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Top 7 Tips for Creating a Successful Digital Content Marketing Strategy

Gary Green
Gary Green
October 10, 2020

Content is king. How your brand communicates with customers is paramount. Having a brilliant product or service just isn’t enough in the digital age.

If you want your content to resonate with your audience, an effective content strategy is a must.

Here are some of our top recommendations for creating content that converts.

Define Your Goals

It goes without saying. In order to judge the performance of your content marketing plan, you need to determine what success means to your business.

Once you formulate the goals of the campaign, you can build your content strategy to focus on achieving those objectives.

Some common goals include driving increased traffic to your website, increasing conversions, receiving more contact form submissions or calls, enhancing brand awareness or having users sign up to your email marketing list.

Your strategy can cover multiple goals, but it’s recommended to focus on one or two, to begin with, so you can target your content better and not spread yourself too thin.

Optimise Your Content

If creating content for your website is a key focus of your strategy, it isn’t enough to just throw 2,000 words of text on your site and hope for the best.

You must be looking to create quality content that caters to not only your prospective customers, but search engines like Google.

Often business owners outsource content creation to cheap freelancers, who produce copy that is littered with spelling mistakes, typos, grammatical errors and broken links. These issues are an automatic red-flag for Google and will undoubtedly hinder your website from reaching its potential.

The best way to get Google onside is by ensuring your content is relevant, answers a user’s query or solves a problem.

Your articles should include specific keywords relating to the topic that you would like to rank for. Including links to high-quality websites with relevant information about the topic is also a good idea for SEO-purposes.

The use of sub-headers (such as H1, H2 & H3) and lists are also highly recommended as it effectively structures your content to make it easier to read – both by users and Google’s algorithm.

Use Attention-Grabbing Titles

It’s important to establish who you are targeting with your content. Once you ascertain what kind of content your audience would be interested in, you need to make sure your titles are also as targeted and engaging.

After all, you could have the most informative article about a particular topic; but if the title is uninspiring and no one clicks through to read it, what’s the point?

Here are a few ways to create an attention-grabbing title:

  • Use numbers - “Top 7 Tips to Improve Your Productivity”
  • Offer an answer – “How to Improve Your Productivity With These Steps”
  • Use emotive phrases – “How to Sky-Rocket Your Productivity & Become the Best Version of Yourself”
  • Mention your audience within the title – “Improving Productivity – The Guide for Small Business Owners”
  • Arouse their curiosity – “How Can Improving Your Productivity Help You Achieve Your Goals?”
  • Keep your title current – “How to Avoid COVID-19 Distractions & Improve Your Productivity in 2020”

Create Genuinely Useful Content

Putting yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers is crucial to devising a successful content marketing plan.

What do they want to see? In-depth blog articles? Top 10 lists? High-quality informative videos?
By getting to know your audience, you can create content that appeals to them the most.

One way to start is by researching some of your competitors. You can see the type of content they’re putting out, what the audience is engaging with the most and if there are any gaps within the market.

Creating useful content that benefits the reader is likelier to be shared online and can have great SEO benefits – helping you increase your brand awareness and drive valuable traffic to your site.

Useful content could include:

  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Quizzes, polls, surveys
  • How-to user guides
  • Listicles

The type of content will depend on your target audience and your defined goals, so it’s important to conduct thorough research before committing to one particular type of content.

Avoid the Hard Sell

Effective content sells your brand to a prospective customer without them being conscious of the sell.

You may be tempted to create content that heavily promotes your product or services. But people don’t like being sold to – especially when they’re predominantly searching for an answer or more information related to their query. By creating sales-led content, you may be having the opposite intended effect.

Instead, look to create content that resonates with your audience by principally satisfying their query and explaining why they should read on for more.

Try to get to the point and explain the key themes of the article within the first few paragraphs.
As you expand your points, subtle suggestions and hints about your brand are OK but avoid making them sound like a sales pitch.

Be creative and keep it natural if you want your readers to engage with your business.

Be Frequent with Your Posts

It’s important that you publish content that is regular and consistent. By ensuring you remain active on different channels, your brand awareness and traffic is likely to improve, while your conversions are also likely to increase over time.

So, how often should you post on your blog? It depends.

If you post too little, your audience may reduce over time as they can find more timely content from your competitors. Similarly, if you post too much, users may find your content hard to keep up with and even a bit ‘spammy’.

Here’s a general guide for different platforms:

  • Website/blog section - 1-3 well-researched articles per week or 2-3 articles per month as a minimum
  • Instagram - 1 photograph & 1 infographic per day or 7 posts per week as a minimum
  • Twitter - 5-10 tweets per day or 15 tweets per week as a minimum
  • Facebook - 1-2 posts per day or 4 posts per week as a minimum
  • Pinterest - 10-15 pins per day or 40 pins per week as a minimum
  • LinkedIn - 1 post per day or 2 posts per week as a minimum

These aren't hard-and-fast rules as every business and website is different. For instance, if part of your content marketing strategy is to write articles about the latest news in your industry, you may need to publish 1-3 articles a day on your blog, rather than per week.

Plan, Track & Schedule

This one is primarily for website/blog articles - but goes for social media strategies too.

Before executing your content marketing strategy, it's a good idea to research your competitors and the wider market to see what content they're pushing out.

You can use the information you get and insert it into a content planner, which allows you to make a list of articles you want to publish yourself.

Your planner should have columns such as article title, synopsis, target keyword, progress, schedule date, etc. These help you keep on top of your strategy, allowing you to track scheduled posts and ensure your content goes out in a timely and organised manner.

Conclusion

A well-rounded content marketing plan can help you reach audiences at a relatively low cost and can produce significant results in the long-term.

However, you should be willing to redefine your goals and strategy as you go along. If you find a particular content type or channel is performing better than others, your plan should be fluid enough to allow you to pivot your focus.

At Key Business Marketing, we offer a range of services for start-ups, including content creation, SEO, PPC and social media management. Get in touch with us today to discuss your marketing needs and unlock your business' potential.

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