How to plan an effective digital content strategy framework

How your business benefits from content strategy

As a business with an online presence, it’s important you try to stand out in the saturated digital landscape. Creating content that engages your audience helps you to do so.

Publishing interesting content is a good place to start, but there is more that you can do to help you achieve sales targets and drive more customers to your website. Keep reading for five tips that will help you get the most out of your online marketing strategy. 

1. Check if your content is working for you

Your website may have lots of interesting things to say, but only if customers engage with your content will it really make a difference. So, how do you know if content is working for you? Analyse your website metrics.  

Why is it important to analyse website content?

The more you analyse your website content, the more you’ll learn about what works well. And once you know what kinds of content perform the best, you can adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly to help maximise your return on investment (ROI).

What metrics should you analyse on your business website?

There are lots of things you can measure on a website, but when it comes down to checking whether your content is working for you, we recommend asking the following questions:

• What kinds of customers are engaging with your content?
• What website pages are customers looking at the most?
• Are your customers visiting your website on their desktop, or from their mobile?
• How many page views have converted into sales?

Once you’ve thought about all the above, it’s important to ask yourself: how can I encourage more customers to read my content online?

What tools can businesses use to measure the success of their content?

Thankfully, there are plenty of data analysis and marketing technologies available to help you understand all aspects of your content lifecycle.

Google Analytics, for example, is hugely popular with users who manage individual sites, and for good reason: it combines plentiful data with a user-friendly interface. Simply put, Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.

The strength of the service lies in its ability to capture a complete picture, so you can “evaluate the performance of your marketing, content, products, and more”.

Other web analytics services include:

• Fathom Analytics
• StatCounter
• Simple Analytics

2. Write with your target audience in mind

Your customers may all shop with your business, but their needs and desires will likely vary. So, it pays to personalise content to ensure you’re speaking to all customer segments. This demonstrates that your business can empathise with different kinds of people, helping you to build trust in your brand.

What tools can businesses use to personalise their content?

Content marketing portal Contently is an account-based content marketing platform that allows users to ‘hyper-personalise’ content for each audience. In a nutshell, hyper-personalisation describes the consumer effects of big data.

Services such as those offered by Contently allow businesses to learn more about what content their customers are engaging with and, most importantly, the potential reasons why. This is powerful as it helps you understand a customer’s reasons for shopping with you, which in turn helps you to serve them better.

How can learning about customer behaviour help your business?

In the past, businesses have only been able to track demographic data. Now that there are tools available to track the unique behaviours of customers, businesses can learn not only about where their customers are located but also what may motivate their purchasing decisions. This information, in turn, can help your business to create content that is based in the individual needs and desires of your individual customers.

3. Keep your website up to date

Businesses will sometimes invest a lot of money in content marketing only to then neglect the content on their website, despite its importance as a lead-generation tool.

To help your website attract more customers, it’s important to update your content on a routine basis. This, in turn, will help keep your customers engaged which may lead to an increase in bookings and/or sales.

Looking for ideas to freshen up your content? You can help boost customer engagement, build brand awareness, and improve your search engine ranking with blogs that help keep your website up to date.

If you'd like help with creating blog content, you may also like to invest in a blog package. 

4. Consider conducting A/B testing

As defined by Oracle Marketing, A/B testing—also called split testing or bucket testing—compares the performance of two versions of content to see which one appeals more to visitors/viewers. It tests a control (A) version against a variant (B) version to measure which one is most successful based on your key metrics.

Before you launch an A/B test on your website, it's important to plan ahead. What would you like to learn with your A/B test? The answer to this question will help you decide what you'd like to measure.

In terms of web analytics (for example), Oracle Marketing says that there are some key data points that your analytics system will provide during the planning process, including:

• Traffic (page views, unique visitors) to the page, component, or other element being reviewed for test scenarios
• Engagement (time spent, pages per visit, bounce rate)
• Conversions (clicks, registrations, fallout)
• Performance trended over time

What tools can businesses use to conduct A/B testing?

According to Saastitute, some of the best A/B testing tools for your business include:

• Google Analytics
• Leadformly
• VWO
• Adobe Target
• Omniconvert

5. Ask yourself these questions when planning your strategy

Your content sits at the heart of any good creative marketing strategy, but success comes only with having measurable outcomes. It's important to ask yourself the following questions when evaluating the success of the elements in your content strategy, whether it’s web copy, interactive marketing or social media, and more.

Whether you’re planning content for your website, social media platforms, or business advertisements, it pays to think strategically. A strong content marketing strategy involves not only the creation of content, but also content analysis. The latter is what allows you to continually improve on the ways you promote your business.

As you continue to evolve your content strategy, you may choose to ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is my core audience and does my content adequately address and engage with their needs?
• What traffic is my content generating?
• What is my website’s bounce rate, conversion rate and average length of visits or time on page?
• Can customers engage with our brand or business without visiting the website? 

The more you measure how your customers are responding to your content, the more you’ll be able to tailor your content marketing strategy to suit your target audience’s needs. This, in turn, may help you to achieve business outcomes by connecting with your customers in a meaningful way.