Key Components of Your Digital Content Strategy
Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2025 10:41 am
As you create digital content for prospective buyers at each stage of your sales or marketing funnel, you’ll want to follow these steps.
1. Set Your Goals for Your Digital Content Strategy
Your business may be looking to enhance your content creation to boost your brand recognition and increase website traffic. Ultimately, you want to drive sales, but you understand that takes time, whether you’re relying on organic growth or using paid search or paid social tactics.
Set realistic goals based on where your company is right now in terms of search engine rankings and visibility, as well as on your budget (in both time and money) for inbound marketing. Make these goals clear and measurable within a specific time frame. Only then will you be able to create a strategy focused on these goals and determine if your strategy has been successful after three months, six months, a year, or more.
2. Conduct a Content Audit
Once you’ve set your goals for your content marketing campaigns, you’ll want to conduct a content audit to determine how well your existing content is achieving those goals. Evaluate your content across platforms to discover what’s working best. Use on-site analytics from your website and social media platforms to measure engagement, click-through-rates and conversions to sales.
Pinpoint the types of content that get the most engagement, the most effective platforms, and the topics that resonate with your audience. Your audit should include the following:
Social media content
Email content
On-site content like blogs and landing pages
Lead generation content like white papers
3. Pinpoint Your Audience with Buyer Personas
Keeping the various stages of the buyer’s journey in mind, identify the buyer personas most likely to be interested in your product. Buyer personas should be based on compilations of real people, and should address some or all of the following characteristics of the web user:
Age
Gender
Location
Lifestyle
Income
Education
Places they visit online
Pain points
If you don’t have a clear idea of who these personas are, it may be useful to back up a few steps and re-evaluate your brand strategy and positioning. Learn more about how to do so here.
4. Choose the Best Types of Content to Reach Your Audience
Once you’ve created a persona, combine this knowledge instagram database with the information you gleaned from your content audit to identify the types of content most likely to reach your audience. It may help to think of content in terms of “clusters,” or a primary content asset with multiple, shorter or smaller assets generated around that single article, white paper, video or infographic.
For instance, a 2,000-word article detailing the hottest trends in home decor today could be broken into shorter articles describing each trend, Pinterest boards showcasing the style, a shorter listicle to publish on Facebook, social media posts for each of the shorter articles and even a video or webinar.
The content you create should be based on the results of your content audit and what performed well in the past. The specifics will be part of your digital content creation tactics. But your strategy should outline, in broad strokes, the customer pain points you want to address, the pillar content for each topic, and an outline of how you can re-slant that content.
1. Set Your Goals for Your Digital Content Strategy
Your business may be looking to enhance your content creation to boost your brand recognition and increase website traffic. Ultimately, you want to drive sales, but you understand that takes time, whether you’re relying on organic growth or using paid search or paid social tactics.
Set realistic goals based on where your company is right now in terms of search engine rankings and visibility, as well as on your budget (in both time and money) for inbound marketing. Make these goals clear and measurable within a specific time frame. Only then will you be able to create a strategy focused on these goals and determine if your strategy has been successful after three months, six months, a year, or more.
2. Conduct a Content Audit
Once you’ve set your goals for your content marketing campaigns, you’ll want to conduct a content audit to determine how well your existing content is achieving those goals. Evaluate your content across platforms to discover what’s working best. Use on-site analytics from your website and social media platforms to measure engagement, click-through-rates and conversions to sales.
Pinpoint the types of content that get the most engagement, the most effective platforms, and the topics that resonate with your audience. Your audit should include the following:
Social media content
Email content
On-site content like blogs and landing pages
Lead generation content like white papers
3. Pinpoint Your Audience with Buyer Personas
Keeping the various stages of the buyer’s journey in mind, identify the buyer personas most likely to be interested in your product. Buyer personas should be based on compilations of real people, and should address some or all of the following characteristics of the web user:
Age
Gender
Location
Lifestyle
Income
Education
Places they visit online
Pain points
If you don’t have a clear idea of who these personas are, it may be useful to back up a few steps and re-evaluate your brand strategy and positioning. Learn more about how to do so here.
4. Choose the Best Types of Content to Reach Your Audience
Once you’ve created a persona, combine this knowledge instagram database with the information you gleaned from your content audit to identify the types of content most likely to reach your audience. It may help to think of content in terms of “clusters,” or a primary content asset with multiple, shorter or smaller assets generated around that single article, white paper, video or infographic.
For instance, a 2,000-word article detailing the hottest trends in home decor today could be broken into shorter articles describing each trend, Pinterest boards showcasing the style, a shorter listicle to publish on Facebook, social media posts for each of the shorter articles and even a video or webinar.
The content you create should be based on the results of your content audit and what performed well in the past. The specifics will be part of your digital content creation tactics. But your strategy should outline, in broad strokes, the customer pain points you want to address, the pillar content for each topic, and an outline of how you can re-slant that content.