How to get started with your digital content strategy
Getting started with any marketing strategy can be difficult and within the constantly changing digital landscape, it can be challenging to know what is possible within the current best practices.
Your digital content strategy feeds into everything that you do online. It encompasses so many areas within SEO, branding and the sales funnel and lead generation. Here we share some of the areas to look at when it comes to kicking off your digital content strategy in 2021.
1. Determine your target audience and keywords
In Summary
Develop content for your target audience.
Target relevant keywords and optimise the content for SEO.
Add lead-magnets to bring people into the sales funnel.
Creating content that is tailored to your target audience is so important when it comes to driving value and good quality leads. Alongside working out your target audience from an SEO perspective it is also important to work out the type of keywords that you want to target.
Content whether it comes in the form of articles, videos, podcasts or downloadable e-Books need to be relevant and of a high enough standard that they are going to provide some real value for your audience. Make sure you also keep your SEO hat on to work out which keywords to target. Content rich-pages that answer user questions are often well ranked in search engines precisely because they provide value.
Once you have content that ranks well and provides value, you can then look at adding a lead magnet in the form of a downloadable tool or newsletter sign-up to start to nurture the relationship further.
2. Work out what types of content you can produce
In Summary
Decide on the type of content that you can produce.
Repurpose the content for articles and social posts and vice versa.
Make sure you optimise all of the content and avoid duplication.
Different industries all have their own preferred ways of delivering content, however if you are sat thinking there is nothing you produce all hope is not last.
A vital part of working out your digital content strategy is working out the type of content that you can produce. If you are a publishing site the options are plentiful, with news and article pieces videos, podcasts and much much more. However even if you are an e-commerce business, there is nothing stopping you adding a blog or podcast section to your website and this can be a great way to touch base with customers who may not be ready to buy yet.
Always try to work out how to get the most value out of your content. A podcast episode can make a great article and vice versa! Again make sure that you are always targeting a valuable keyword within the content and are writing for the web as best as you can.
3. Write with the end user and search engines in mind
In Summary
Write for both the search engines and your end users.
Include relevant headings, metadata and keywords in the content.
Make the content easy to read and digest.
Writing for the end user and the search engine can seem somewhat counterintuitive but as tools like Google become more sophisticated the lines between good content for SEO and good content for humans, is becoming less defined.
Yes you need to include the target keyword within your content but don’t make it spammy, your readers will see right through it.
Make sure you include relevant keyword rich headings and subheadings (H1 and H2s) as these will help both Google and your users digest the content and work out its purpose.
This is why it is also useful to include copy on podcast and video pages. Whilst search engines are getting better at reading this content directly, having some text on the pages always helps.
4. Develop a robust strategy for outreaching your content
In Summary
Create content that can generate links organically.
Create content that you can pitch to publications and blogging sites.
Having good onsite content will provide value for readers and give you the opportunity to conduct some lead generation. Leading on from this, over time if the content is high-value it may even generate highly relevant links from authoritative sites too! This helps the content rank better and creates a virtuous cycle by which you can get a good number of backlinks.
This takes time, and some manual outreach for your content may be needed. Make sure that if you are creating digital content that it really does provide value. This will increase the success rate of your outreach campaigns and help increase the number of links to your website.
Get in touch to make your digital content perform better
Varn is an agency near Bristol that has years of experience managing digital marketing and content campaigns for a variety of different clients. We know how to structure your strategy in a way that keeps the focus on generating more revenue through sales for your company whilst also providing potential customers with great content along the way.
Get in touch with a member of our team today and we can show you how to make our digital content strategy perform better.
