The ultimate guide to digital content strategy

With online channels commonly being the first - and sometimes only - way that customers find and interact with brands, a company’s digital content strategy is now a critical part of business

A digital content strategy helps teams go from investing a lot of time and money into one-off pieces of content, to efficiently creating content that works together to amplify a brand’s message and drive business across digital channels.

#What is digital content strategy?

Digital content strategy is a layer on top of a team’s overall content strategy.

• Content strategy. What content should be created based on factors like business needs, market research, audience personas, and competitor analysis. As well as the brand messaging and tone of voice that should run through all content.

• Digital content strategy. How content will be produced for and delivered to digital channels to meet specific business goals, like increasing brand awareness or generating leads, and measuring the performance of this content to feed back into the overall content strategy.

#Why is digital content strategy important?

Focused efforts

A digital content strategy helps you get a clear view of the scope of content needs and create a roadmap that prioritizes the elements that are the most critical to business, drive the most audience engagement, and that your team has the resources to create and the capacity to maintain.

Efficient teams

With an overarching plan in place, teams can create better workflows to get content from idea to live. It can guide how to set up content operations to improve collaboration across departments, and how to structure content to make it easy to reuse assets across multiple touchpoints and channels.

Consistent experience

There might be many different people and departments responsible for parts of the digital experience (customer service FAQs, product details, marketing campaigns, social media, etc) but to your audience it’s one and the same. A strong digital content strategy ensures that practical information, brand messaging, and content quality is consistent at every step in the customer journey.

Better measurements

Defining goals for digital content, and the metrics to measure these goals, gives teams a clear view of progress and helps them prove the value of their work. Additionally, tracking the time and cost that goes into content creation helps to determine the return on investment (ROI) of different content types, channels, and topics so that budget and resources can be allocated to the areas that will bring the highest returns.

#Components of a digital content strategy

Business goals

The objectives that should be prioritized in a digital content strategy such as increasing brand awareness, acquiring new customers, or improving team productivity.

Content types

The content formats you’ll use across your digital channels such as blog posts, videos, infographics, live data graphs, webinars, learning courses, podcasts, landing pages, product information, reviews, customer service FAQs, email newsletters, social media posts, etc.

Content operations

The workflows used to produce, publish, and manage digital content. Content operations can include elements like the content calendar, approval processes, user roles and permissions, content governance, and setting up a system that makes it easy to reuse content assets across various channels, brands, and regional experiences.

Technology infrastructure

The technologies used to implement your digital content strategy. Such as:

• The platforms content lives in such as the content management system (CMS), digital assets management (DAM), product information management (PIM), or ecommerce software.

• The tools and data used to drive tactics like localization, personalization, and lead generation.

• The digital channels content is delivered to such as websites, mobile apps, customer portals, chatbots, and social media.

#How to create a strong digital content strategy

Define KPIs

Choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure how well content is supporting business goals. Keep things simple to start with, focusing on 1 or 2 KPIs per goal, and be sure to take baseline measurements for comparison.

For example, metrics for goals could be:

• Brand awareness: website traffic, traffic sources, search engine rankings, unique visitors, page views, social channel engagement

• Customer acquisition: bounce rates, time on page, conversion rates, time to conversion, leads generated, cost per lead/customer

• Customer lifetime value: newsletter subscriptions, interaction with marketing communications, self-service revenue

• Team efficiency: time to market for new content, cost of production, frequency of website updates

Choose content types and channels

Looking at your KPIs, and considering your target audience, what content should you prioritize? Maybe you want to focus on improving the bounce rate on product pages, or creating more premium content to drive form submissions, or optimizing content for mobile.

It’s also good to note what doesn’t make sense to invest in. You probably don’t need a Pinterest page if your selling manufacturing parts, or to advertise on LinkedIn if your customer base is in their teens, or to start a podcast if you don’t have the resources to do it consistently.

Run a content audit

Take a look at your existing content to spot the most effective topics, formats, and channels. Use these as a jumping off point to brainstorm new ideas and to get a head start in your strategy by reusing the assets you already have. It’s also a good time to delete outdated content, so that your audience doesn’t stumble across inaccurate information or off-brand messaging.

Create your content models

Content models are how you structure digital content. Creating a standard set of models helps teams work efficiently and keeps content consistent.

Content modeling can look very different depending on your content and the CMS you use to manage it. Companies with fairly simple websites might prefer to use full page templates as their models, while teams that integrate content data from multiple sources or work with omnichannel content will need a more modular, component-based content model.

For a more detailed look at this step, check out our in-depth guide to composable content modeling.

Outline Workflows

Map the lifecycle of different content types. From how topics are chosen, who’s involved in production, the publication process, translation and localization needs, promotional strategies, how updates will be maintained, to when (or if) the content should be retired.

Create a content calendar

Plan out what, when, and on which channels content will be published. Creating a schedule that matches team capacity and aligns with the business roadmap, product launched, promotions, seasonal events, etc.

The content calendar should make it easy to see high-level information about each piece like format, topic, target audience, user journey stage, and who is responsible for creating it.

Publish and promote

Creating content takes money, time, and effort. Promotion is key to getting the full value out of all that investment. This could include:

• Buying ad placements on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

• Creating a variety of organic social posts and spreading them out over time.

• Republishing content on third party sites, such as via paid syndication services or exchanging blog posts with a company you partner with.

• Adding content to marketing email drips.

• Repeatedly referencing content on your own channels, such as by hyperlinking pages, creating call to action (CTA) banners to promote key assets, or adding relevant links in video show notes.

• Sending an internal newsletter about new content with copy-and-paste snippets people can use to share on their own socials or in personal emails.

Measure and improve

Digital content strategy isn’t static. Regularly review and revise your plans based on your KPIs, customer feedback, and business priorities.

#Example of digital content strategy

HolidayCheck, the hotel review and booking portal, decided to launch an online travel magazine in order to reach a wider audience and increase organic traffic. The team didn’t want magazine content to have to follow a rigid page structure, so 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, and the ability to reuse elements across articles for more efficient publishing. The team can now publish articles in under 20 minutes, with around 100 articles published per month, and has seen a 120% increase in website clicks since the launch of the online magazine.

#Business tools to execute a digital content strategy

Content management system (CMS)

A CMS platform provides the developer tools to structure websites and other digital channels, along with the editorial features to add, edit, and publish content to those channels.

The type of CMS you need will depend largely on your digital content strategy. Organizations with simple websites and a largely blog-based strategy might prefer to use a traditional, page-based CMS where editors work with a set of page templates to create new content for web and mobile sites.

Teams with more advanced strategies are more likely to go for a headless CMS where, instead of tying content to a particular page, content data is structured so that it can be presented in different ways across multiple channels (or “heads”). This structure allows content data to be communicated via APIs, which offers a lot of flexibility to support unique content types, complex data integrations, and omnichannel content strategies. It also lets teams reuse and repurpose content to more efficiently manage multiple brands and locales from one CMS.

For an overview of the factors to consider when selecting a CMS, and the pros and cons of popular solutions, have a look at these 9 great CMS options for website development.

Tools to plan content

• Task management. A visual project management tool like ClickUp or Asana is useful to keep track of the content calendar.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ahrefs offers free tools for basic keyword research, Similarweb lets you see the search traffic of competitors, and Moz provides more advanced SEO insights.

Tools to create content

• AI. Since the explosion of ChatGPT there’s nearly an unlimited amount of AI-based tools to automatically generate, translate, personalize, and optimize digital content. It’s helpful to have a policy in place to guide people on how to use these tools when creating different types of content.

• Graphic design. Adobe Creative Cloud and Affinity both offer a suite of tools to create digital assets, and Figma is a popular platform for user interface (UI) design.

• Video creation. Davinci Resolve is a professional video editor with a free tier to get started. For simpler needs, like tutorials, Loom is an easy way to capture and edit screen recordings.

• Editing and proofreading. Grammarly is a writing assistant that integrates with common business apps and web browsers, while Surfer will give blogs an SEO score with editing tips to boost your ranking.

Tools to optimize content performance

• Website metrics. Google Analytics is the most widely used platform to measure website performance and see how users interact with your content.

• Marketing automation. HubSpot offers tools for lead generation and marketing communications like nurture emails.

• Social media management. Hootsuite lets you pre-schedule posts and manage all your social channels from one UI.

#How Hygraph can help you implement your digital content strategy

Hygraph is a headless CMS that helps organizations enhance their web presence, improve engagement, and drive revenue by streamlining content production and leveraging digital content effectively. It empowers developers, marketers, and content managers to work autonomously to quickly implement and scale their digital content strategy.

• Simplify content distribution by unifying content data from your backend systems into a single source of truth, with a single GraphQL API endpoint to deliver that data to any frontend channel.

• Manage content easily with Hygraph Studio, an intuitive editorial UI designed for maximum performance to help teams create, edit, and publish content fast.

• Streamline workflows with modular content blocks, granular user permissions , and localization tools.

• Connect all your preferred systems and tools to extend platform capabilities and build a best-of-breed tech stack.

Thousands of global digital teams (including Samsung, Telenor, Epic Games, and 2U) monetize their content by powering mission-critical applications with Hygraph. If you’d like to learn how Hygraph can accelerate your digital content strategy, we’re happy to have a chat.