Digital content marketing: According to the Content Marketing Institute report in 2021, only 43% of content marketers have a written document called a digital content strategy document or digital content marketing.
As a content marketing expert, you have only one task: capture people’s hearts and minds with content; This is by no means easy, especially when you have to create quality content regularly on a low budget.
However, having a written plan will help you stay on track to achieve your long-term goals. And This is why all successful content marketing starts with a good content strategy. Of course, the reason why some content marketers struggle can also be a sign of its absence.
We have helped many businesses, large and small, across all industries to develop their content strategy document. In this way, we have realized what things have a terrible effect on the digital content marketing document, what things have a good effect, and, more importantly, what things have an excellent and impressive effect. We are ready to share this information on digiwaremarketing with you.
What is Digital content marketing?
In general, we can say that content strategy or digital content marketing means planning for the production, distribution (delivering to the audience) and managing valuable and practical content.
For example, one of your business goals might be to increase awareness. To achieve this goal, you need to develop a digital content marketing document that focuses on SEO so that your site is ranked higher in Google search results than other sites. As a result, more people will be informed about your products, and more traffic will flow to your site.
Not having a content strategy is like flying with your eyes closed or Rumi’s famous example of the dark room and the elephant. Of course, it also has fans because if you don’t have a specific plan, people can give a thousand and one reasons for not doing or postponing their work.
For example, “I was busy preparing content for the advertising campaign”, “It’s too late now, and I don’t have time to prepare content.” or “I don’t have enough information and resources to write content”, and…
Digital content marketing steps
When developing a Digital content marketing document, you will probably encounter the following questions:
1. Who reads your content?
Who is your target audience? How many audiences do you write content for? Content strategy becomes effective when you have designed customer personas.
Various content types and formats will help you tailor your content to your audience’s tastes. And This allows you to engage with all of your business audiences.
2. Which needs of your audience are you responding to? Or which problem do you solve?
The idea is that your product fulfils a need of your audience. For this reason, your audience should understand their need or problem from your content and find a way to solve them.
An excellent digital content marketing document covers both sides of the product: both creating the need and finding the problem and solving the need and solving the problem.
3. What makes you unique?
Your competitors probably offer products similar to yours. Therefore, your audience should know what makes you different from your competitors. And This is where content comes in handy.
To convince your audience that your product is worth using, you must first convince your audience that you are worth hearing.
4. What content format should you focus on?
What formats are suitable for your content? Infographics, video, blogging.
To achieve the goal you want, in addition to specifying attractive titles, you should determine the type of content format to achieve that position according to your budget.
5. What channels will your content be published on?
As you can use different content formats, you can also use different channels to publish your content. These channels can belong to your business, such as a website, blog, etc., or they can belong to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Which of the channels we choose to publish content depends on the digital presence of the persona, not our taste.
6. How will you manage the production and distribution of your content?
Google and social networks love content continuity. By setting up a content calendar, you can produce content regularly, quickly shape the business message with selected titles, and gradually make a name for yourself in the market and among competitors.
Preparation of digital content marketing document in 9 steps
Below is a step-by-step guide for you to quickly set up a digital content marketing document:
Step 1: Determine your goals
What is your goal in doing content marketing? Why do you want to create content and have a content marketing plan?
Before you start planning, define your goals. In this way, it is easier to understand what strategy is suitable.
You can use the SMARTER model to create the right goal.
Along with setting your content marketing goals, you should also look at your business mission, vision, and values so that there are no contradictions.
Step 2: Know your customer persona
To prepare the digital content marketing document, you need to know your target audience. Design your business persona according to the information obtained.
Knowing your persona can produce relevant and valuable content that your audience will want to read.
Step 3: Budget for content
If you want to use content as one of the pillars of your business, you must have an accurate and appropriate budget.
Budgeting strategies for content should be discussed independently. But here we have mentioned two of the most common methods:
Allocating a figure for the initial investment and then determining a percentage of the income or profit for subsequent years
Formulating the annual budget and proposing it to the management by the content strategist; Then the approved budget allocation.
Step 4: Knowing the competitors
The first step of knowing the competitors is their classification; You need to know which of them compete with you in the product and are in some way commercial competitors and which of them compete with you on content and keywords and are considered content competitors.
In this way, you can give an appropriate answer to each of these categories of competitors and save your time and money.
In the next step, you should check the content activity of each of the competitors, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and identify content gaps to differentiate yourself from your competitors by creating content in that field.
Step 5: Determine the subject or theme of your content with digital content marketing
To determine the content, you need to look at your organizational mission. This theme is usually expressed in one to three sentences. In a content strategy, the theme is a guide for the content topics. That is, 99% of a brand’s content originates from that business’s content or theme.
Another use of the theme is not allowing unrelated topics to enter the program. For example, the theme of Adidas company is the introduction and guide for buying shoes and sports equipment. Therefore, if he wrote content on urban transportation, he did not follow the theme and the content production was ineffective.
Step 6: Set up a routine for content management
Establish a system where you can produce, manage and track your content, or in other words, use a content management system (CMS).
Some critical parts of content management include content creation, publishing, and analysis.
Step 7: Use brainstorming to come up with an idea
Now it’s time to brainstorm content ideas for your project.
For this, there are tools that you can use:
• Hubspot’s Website Grader
• blog about
• HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator
• Feedly
• Buzzsumo
• Blog Post Headline Analyzer
Step 8: Determine what type of content you are going to produce
There is a wide range of content types, and you need to determine which type is right for you and aligns with your goals.
The following are examples of content types:
- blog
- electronic book
- case study
- Motion graphics
- Examples and templates
- infographic
- the video
- podcast
Step 9: Publish and manage your content with digital content marketing
With the help of a content calendar, you can publish your content on your website and social networks in a balanced way. In addition to the above, you can plan to cover the day’s topics. In advance, you can determine the occasions related to your business and plan to prepare suitable content.
What is the purpose of a content strategy, or why have a content strategy?
In short, to prepare the digital content marketing document, we must understand why we need it. Let’s know why every business needs a written and written strategy to achieve its organizational and content goals. After that, we must define our persona and introduce it to everyone involved in the work.
Let’s know what direction our persona will take as a representative of customers and their goals and needs. In the next step, let’s get to know our commercial and content competitors and where we are fighting.
importance of content strategy
So don’t be afraid and start taking the first step with us to content strategy digital marketing. Rest assured that you will be amazed at the impact of your digital content marketing document as you progress.