online strategy

Content alone will do nothing to improve your marketing results. (But you know that.) Pushing out content with no direction, no strategy, no purpose, no goals, and no targeted audience will just end up wasting time and money – even if your content is beyond incredible! So, that begs the question – What does your content need behind it to truly have an impact on your audience, bottom line, and web presence? What does your content need behind it to work well in a post-pandemic world? You guessed it: a digital content strategy. ? I repeat: To work, your content needs some kind of digital content strategy in place. Without that solid foundation, your blog posts, articles, ebooks, web pages, guest blogs, and more will go to waste. Yes, it’s a lot of extra effort. You’ll need to put in time and money to get a strategy crafted and set up. But… it’s worth it. Why? As you’ll soon see, the numbers don’t lie. A digital content strategy is essential to any content marketing endeavor. It’s what differentiates the successful from the unsuccessful. Plus, you can bet your bottom dollar your competitor has a strategy, especially that brand with the content you’re constantly jealous over. ? Now that you understand that a digital content strategy is 1000% necessary, let’s dig into a clear definition of what it entails. Then we’ll jump straight to a master plan for building your own profitable digital content strategy. Ready? The 6-Step Master Plan to Building a Profitable Digital Content Strategy 1. Understand the Key Fundamentals and Foundations of Digital Content Strategy Know Your Content Goals Know Your Content Differentiation Factor (CDF) Know Your Topic Area(s) 2. Understand Your Audience Do Audience Research Create Audience Personas for Your Content Strategy 3. Know How SEO Fits into a Digital Content Strategy Research Targeted Keywords Your Ideal Buyer Is Searching 4. Build and Solidify Your Online Authority on Your Website 5. Create Content the Right Way Optimize Your Content with Keywords Find a Workflow that Works Map Your Audience Persona to the Marketing Lifecycle Map Content Topics to Your Content Goals Guest Blog Strategically 6. Set Up Processes to Manage & Maintain Your Content Budget for Your Major Content Activities Promote Your Content Maintain Your Digital Content Strategy What Is a Digital Content Strategy? & What Is It Worth? The simplest way to think of a digital content strategy is to imagine it as the engine of a car. The car represents your content marketing. The engine that drives your content marketing is the digital content strategy. It moves your content marketing forward, pushing it in the right direction. It gives your content its power and impact. ? Last but certainly not least, the digital strategy gives your content a purpose – and gives YOU a way to reach ROI. Without a strategy, your content will remain stuck in the mud. And you’ll end up with a ton of unwanted facepalm moments. Source: GIPHY The digital content strategy is also a lot like a map. It tells you the direction to take your content to best appeal to your ideal audience, so you always know how to get to ROI. This includes: Where to publish content How often to publish Where to share/promote/distribute it The style/voice to use in your content The audience niche you’re writing to Your content budget Your topic areas and target keywords And more! Marketers who forge ahead without a strategy are literally traveling without a map. It’s no wonder they end up lost more often than not. This is what the numbers say about using a digital content strategy for your content marketing: Without a strategy, you’re paddling upstream. According to CMI’s 2021 B2B Content Marketing Report, 63% of marketers blamed “content creation challenges” for their organization’s lack of success in the past 12 months. (Conversely, with a strategy in place, you take the guesswork out of content creation.) Another 51% said they had general “strategy issues.” (Correctly done, a digital strategy should work seamlessly, on repeat.) 79% of content marketers have a digital content strategy in place, either documented or undocumented. 17% don’t have one, but plan to create one within the year. Only 4% have no strategy with zero plans to create one in the future. (That says a lot about the importance marketers place on strategy, even if their grasp on strategy is shaky.) Some of the benefits of a documented digital content strategy: It aligns your team around your mission/goals. It helps you figure out which types of content to develop. It keeps your team focused on priorities. It helps you allocate resources for better results. It clarifies your target audience(s). And of course… it helps you actually measure and see PROFITS and growth. Time and again, when marketers implement a strategy (or tweak the one they have for the better), their content improves. And, when their content improves, their marketing improves as a whole. ♥ Source: CMI The 6 Essential Steps to Build a Digital Content Strategy How do you build a digital content strategy that gets results? There are 6 steps to putting all the pieces of this framework in place. Let’s take a look at how it all comes together. 1. Understand the Key Fundamentals and Foundations of Digital Content Strategy You can’t build your digital content strategy without these key fundamentals. Start here and get these solid before you move forward. A. Know Your Content Goals What do you hope to gain from content marketing? These are your content goals, and they should drive your entire content strategy. Identify goals first before you do anything else. B. Know Your Content Differentiation Factor (CDF) Before you can assemble the other pieces of your strategy, you have to have one key fundamental in hand. I call this your Content Differentiation Factor, or CDF for short. This factor is what separates you or your client’s brand from the billions of others out there on the internet. It answers … Read more