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What is digital content and how to make the most of it?

Great content is the lifeblood of effective communication, but it should always be strategic and form part of a wider marketing plan. Digital content plays a crucial part in marketing plans. Leveraging this can help you communicate your message to your audiences effectively.

Learning the true essence of creating valuable digital content is important in today’s competitive marketplace where content consumers have short attention spans and are hard to engage meaningfully.

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Roman Samborskyi / Alamy Stock Photo

Knowing your audience

The first part of digital content creation is getting to know who your audience is, and then planning the content to attract their attention.

It involves the process of generating topic ideas that appeal to your target audience. Then the content should be made as accessible as possible. Typical forms of digital content creation include maintaining and updating websites, social media platforms, blogs, emails, videos, and infographics.

This might include knowing their age and gender or understanding what their interests and hobbies are. How do they buy products? What is their pain point?

Once you have answered these questions, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of your target audience, and therefore understand how to serve them best.

Localised digital content is about further adapting your content to the expectations and sensibilities of an audience in a specific geographical region. Localisation can overcome cultural differences in audiences and can expand brand awareness and increase customer loyalty.

Implement sophisticated SEO research

The written word has naturally been the go-to for web-based content. This is because search engines can use it to find out what the content is about. They will then serve up your content to answer search queries provided you answer the question accurately and informatively.

Keyword research helps you determine the most valuable terms for your location and industry. Search volume of a specific keyword or phrase can help determine whether it’s worth the time creating a piece of content around a specific topic.

If there are lots of people searching for a keyword you’d like your content to rank for, then you know there is great potential to reach a large audience. A common practice is to target keywords that have a monthly search volume (MSV) and keyword difficulty that corresponds to your domain authority.

There are some great keyword research tools like SEMRush or Moz Keyword Explorer. They can provide insight into the best words or phrases for your brand to target, and help you build traffic and visibility for your content. If you have a Google AdWords account, then you can also check keyword search volumes there too.

Keyword research is the key to creating quality digital content that will help increase website traffic and grow brand loyalty.

There are some other tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer The Public that allow you to see what questions people are asking. This can inform you about the topics you want to talk about in your digital content.

Keyword research should be considered before you produce any digital content. It’s crucial as there’s no point going after keywords where there is so much great content already out there. It can be difficult to compete with popular content so your time might be better served on other topics.

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sutipond somnam / Alamy Stock Photo

The fun part – creating digital content

Now it’s about providing useful, high quality content about your products or services, communicating key benefits, and answering any common customer questions. Write content that caters to your audience’s needs using a unique voice to make your content stand out.

However, you need to hook your audience in first. Content creators put a lot of effort into the title and opening paragraphs to help them do this. So, try to highlight the benefit of your content in the title to intrigue your readers, and let them know why they should read it.

Digital content creation is an important part of a business’ online strategy. Every piece of content, whether it’s newsletters, emails, case studies or blog posts, should be created to drive prospects to your brand and increase your reach.

Most importantly, digital content should have a specific purpose and be relevant to its target market for you to achieve successful results. Different types of content have specific purposes.

For example, case studies demonstrate an organisation’s experience and expertise in their field. On the other hand, video content can engage different demographic audiences through entertaining and educational visuals.

Making your content visually appealing can also attract a lot more attention, such as adding videos, infographics, and images that support what you are saying.

Once you’ve created your content, then it’s all about distributing it. Promoting content on social media platforms can expand your brand’s reach and increase campaign engagement with views, likes and shares.

It’s important to be mindful of the noise out there. This is why unique content that nobody has seen before often outperforms everything else.

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Robbi Akbari Kamaruddin / Alamy Stock Photo

Publishing and analysing content

In our fast-paced digital world, publishing content is as simple as clicking a button. Although to maximise results, you should find the most optimal time to post your content.

If you construct a publishing schedule, it can build familiarity with your audience. Be consistent with this and they will know that they can expect content from you at a specific time.

Once your content is out there, it’s important you understand how it’s performing by analysing it. ‘Page views’ and ‘average time-on-page’ can provide valuable data on how engaging your content is. Behavioural and demographic data can also provide insight into what influences customer’s buying decisions.

Google Analytics can help you find this data. It’s also essential to maintain awareness of your rankings in the top search engines and continuously work to improve those rankings.

Digital content can be used to engage with your audience and prospects at every step of the buying process. Creating high quality digital content can help build brand reputation and revenue.

It is crucial to find your audience online and publish content that interests them enough to engage with it. This helps to grow brand visibility. The more people who are discussing your brand, and engaging with it, the more likely it is that other people are going to see and hear about your brand.

Here are some top tips on how to make your marketing content stand out against the crowd.

Overall digital content does not only produce more online traffic but helps provide targeted traffic that delivers better results and ROI.