Improve your content strategy with these 5 tips!

Summary

Every sales process is a journey with many stages, and different depending on the brands and the goals. The starting point, however, is always the same: the ability to communicate, to dialog, to offer your target audience quality and valuable content. So, what are the pillars for an effective digital content strategy? 

Digital content strategy: an introduction

Marketing aims to bring financial value to a company, whether in terms of increasing sales, winning new customers, or strengthening customer retention and loyalty. This is beyond doubt. And it is the ultimate goal. 

But there is a potentially lethal mistake that marketers must be very careful to avoid: aiming for this ultimate goal, without first planning a path to get there. 

Stepping out of the metaphor and into a concrete, operational realm: before selling, one must always know how to communicate, how to create an engaging and effective narrative around your products or services, and, finally, how to create a fruitful dialog with one’s customers. 

This applies to both B2C and B2B marketing, and it revolves around something very simple and decisive: content. This awareness is nourished by so-called content marketing. 

In the next section we will focus on the goals and types of this type of marketing with numbers that perfectly demonstrate its effectiveness. Next, we will provide you with 5 decisive tips to improve your digital content strategy. 

Content marketing in brief: goals, types, effectiveness 

Content marketing is a type of approach focused on creating, sharing, and distributing valuable content.  

Digital content marketing strategies are valuable for consolidating (or re-addressing) a brand image, winning new customers, but also improving retention and loyalty. In short, they are useful for all traditional sides of marketing. 

There are many forms through which content marketing may be put into practice: corporate blogs, articles to be hosted on external platforms, seminars, webinars, video marketing, specific social media strategies, but also infographics, podcasts, and in-person or digital events, just to name a few examples (and we will return to some of these later). 

And what are the typical goals for a content marketing strategy? 

The answers come to us from an infographic produced by Mashable. 

• In 69% of cases the goal is brand awareness. 
• In 68% of cases it is new customer acquisition. 
• In 67% of cases it is lead generation. 
• In 62% of cases an improvement in retention and loyalty. 

Finally, we will close with some numbers that speak to the centrality and effectiveness of digital content marketing strategies in the current ecosystem. 

• More than half of marketers plan to use content marketing in their strategies. And 72% say it is a great way to increase engagement (source: contentmarketinginstitute.com). 
• 78% of companies have a team that is specifically dedicated to content production (source: hubspot.com). 
• On average, content marketing generates three times as many total leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less (source: serpwatch.io).

These statistics further emphasize the situation. And it’s important for marketers to beware of something that is almost taken for granted: when we talk about content marketing today, above all we’re talking about Digital Content Marketing, because it is in the digital world that there are the most numerous and most important opportunities to be seized. 

And that’s why we have chosen to focus on digital content strategy and the 5 tips to make it more effective. We’ll tell you about them below. 

1. Entertain, inform, be helpful 

We opened this post by emphasizing that selling is always a journey, a process, and that it’s counterproductive to rush the steps. So, an effective digital content strategy must always start with communication and content. 

An absolutely essential point to keep in mind is this: offering content also means offering value to your customers. 

Each company must address this value, choosing it according to its image and reputation and according to its marketing objectives. But more than that, each individual campaign included in the strategy must have its own specific goals, which can also be very different from each other. One can aim to inform. In some cases to educate, creating awareness around the importance of a product or service. 

Then there is the whole emotional part, with the attempt to create a deeper connection between brand and customers. And don’t forget the importance of entertainment: no one wants to be forcefully indoctrinated in a boring way. In short, no one goal is better than another, ever. 

It’s all about setting them precisely and beforehand, with the utmost awareness. And then in knowing how to create the right mix. How to get your bearings, though?  

With the compass of Big Data…which brings us directly to the second point in this list.  

2. Be guided by data 

If we had to choose two words to sum up Digital Transformation, we would undoubtedly choose these: big data. 

In fact, data is the fuel of the digital revolution, an inexhaustible resource available to companies in all sectors to keep track of their processes at all levels and to constantly improve them. But, above all, it helps them get to know their actual and potential customers. Needless to say, a digital content strategy must start from here. 

Let’s ask right away: what types of customer data can companies collect about their customers? 

Let us answer with a quick list: 

• Demographic Data: information regarding age, gender, marital status, employment, and income status.  
• Psychographic Data: behaviors, beliefs, values, interest, lifestyles. 
• Geographic Data: that is, geolocation.  
• Behavioral Data: this is the data based on users’ web surfing behavior, extracted from so-called “cookies”. 
• Contextual Data: a broad field that concerns the context, the environment that surrounds us, from news, to sentiment, to market fluctuations. 
• First Party Data: the data that a company collects directly from its users and customers, for example through CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CCM (Customer Communication Management) systems.

What does this mean, as far as content marketing is concerned? 

To put it briefly: having the ability to know your audience in depth, to divide it into segments with consistent and homogeneous characteristics. And based this segmentation, to produce and distribute content that is tailored to the different targets. 

In short, with data-driven content marketing, you can overcome the old one-size-fits-all view. The ultimate goal? Content marketing aimed at individuals. It can be done; and that is what we will discuss in the next section. 

3. Targeting individuals 

The time of one-to-many advertising campaigns is over. There is no longer a single target, but many increasingly specific micro-targets to hit with tailored actions. But what is the ultimate boost? 

The shift to one-to-one communication and marketing, thus the shift to personalization. What are we talking about? 

About tailoring one’s messages and digital content strategy to the characteristics of individual target audiences. One-to-one. 

All of this is possible, even when we’re talking about a potentially endless audience. And that’s not all.  

It’s not just a shift from one-to-many to one-to-one. Today, the interactivity side can also be implemented, to move from one-way communication to a truly bi-directional one, based on individuals’ navigation choices. 

All of this is made possible by specific cutting-edge tools, such as the personalized video creation solutions offered by Babelee. 

We are facing the ultimate boost for content marketing, as we combine the communicative effectiveness of the video tool with the absolute breakthrough of personalization. Discover more insights on Babelee’s personalized videos here. And in the next point, we will quickly explain why video is the king of digital content. 

We will limit ourselves to some very telling numbers and statistics. 

4. The most powerful media? Video  

We address this point by providing you with some statistics that perfectly answer the question: what is the most effective medium for digital communication? 

• 55% of people pay more attention when approaching video than any other type of content (source: omnikick.com).  
• When viewing a video, the average user retains 95% of the message it contains; when it comes to text, this percentage dips to 10% (source: covideo.com). 
• 85% of marketers say video is the best way to get attention online (source: animoto.com). 
• 94% of marketers say that video has consistently helped with what customers understand about their products or services (source: hubspot.com). 

We could go on much longer; and the data would continue to reiterate the same thing: the most powerful, effective and engaging digital tool in the hands of marketers is video. 

This data comes as no surprise:

• Marketers’ favorite format when it comes to digital content strategy is, indeed, video (source: hubspot.com). 

5. The perspective must always be omnichannel 

Finally, we come to the last tip, which is a prerequisite for a successful digital content strategy: the optics must always be omnichannel. 

Indeed, one’s content marketing campaigns must be optimally usable from smartphones, desktops, and tablets, first and foremost. But they must also be designed according to the channels: from email to social media (with all of their huge internal differences), from company websites, to YouTube and Google ads. 

Each channel has its own technical rules and best practices: it’s a matter of knowing how to adapt, with a focus, however, on maintaining the unity of the message and brand identity. 

As always, it’s a matter of balance!