Creating a Digital Content Strategy from Scratch

Starting from scratch can be daunting, but creating a digital content strategy doesn't have to be. According to a recent study, 63% of businesses that prioritize content marketing have seen an increase in lead generation.

First, identify your target audience. Who are they, and what problems do they need help solving? Understanding their needs and pain points will help you create content that resonates with them.

A content audit can also help you determine what type of content to create. By analyzing your existing content, you can identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Planning a digital content strategy requires careful consideration of various tools and resources. A visual project management tool like ClickUp or Asana is useful to keep track of the content calendar.

To plan and execute a digital content strategy, you need to identify the objectives that should be prioritized, such as increasing brand awareness, acquiring new customers, or improving team productivity. Business goals are essential in a digital content strategy.

A content calendar is a crucial tool in planning and execution. It should make it easy to see high-level information about each piece, such as format, topic, target audience, user journey stage, and who is responsible for creating it. Planning ahead allows you to establish a rhythm and stay on track.

Here are some tools you can use to create a content calendar:

By using these tools and resources, you can create a solid content calendar that helps you stay organized and focused on your digital content strategy.

To create a solid content strategy, you need to define your foundational content and supporting content that align with your business goals. This content plan should cover messaging guidelines, content journeys, target keywords, priority topics, and how content will be promoted.

Understanding your target audience and personas is crucial to ensure that each piece of content is relevant to the user. This involves identifying their needs and pain points and how they overlap with your business goals.

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Decide how to package your content, as it falls into two broad categories: flow content and premium content. Flow content, such as blog posts and short videos, is used to attract regular traffic to your website, while premium content, like executive guides and ebooks, is used to generate leads.

You'll need a blog and at least one piece of valuable premium content to get started. This will give you a place to publish flow content and a piece of premium content to convert interested readers into leads.

Here's a rough outline of what you might need to get started:

By structuring your content for reusability and using AI tools, you can increase the reach of your existing content and make it compatible across channels. This will help you create a solid foundation for additional digital content strategies, including omnichannel content and agile ecommerce.

Business goals are the foundation of a successful digital content strategy.

Increasing brand awareness is a key objective that can be achieved through consistent and high-quality content creation.

Acquiring new customers is another crucial goal that can be pursued through targeted content marketing efforts.

Improving team productivity is also an important objective that can be achieved by leveraging digital content to streamline processes and enhance collaboration.

Setting specific and measurable goals will help you stay focused and motivated throughout the planning and execution process.

Planning is a crucial step in the content creation process. To plan effectively, you need to have the right tools in place.

A visual project management tool like ClickUp or Asana can be useful for keeping track of your content calendar. This will help you stay organized and ensure that all team members are on the same page.

Content planning involves identifying foundational content and supporting content that aligns with your goals. This includes messaging guidelines, content journeys, target keywords, priority topics, and more.

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To create a content calendar, you need to plan out what, when, and on which channels your content will be published. This should be aligned with your team's capacity and the business roadmap.

Developing a content calendar is essential to staying on track and implementing your content strategy. You can use a collaborative Google Sheet or a digital calendar to coordinate your production schedule.

To identify the right issues to focus on, you need to look at your audience research. This should point you toward issues and challenges that interest your target audiences.

Here are some key components to include in your content plan:

By having these components in place, you can create a solid content plan that aligns with your goals and resonates with your target audience.

Defining business goals is the first step in creating a successful digital content strategy. Every business strategy starts with clear goals, and your digital content strategy is no different.

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To get started, ask yourself what you'd like to change about your business. Here are some questions to consider:

Your business goals will help you decide if a particular decision, technique, or tool is going to move you closer to your destination. With clear goals in mind, you'll have a better sense of what metrics and outcomes to monitor.

Producing content is a crucial part of your content marketing strategy. You need to create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.

To make content creation easier, you can use a content calendar to plan out what, when, and on which channels content will be published. This helps you match team capacity with business goals and aligns with promotions, seasonal events, and product launches.

You'll need to decide how to package your content, which can be either flow content or premium content. Flow content, such as blog posts and short videos, is used to attract regular traffic to your website. Premium content, such as executive guides and ebooks, is used to generate leads.

Some popular content types include blog posts, webinars, podcasts, and videos. You'll also need to create a piece of valuable content to convert interested readers into leads.

It's essential to have a routine for producing content. With repetition, it becomes easier and takes less time. You can also consider hiring a ghost writer to produce your written content, or work with a digital marketing agency that provides writer services.

Here are some popular content types that can be used for flow content and premium content:

IDEA & M-23-22 is a program that automatically generates data about the health and best practices of federal websites. It's a valuable tool for anyone looking to improve their website's performance.

This program is available to the public, which means you can use it to get insights on how to improve your own website. You can access it online and start generating reports right away.

The data generated by IDEA & M-23-22 includes information on health and best practices, which can be used to inform website planning and execution.

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Having a clear plan in place is key to creating efficient teams. With an overarching plan, teams can create better workflows to get content from idea to live.

A unified content hub and shared content calendar can help break down silos and align teams around the current business priorities. This can be especially helpful for streamlining content operations and making content operations more efficient for editors and developers.

Here are some key elements to consider when setting up your content operations:

By implementing these elements, you can improve collaboration across departments and make it easier to reuse content assets across multiple touchpoints and channels.

A clear view of your content needs is crucial for efficient teams and operations. A digital content strategy helps you achieve this by identifying the most critical content elements.

Prioritizing content is essential to focus efforts effectively. This involves driving audience engagement and allocating resources accordingly, as mentioned in a digital content strategy.

A roadmap is created to guide the team's efforts. This roadmap prioritizes content elements based on their importance to the business and the team's capacity to create and maintain them.

By focusing on the most critical content, teams can optimize their resources and streamline their operations. This leads to more efficient use of time and personnel.

Having a clear plan in place is key to creating efficient teams. It guides how to set up content operations to improve collaboration across departments.

A well-structured content operation is crucial for efficient teams. It allows teams to create better workflows to get content from idea to live.

With a digital content strategy, teams can align their structure and roles to work more efficiently together. This includes marketing teams, content creators, and engineers.

Content operations define the workflows that take content from a new idea to a published piece of content. This includes editorial calendars, approval processes, and content governance.

Non-technical teams can quickly build and launch new experiences with the right tools. Contentful's Studio feature is a visual canvas that combines the ease of a visual builder with the speed of structured content and design.

By streamlining content operations, teams can focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with their audience. This requires prioritizing critical content elements and allocating resources accordingly.

Streamlining operations is key to efficient teams. It involves looking at existing workflows and governance to identify bottlenecks and challenges.

A unified content hub and shared content calendar can help break down silos and align teams around current business priorities. This can be achieved by reimagining workflows and experimenting with AI tools that can make content operations more efficient for editors and developers.

To streamline operations, focus on your biggest challenges and bottlenecks. This will help you identify areas that need improvement and prioritize your efforts accordingly.

Here are some tools and strategies to help you streamline operations:

By streamlining operations, you can improve collaboration across departments, structure content to make it easy to reuse assets across multiple touchpoints and channels, and ultimately, achieve your business goals.

Defining goals for digital content gives teams a clear view of progress and helps prove the value of their work. This includes tracking time and cost to determine the return on investment (ROI) of different content types, channels, and topics.

To measure success, specify how you will measure it in your strategy. This might involve tracking qualified and unqualified leads, premium content downloads, and contact form fills.

Your team should review metrics regularly, such as weekly or monthly, to stay on track and motivated. If you notice any problems, don't hesitate to try something else – that's the ultimate reason you measure your results.

Here are some examples of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content's support of business goals:

By regularly reviewing and refining your strategy, you can continue to improve and achieve your goals.

Measuring your results is a crucial step in making sure your digital content strategy is on track. You should specify how you will measure success, and track metrics that align with your goals. For example, if you're seeking more leads, you'll want to track qualified and unqualified leads, as well as premium content downloads and contact form fills.

To get started, define your key performance indicators (KPIs) by choosing the metrics that will help you measure how well content is supporting business goals. Keep things simple to start with, focusing on 1 or 2 KPIs per goal, and take baseline measurements for comparison.

Here are some examples of KPIs for different goals:

Regularly reviewing your metrics on a weekly or monthly basis can help you stay on track and make adjustments as needed. Don't be afraid to try something new if a particular tactic isn't generating acceptable results. By continuously measuring and improving, you'll be able to refine your strategy and achieve your business goals.

Reducing the use of PDFs on government websites is a great place to start. A recent governmentwide community discussion shared tips on how to do this effectively.

The discussion highlighted the importance of balancing needs and choosing formats that meet those needs. This involves considering the types of documents being shared and selecting formats that are accessible to everyone.

One approach is to start small by fixing existing PDFs and making them more accessible. This can be achieved by adding alt text to images and using clear and consistent formatting.

Government websites should ensure that documents are accessible for everyone, which is a key goal of remediation efforts. This includes making sure that documents can be easily read and used by people with disabilities.

By following these tips and starting with small fixes, government websites can take a significant step towards reducing their reliance on PDFs and making their content more accessible to everyone.

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A content management system (CMS) is a crucial tool for structuring websites and digital channels, and the type you need depends on your digital content strategy. Organizations with simple websites might prefer a traditional, page-based CMS, while teams with advanced strategies often opt for a headless CMS.

For a headless CMS, content data is structured to be presented in different ways across multiple channels, allowing for flexibility and reuse of content. This structure also enables teams to communicate content data via APIs, supporting unique content types and complex data integrations.

To plan content, you'll need tools like task management (e.g., ClickUp or Asana) to keep track of the content calendar, and SEO tools (e.g., Ahrefs, Similarweb, Moz) to analyze search traffic and optimize content.

Here are some popular tools for creating content:

To build a robust infrastructure for your digital-first content strategy, you'll need to consider a range of tools and technologies. These include your content solution, localization and translation tools, PIMs, DAMs, personalization, analytics, tracking tools, and your content model.

Your content solution should be able to integrate with any tools you need to align with your business goals. Contentful's API-first content platform and structured content make it easy to integrate with other tools.

Identify the tools you currently have, and those you want to add or replace. Consider your timeline for change and choose a content platform that can deliver to any digital channel and integrate easily with the tools you want to use.

Headings play a crucial role in making your content accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Clear headings are essential for assistive technology users, who rely on them to navigate your website. The USA.gov study found that users who are blind or deaf prefer clear headings and action-oriented descriptions.

Using clever link labeling can also improve accessibility, as it helps users understand where a link will take them. This is especially important for users who rely on screen readers to access your content.

Headings should be descriptive and concise, making it easy for users to scan and understand your content. This is a best practice in content distribution, where clarity and concision are key to engaging your audience.

Planning your digital content strategy is a crucial step in creating a cohesive and effective online presence. A content calendar is a must-have tool to keep track of your content plan, and tools like ClickUp or Asana can help you visualize and manage your projects.

To research keywords and optimize your content for search engines, you can use Ahrefs for basic keyword research, Similarweb to see the search traffic of your competitors, and Moz for more advanced SEO insights.

Having a clear understanding of your target audience and their needs is essential for creating relevant and engaging content. By developing messaging guidelines and content journeys, you can ensure that your content is consistent and effective in reaching your goals.

A content plan should cover foundational content, supporting content, and how decisions about format are made. It should also outline how content will be promoted and which channels you want to prioritize.

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To streamline your content creation process, consider using AI-based tools to automatically generate, translate, personalize, and optimize digital content. However, it's essential to have a policy in place to guide people on how to use these tools when creating different types of content.

Here are some popular tools for creating digital content:

Designing a multilingual future is crucial for equitable access to government information. Laura Godfrey emphasizes the importance of multilingualism in her conversation.

The concept of multilingualism is not new, but it's gaining momentum in the digital age. With more people accessing government information online, language barriers can be a significant obstacle.

Laura Godfrey reflects on her career, highlighting the need for multilingualism in government services. She believes that designing a multilingual future will ensure that everyone has access to information regardless of their language proficiency.

Government agencies can benefit from implementing multilingual support, such as translation tools and language options on their websites. This can help bridge the language gap and make information more accessible to a broader audience.

Having a digital content strategy is crucial for businesses looking to establish a strong online presence. A solid digital content strategy can offer several benefits, including modernizing content operations and breaking down silos to produce seamless user experiences.

A documented content strategy accelerates new projects by putting the information that informs the project's scope and requirements right at your fingertips. This empowers you to take a fresh look at your content infrastructure and operations and streamline them to deliver new digital experiences, faster.

Investing in new technology like a new CMS or generative AI requires a digital content strategy to maximize return on investment. A documented strategy helps determine space size, the number of content types needed, and how to measure success.

Today's buyers are increasingly going online to find their next professional services partner, and a digital content strategy is effective in reaching them. Over 70 percent of buyers use digital channels to research their business problems.

An overwhelming percentage of professional services buyers use digital channels and tools to find their vendor candidates and then evaluate them. If your firm isn't visible in these channels, you'll be at a severe competitive disadvantage.

A digital content strategy is essential for businesses that want to stay competitive in today's digital landscape. It's not just about having a presence online, but about delivering messages that buyers want to hear.

HolidayCheck's online travel magazine is a great example of a successful digital content strategy. They were able to publish 100 articles per month in under 20 minutes.

This level of efficiency was made possible by using a headless CMS with a modular structure. The team can now reuse elements across articles and add CTA banners for relevant hotel offers.

As a result, HolidayCheck saw a 120% increase in website clicks since the launch of their online magazine.

The CDC.gov team took a bold approach to rebuilding their website, adopting a "Clean Slate" strategy that allowed them to reimagine the site and meet real user needs.

This approach was a deliberate choice to start from a blank slate, rather than trying to build on an existing site. By doing so, they were able to create a more user-centered experience.

The team's focus on user needs is evident in their decision to use a "Clean Slate" approach. This allowed them to prioritize the most important features and content for their users.

The outcome of this approach was a website that better serves its users. By putting users first, the CDC.gov team was able to create a more effective and efficient website.

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The Login.gov team improved translations to enhance their service. They approached language translations to provide a better user experience.

By adding a new language, they were able to reach a broader audience. This move is in line with the Department of Justice's efforts to improve access to federal services for individuals with limited English proficiency.

The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division reviewed language access plans across federal agencies, emphasizing progress in hiring and staff training, improving language assistance services, and expanding multilingual content.

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HolidayCheck, a hotel review and booking portal, created an online travel magazine to reach a wider audience and increase organic traffic. They used a headless CMS to create modular blocks that content editors can mix-and-match to build unique page layouts without tech support.

This modular structure gives editors the flexibility to add CTA banners for relevant hotel offers throughout the magazine. The team can now publish articles in under 20 minutes, with around 100 articles published per month.

Defining goals for digital content and measuring progress helps teams prove the value of their work. Tracking the time and cost of content creation also determines the return on investment (ROI) of different content types, channels, and topics.

You can't just create digital content and expect it to magically attract an audience. You need to actively promote it. One way to do this is through email marketing, where you can share your latest post or premium content with your list.

Email marketing is a great way to reach people who are already interested in your content. If you don't have an email list yet, a digital content strategy can help you build one.

Social media is another powerful tool for promoting your content. LinkedIn is a great platform to share your latest content with your followers. In fact, individual experts on LinkedIn often receive more engagement and visibility than company profiles.

Sharing your thought leadership content on LinkedIn can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field. You can also use LinkedIn to reach new audiences by publishing content on the platform.

Guest publishing is another way to promote your content and reach new audiences. Look for opportunities to write for outside publications and blogs. This can help you expose your ideas to new people and even earn backlinks to your own content.

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