What does a good digital content strategy look like?
Global Search Marketing
What is a Content Strategy?
If you Google the phrase “ what is a Content strategy” you’ll be hit with overly formal definitions such as:
“Content strategy is the discipline responsible for satisfying business requirements through content creation and distribution. “
The truth is that the term content strategy is often misunderstood and either ends up being over simplified or over-complicated. At its core a content strategy is a defined plan of what content you need to create to help meet your business and marketing objectives.
What does a Content Strategy look to do?
There isn’t really a simple answer to this as every content strategy can look to achieve different things. The focus of content strategies are defined by business and marketing objectives, but every content strategy should provide two core elements:
a) A list of content that needs to be created
- b) An idea as to how every piece of content is going to be distributed to your target audience
As a good content strategy involves creating alist of the content you’re creating it’s important to understand what sort of content can be included in the strategy, so that you’re making sure that you’re using the right sort of content for the right audience and purpose.
Types of Content:
Blogs
Blogs are often one of the most misused elements of content strategies. Everyone knows businesses need a blog to meet user expectations, but what does the blog actually do? The truth is that unless you’re creating content for a specific reason then you’re probably better off not creating content at all, and blogs are often the sort of content that gets crafted with very little real thought.
What are they used for?
Blogs have a couple of different purposes. First, they allow you to add additional content to the site that can be targeted towards SEO key terms. To climb up the rankings you need to ensure you have a range of what Google calls “ supplementary content” on the site that is high quality, this not only allows you to target additional key terms in the blogs that aren’t suitable for the core pages of your site, but it also allows you to holistically improve your SEO by demonstrating expertise in the areas you specialise in by having high quality content on the site.
What makes a good blog?
A good blog is defined by two core elements:
- Is it useful for the target audience ( for SEO purposes you may also want to consider whether or not the content aligns to the intent of the key terms you’re targeting).
- Is it well written and engaging
For the first part you just need to plan out your content properly and ensure that you’ve given proper thought as to what’s going into the piece. For the second point it’s really just a simple case of making sure that the people crafting your blogs are using the right sort of language. Avoid overly complicated jargon and focus on the basic of good writing such as Orwell’s rules of writing.
eGuides
What are they used for?
eGuide are primarily used as a way to convert users on the website and acquire the emails addresses of visitors, as well as to engage users who you already have email addresses for. eGuides should be considered an integral part of any content strategy that’s aimed at Lead Generation, and if you’re not using them, you should definitely consider doing so.
What makes a Good eGuide?
eGuides should be a deep dive into a specific topic that’s of major interest to your target audience. Quite often they will rely on polling or expertise of your business to create original ideas and narratives to report and comment on.
The length of an eGuide can be varied, but usually they are a few thousand words. In more complicated business areas this can get up into the tens of thousands, though normally such a piece can be broken down into multiple eGuides without too much additional work.
Social Media Copy
What is it used for?
Social media is one of the most ubiquitous elements of modern life so it makes sense that it would form a major part of any company’s marketing strategy. Social media requires posts and copy in order to function meaningfully, and these posts allow you to reach out to your core audience and engage with them. It also holds the potential that you could go viral and expand your audience further.
What makes a good Social Media Post?
The reality though is that social media doesn’t necessarily get given the love and attention it needs to shine through. Copy is rushed and churned out as an additional element on top of other more “ pressing” work, which hampers the capacity of the channel to deliver great results.
So to ensure you’re getting the most out of social media, you need to understand what goes into making a good social media post. Unfortunately there isn’t a cookie cutter solution for this, as each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, attracting a certain type of audience, and those audiences will respond to different things. Ultimately though to make a good social media post you need to understand your audience, and offer them something they’re properly interested in and show them why they should invest their time in reading your blog, downloading your guide, or even following you on the platform.
Videos
What is it used for?
Videos are some of the most engaging forms of content around, and can engage your audience up to five times more than text based copy can and they can be used in the same way that copy can.
Looking to explain a product? You can use a video. Doing a deep dive into a technical topic? Video works. Case studies, presentations, long form content, short form content? All of these can work in a video format. Video is without a doubt the most versatile type of content available.
What makes a good Video?
The versatility of video though does present some challenges. Depending on the type of video you’re producing you’ll need different elements, features, styles and approaches to the content. As such there’s no simple way to summarise what makes a good video. There are a few commonalities though, not least of which is the necessity of working with a top quality editor!
Global Search Marketing is a specialist PPC and SEO Agency headquartered in Birmingham. If you would like additional information on how to improve your digital marketing please don’t hesitate to get in touch.