It is hard to oversell the value of social media and digital marketing to the success of business today. The average internet user spends around an hour and a half on social media each and every day. This does not even begin to cover the amount of time that people spend doing other functions like email and searches, where they might click on a link for an ad or for a response that seems relevant.
With all of this time being spent on the internet, it is easy to see why you need a good digital content strategy, regardless of your industry. If you plan to market on the internet, it is important to have a plan. The internet simultaneously has an incredibly long and an incredibly short memory.
Things that you share while you are finding your footing from a marketing standpoint never really go away, even if you delete them, so it is vital that you have a plan before you start. This guide will give you the basic rules to follow when establishing your plan.
1. Who is Your Audience?
This is the most important question to ask because everything that comes after is based on this answer. This isn’t just “who is your ideal customer?” although that can be part of it. This is more specific. This wants to know who you are trying to reach with this content.
If you are creating a campaign for Facebook, it might be very different from one created for Tiktok, due to the demographic differences between each platform’s user base. An easy analogy from thirty years ago: A brand making ads for MTV would probably create different ads for prime time networks. The same product is being marketed to a subset of their customer base.
This doesn’t mean it will always be different. It just means to know who you plan to reach, so you can decide if it needs to be.
2. What Problem Will You Solve?
A basic tenet of advertising is to point out a problem, then show people why they need you to solve it. Listerine famously coined the term halitosis to describe bad breath and portray it as a medical condition, so they could market themselves as the solution. This was especially elegant because you could never be certain that you didn’t have bad breath so you would use more Listerine just to be sure.
Knowing who your audience is and what problem they might have that you can solve will allow you to cater your voice to them.
3. What Sets You Apart?
This one is easy. Why are you the obvious choice to solve the problem that exists? Whether it is price, convenience, quality, or innovative systems, this is the “why you should pick me” part of the plan.
4. Where Is This Going?
As mentioned earlier knowing the audience will have some impact on where you market. Marketing in the wrong place for your audience and solution is basically the same as not marketing at all.
5. What Type of Content Will It Be?
This one and the one before it might have to be rearranged, but often the answer to one will answer the other. If you are marketing on Instagram, visual ads may be your better option. If you are going to TikTok, you are making videos. If you already know you need a certain type of content, that might end up informing where it goes.
Wrap Up
Developing a strategy for digital content marketing can be complicated. For many companies, it makes sense to hire a third-party digital marketing company to help. These companies can help you find the direction you want to take by guiding your strategy planning, they can handle creating content or any portion of the process you need.