According to Smart Biz Genuis, more than 90% of marketers use digital content for advertising to their customers. However, 65% of those marketers reported struggling with creating the engaging content that Google and other search engines love.

Excellent content is obviously a great way to reach potential customers, but as we have seen in this example, it can be difficult creating and keeping up with the content. That is where a content strategy comes into play. This article will explain everything you need to know about creating an effective digital content strategy.

Let’s get started!

What Is Content Strategy?

Content marketing uses newsletters, social media, and blogs to bring brand awareness, promote products, and ultimately draw in a larger audience. That doesn’t mean just throwing up any sort of content, though. For content marketing to work successfully, you need a content strategy.

A content strategy will be a carefully laid out plan on how you can market yourself and your brand to your existing audience and new potential clients/customers. There is a lot to consider and learn when creating an effective plan, though. Many businesses opt to hire a content service provider, rather than spending the excessive time and effort creating the content themselves. 

Now that you understand what a content strategy is let’s take a look at what is in every excellent content strategy plan so that you can start efficiently promote your brand. 

Understanding Your Audience

First and foremost, you’ll need to understand your audience. Why? Because your content needs to be tailored towards them. No matter what niche or type of brand you are, you won’t successfully market yourself towards everyone. You need to tweak and market your brand towards your ideal customer.

The best way to do this is by creating fake customers. Ask yourself who your potential and the ideal customer would be? What do they do, how much do they make, ext. – The more you understand your niche customers, the easier it will be to create excellent content that they will like. 

Further Understanding Your Audience

Once you have created your ideal customer base, you can take it one step further by creating segment audiences. Split your audiences into groups based on the needs of your products or services. 

One of the best and easiest ways to do this is by personas. A fully developed, ideal buyer profile will provide you with the exact content and products you need to market for each persona. It will ultimately allow you to put the right type of content in front of the different audiences you have. 

Create A/B Tests

Another content strategy example is through A/B testing. If you’re posting content on social media and running ads, it’s important to understand what type of headlines, call-to-action, landing pages, and graphics get the most engagement from your audience. How do you find that out, though? Through A/B tests.

By running similar posts and ads with just minor changes, you can find out which works best for your audience. Once you know which strategies work best, your content creation will become easier to create and much more effective. 

Research Your Competitors

With about 7.1 million online retailers globally and 1.8 million of them in the United States, the competition is stiff, to say the least. Researching your competitors is going to be one of the most important parts of any content marketing strategy. 

When looking at your competitors, you’re going to be able to see exactly what they are doing so that you can outsmart and outperform them. It will allow you to improve much of your marketing strategy and, most importantly, your conversion rates. 

Start with your largest competitors and see how they market themselves. Look at what they are doing right and getting the most engagement with. Remember to look at what they are doing wrong as well, though, so you don’t make the same mistake. 

Don’t Forget About SEO

When creating content for your business, you, of course, can’t forget about SEO. It needs to be included in everything that you create digitally. With the way that search engines and social media uses SEO to determine who should be put in front of search results, it’s going to be critical to the success of your business.

Ultimately by using the right keywords, longtail words, and SEO best practices, you will bring in more organic SEO traffic to your website. 

Content Strategy Example:

One of the many reasons, both larger and small companies have a blog is because of SEO. Content blogs not only provide your customers and readers with valuable content that they are looking for, but it also allows you to plug in SEO for your site. 

Remember Your Brand and Core Values

No matter your brand or niche, core values are essential to every business. They are the foundation on which your company started. Without them, you most likely would not have made it very far. 

Your core values are the guide to how your business moves and interacts. So, it’s important to include this in your digital content strategy. Let this help guide you with the content that you create for your audience. 

If you don’t follow your core values and include them in your content, then eventually, your followers and readers will catch wind of it. People want to see a good brand with excellent values. 

Your Content Strategy Plan

When it comes to curating an effective content strategy plan, there is a lot to remember and consider. Take all of these into account when developing your marketing strategy. The most important thing to remember is your audience. Get to know them and understand them. Once you have done that, you will have won half the battle. 

If you are looking for a content service provider, or have questions about a content strategy plan, head over to our contact page and send us a message today!