A Brief Introduction to Digital Content Strategy for San Diego Businesses

digital content strategy

As small businesses across San Diego are slated to spend around $75,000 this year on digital marketing, there are smarter ways to spend that money than others.

With the right digital content strategy in play, every dollar gets stretched as far as possible. If your digital content has a lot of depth to it, you’ll ensure that the hits you get translate to real visits and real dollars.

Here are four ways to revitalize the digital content strategy at your business this year.

1. Do Your Research

When putting together your digital content strategy, start by looking at where the market is currently. When you think critically about where other companies are compared to where you are, you get the chance to think about your present and your future. If you attack without a plan, you’re bound to waste a lot of time spinning your wheels with digital content.

Look at what the leaders in your market are doing. Stalk their social media profiles and see what kind of content they’re posting. Look to see what content people are responding to the most and whether or not your competitors are picking up on that.

It’s so common for a business to overlook their own assets and benefits. However, what they overlook can be the path in for you to take the reins and seize control of your shared customer base.

Research what your customers seem to want, outside of what your competitors are offering. You get ahead of the pack by taking risks and pursuing paths that they’re not. You don’t get ahead by following.

2. Assess Where You Are

Now start looking at where your business is today. If you’ve run content in the past, consider what your strategy was then. Make a chart listing the things that succeeded with another column for the things that failed.

The content from recent years let you know how your specific assets performed. Companies tend to overlook the past when they’re considering the future. However, when you have a handle on the future, you make better decisions in the future.

If you notice that some topics generated a lot of leads, make those central for the coming year. If there were themes that got a lot of social shares, put them at the frontline of this year’s social media campaign. While you shouldn’t put your eggs in just those baskets, starting off with strong elements gives the rest of your campaigns the chance to shine.

Look at the real material business results of your asses and investments. The metrics that show your spendings, earnings, and which topics helped or hindered those campaigns are the place for you to start.

3. Make a Few Themes

Your customers are changing all the time. As other companies try to fight for a piece of your customer base, it’s inevitable that their interest is going to change. Customers introduced to new ideas are going to move in unpredictable directions.

While trends shape the day-to-day in any market, there are going to a be a few key themes that prevail from year to year.

See what challenges your customers are seeing most often in your industry. What is it that they complain about or what do you get the most negative feedback on? The answer to these questions should drive the decision making of your company when it comes to themes.

Watch the trade articles and popular news items that shape how people interact with your industry. Those articles give a clue as to what people are thinking about and where their dollars are going to go in the near future. Ideas that generate a lot of buzz offer you a perspective on what to do with your brand and where to take your customers.

4. Write Your Own Script

While the foundational topics that you’ve outlined provide a loose sketch of where you want to go in the near future, you need a fleshed out strategy. Your content needs a lot more legs than just the quick-hit content that’s shared by buzzy news websites and that you pass by on Twitter feeds. You want your content to be that news item that keeps getting shared for a week accompanied by a long text written by the person sharing it.

You need to have a deep understanding of your foundational assets in order to write content like this. While some of this content can be farmed out to SEO and content producing sites, much of it needs to come from within your offices. Only the people who are closest to the product can give the outline for the story before it turns into a strong piece fo content.

Don’t be afraid to hammer against a theme as well. Just because you wrote one article about it doesn’t mean that the topic has been beaten to death. You can create a video or send some of your staff to talk on a podcast to see how much you can get out of the topic.

Reusing content might seem like a bad idea, however, your old and successful content offers an insight into how to succeed in the future. Old content that’s been successful has everything in its DNA that you need to succeed. Don’t rehash old ideas, but take them apart and see how your new content fits your old model.

Digital Content Strategy Is a Moving Target

Your company’s digital content strategy shouldn’t be the same this year as it was last year. Even if you still spend money in the same places, you need to find new ways to engage your audience and meet their needs with better content.

For more tips on engaging with your audience, contact us today.

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