It’s a brand new year and for many businesses it’s the perfect chance to revamp and re-energise their digital marketing efforts in preparation for the year ahead. All aspects of your digital marketing should be reevaluated (such as your SEO or PPC strategies) but none more so than your digital content strategy. After all, as Bill Gates once said, ‘content is king’, and it always will be, even in 2022.
So whether your digital content strategy has been performing well or not, there’s always room for improvement.
In this article, we review the importance of a solid digital content strategy and give you 5 ways you can revitalise and boost your strategy for 2022.
What is a digital content strategy?
Whether you’ve been playing the content game for years or are new to the world of digital content, it’s always a good idea to go over what it actually is, and more importantly, why it matters.
A digital content strategy is what dictates the content you as a business produce. It serves as a guide to what kind of content you make, as well as where and how it’s distributed.
Things such as online advertisements, emails or social media posts are all determined by your business’ digital content strategy.
Why is it important?
Content acts as one of the biggest forms of communications between you and your customers. Not only does it inform and educate people about your brand, it also works to persuade, attract and ultimately convert them to paying customers. But not all content is the same. As you can guess, content needs to be well-made and well distributed in order to maximise its effectiveness.
This is where your digital content marketing strategy comes into play. A strong strategy will help you create effective content – the kind that draws in more customers for your business. Working without a strategy is akin to travelling without a map; reaching your goals takes longer, costs more and in the worst case, impossible.
A lack of content strategy has been a thorn in the side of many businesses. 63% of marketers blame ‘content creation challenges’ for their organisation’s lack of success. This stat alone speaks volumes for the importance of an effective digital content strategy.
5 ways to boost your 2022 digital content strategy
With the importance of digital content in mind, it’s time to get to work and find out how you can improve your strategy. These 5 tips will prime your strategy, gearing it up for a year of success!
Update and clarify objectives
Every good strategy starts with a clear set of goals and objectives. Having something to aim for gives you direction and gives your strategy purpose. It also gives you something to measure against, which will help you optimise your strategy.
Take the time to set clear goals for your digital content strategy. Source: Google
If you’ve had goals in the past, now is a perfect time to evaluate them. Has your current content strategy reached your previous goals? If so, it might be time to expand on those objectives. If they haven’t, your goal may need adjusting. Diving into end-of-year reports and performing new SWOT analysis can all help you set new content strategy goals for the year.
Update your target audience
A key component of effective content marketing is knowing your audience. It only makes sense then that to improve your 2022 digital content strategy, you should take some time to review and ensure that you are targeting the right people. Has your current target audience brought in the results that you had hoped for? Are there any opportunities to target brand new audiences?
When’s the last time you updated your target audience’s buyer personas?. Source: Google
Try updating your buyer personas, identifying new customer pain points, performing competitor gap analysis and conducting surveys and market research to optimise your audience for 2022.
By updating and reviewing your target audience you give your content strategy even more direction, which can only improve its effectiveness. It also makes your content creation efforts a lot easier, since you can create specific content for specific audiences – no second guessing involved.
Audit your existing content
For those of you who are already producing content such as product photos, Instagram posts or blog posts, performing a content audit is a great way to maximise their effectiveness, as well as your future content creation efforts. An audit will give you the data you need to make informed decisions regarding your entire strategy.
It’s a great way to see which pieces of content are performing well, giving you the opportunity to leverage them in more marketing materials. It’ll also help you identify areas of improvement in your digital content strategy, allowing you to repurpose or update underperforming pieces of content.
Try something new
Much like the new year resolutions that many people make, a new year is also a great opportunity to mix it up and try something new. The importance of diverse content is something that all great content marketers are aware of. One size very rarely fits all, so it’s important to spread yourself out and experiment with different content types and channels.
Like DeLonghi’s blog content, diversifying your content can help you reach new audiences. Source: DeLonghi
Try your hand at video content creation. Or perhaps it’s time to start advertising more on Instagram. Or maybe you can begin creating valuable how-to guides or tutorials. The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to experiment with new content ideas.. You never know, you might find a brand new content type that reaps in results you’ve never seen before!
Step up your optimisation game
So far this article has talked about how now is the perfect time to update and optimise your digital content strategy. However, we can’t stress enough that optimisation needs to be a continuous effort; something that is regularly done during the year. Content maintenance makes up a big part of content marketing. Making sure that your content efforts are generating consistent results tells you that you’re still on the right track.
There are many ways to regularly optimise your content. Things like A/B testing images and copy can improve click-through-rates (CTRs) and maximise a piece of content’s effectiveness. You can also optimise your content for SEO purposes, allowing them to rank higher on search engines. Ensure that you’re regularly checking up on the performance of your content and tweaking them as necessary to encourage consistent positive results.
Make 2022 a great year for your business’ content
Content marketing is the driving force for any successful business. And with these 5 tips, you’ll be well on your way to creating a digital content strategy that will help your business skyrocket in 2022! For more articles like this one, head on over to the ZipZipe blog today!
