that you’re competing against endless streams of free content, all jostling for your audience’s attention. Putting up a paywall will only cause people to look elsewhere. Ads will do the same if they’re obnoxious enough, and will often get stymied by now-ubiquitous ad-blocking technology.
The truth is that metrics aren’t everything, and ultimately they’re not what matters.
Page views, backlinks, bounce rate, comments, social media amplification… at the end of the day, all of these metrics mean the same thing — that you’re successfully connecting to the people in your audience. People will spend money if you convince them that you have what they want.
Digital content marketing 101: Find the content that’s right for you
The first thing to realize about content is that it doesn’t have to take only one form. While researching digital content marketing strategies, you might start to get discouraged by generic advice like “longer content is better,” or “make sure you write two posts a week.”
Podcasting, videos, live streaming, images, text-based social media posts, and how-to guides — all of these various forms of content are up for grabs when you’re considering a digital content marketing strategy.
How do you decide what’s best for you? Let’s go over a good roadmap to get you started.
Begin by channel mapping
Mapping out your content channels is an important step, allowing you to avoid duplicating effort when creating content online.
Here are the usual channels that would apply to brands online:
- Website: This is where your blog would live, as well as your core website content.
- Social media: With a wide array of content types available, social media could represent multiple channels for your brand, depending on the type of business you have.
- Email newsletters: Email is still a strong marketing channel for brands, so don’t neglect your mailing list.
When planning out your content flow, long-form content is a good place to start, since you’re able to extract the main ideas from that piece and then coordinate it across other channels.
If, for example, your long-form starting point is a blog post on your website, you can grab pithy quotes to post on Threads and link back to your website. Those quotes can also be turned into images and posted on Instagram. You can also send a link to your blog post to your email subscribers to drive viewers to your website.
By using one main starting point for your digital content marketing push, maintaining a consistent brand voice and tone is easier, and you’re not duplicating effort across platforms.
Another consideration here is utilizing AI to help you maintain your brand voice and tone across platforms, as well as implement quality controls for your content. You don’t have to use AI to create your content, but if you do, it’s very important to verify the veracity of the output, as well as disclose when you’ve used it.
Most importantly, when it comes to creating authentic content online, choose something that you’re good at, that you can commit to doing consistently, and hopefully that you’ll enjoy creating. The rest will flow from there.
Implement SEO-integrated planning
When planning your long-form content, starting with a solid SEO foundation is still key. And while SEO planning is usually focused on websites, there are ways that this SEO-first planning can help boost your other content channels.
To accomplish this, you’ll want to consider your overall goals for your digital content marketing and use those as a framework for everything you create going forward. Starting with this framework is crucial, as it will help you define and clarify your SEO goals for your digital content marketing.
To create that framework, here are some key components of successful SEO-first content:
- Audience research: Define your target audience personas, including their pain points and interests. If you already have an audience, check out their demographics and define your personas around that.
- Keyword and search intent analysis: Research the relevant keywords to your niche, including the search volume, long-tail keywords, search intent, and related search queries. This information helps guide topic clusters, pillar pages, keyword mapping, and on-page optimization, critical parts of successful SEO implementation.
- Content ideation: Have regular brainstorming sessions, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, and monitor the trends in your industry. If you have customers currently, conduct a survey to solicit feedback and adjust accordingly.
- Buyer’s journey alignment: Create content for different stages of the buyer’s journey, which includes Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Use those stages to develop topic clusters and content hierarchy.
- Strategic planning: Develop content themes, create content calendars, plan content series, and balance evergreen content with timely content. Don’t forget to also set a consistent cadence for content refreshes (quarterly or semi-annually are good starting points).
Once you’ve done the research and established your framework, use that framework as your brand’s north star and stick to it. Your content will be more focused, more impactful, and resonate better with your intended audience.
Give your content time to grow
The power of digital content marketing is that it snowballs. With every new piece of content you create, you increase the overall value of your entire content network. Each piece boosts traffic to everything else as your audience gets sucked in and starts crawling through your older work. I understand that this sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. The only reason it’s so hard to achieve is that it takes time and commitment.
Most experts say that you should be prepared to commit to six months to an entire year to see if your efforts will pay off. This is why it’s so important to pick something that you actually want to make. It’s easy to find the motivation to ramp up once things are going well and you’re starting to see results, but getting to that point in your digital content marketing effort is where most companies have doubts and break that commitment.
Volume is valuable, consistency a key component, but even more vital is quality.
At this early stage, your focus should be on only two things:
- a maniacal obsession with improving the quality of your content.
- an equally fanatical commitment to turning your audience into something you can work with.
Quality content builds trust, but only if it’s useful and not sales-y. The difficulty lies in the fact that, at some point, you do actually need to sell something.
Build your mailing list
As I said earlier, it’s not page views or traffic stats that ultimately matter when you’re trying to turn content into sales. You need to be able to reach people directly, and for that, you need to focus on building an email list.
There are a lot of ways to get people to give you their email address. One of the most simple, but often forgotten things is to make sure that you’re asking clearly. You’d be shocked at how much of a difference it can make if you’re careful about tweaking your signup forms and their placement.
Make sure that your call-to-action is impossible to miss, and that your signup form is dead simple. Another big boost is to pitch an extra tantalizing piece of free content — an ebook, a whitepaper, or a study — and offer it for free, in exchange for an email address.
Strategic digital content marketing matters
When it comes to digital content marketing, it’s almost impossible to give general advice. It depends on the subject matter of the content you’re creating, what your business is selling, and what you’re good at.
The big thing is to figure out your goals. Hopefully, this guide has given you helpful steps to define them.
If you’re using digital content marketing to drive foot traffic, for example, then you can use your mailing list to augment it by offering a special discount code or announcing a special event. If it’s about getting people to try your product, then offer them a free trial.
Content marketing is a popular strategy because it helps you build awareness and trust. By creating content that people want to engage with — that’s informative, helpful, or beautiful — you have a chance to capture your audience’s attention and make the sale.
