Early on in my business venture, someone said to me “If you don’t have a digital strategy, do you even have a business?”. It was from that moment that I decided I needed to crack this digital strategy nut once and for all. Follow these simple steps and make your business run in line with digital strategy best practices. The good news is that it’s easier to implement than I thought it would be…
Of course, “best practice” is constantly changing as technology and top social media sites come in and out of fashion. However, the standard process of plan (audience and content), execute (create and publish) and measure (engagement and results) hold true no matter what the platform or content that you are producing. But if you want to make sure that your business is set up for digital strategy success it’s time to get your SEO, content marketing and mobile accessibility up to scratch!
What do we mean by digital strategy best practices?
I want to clear something up really early on in this blog: Digital strategy is NOT selling.
Well, what I mean is, digital strategy is not simply spamming as many people with your product across as many social media sites as your team can sign up to and automate in Hootsuite.
A digital strategy is about nurturing relationships with customers. It is about being as helpful as humanly possible. It is about removing the friction to buy when your customers decide that they want your products or services!
Below, we will look at the best steps to take when forming your digital strategy as well as the top things you should be focusing on in the next few months.
Developing your digital strategy
Irrespective of the social media channel, blog posts or videos that you plan on creating or promoting, you should always follow these six steps when it comes to developing your digital strategy.
1. Define The Goals Of The Strategy.
While it’s very tempting to just say “we want to make more money”, you will need to dig deeper to create your digital marketing goals.
For example, good specific goals are: 100 social media shares per month, increase your email subscription list by 250, grow your followers on your LinkedIn page by 1000 people.
In this stage, write as many goals as you possibly can in the first instance.
Once you define your goals, choose no more than your top three and shelve the rest…for now.
These top three goals will be the guiding star of your best practice digital strategy.
2. Get to Know Your Channels.
Being across multiple channels is great if you’ve got the time and resources to do it well. When I was starting out, I felt pressure to be on every social media platform.
The truth is that I quickly became exhausted by the amount to effort it took to keep them all up to date and they all quickly looked sad and neglected – not something you want for your business!
The reality is that there are few businesses that actually need to use every channel. Limiting to one or two initially will really help you grow an audience and, importantly, a relationship with that audience.
Once you know where you are going to focus your efforts. Spend at least a month on that platform with your customers in mind.
What are your customers looking for on that platform? How can you help them? And how do people on this platform like to consume content? How do people interact on that platform?
Who is your ideal client or audience?
- Age
- Gender
- Marital Status
- Ethnicity
- Religion
What do they do and like?
- Interest and hobbies
- Strongly held opinions
- How do they buy products?
What is their pain?
- Problems and concerns that keep them up at night?
- How can you help them solve any of these pains?
It’s this deeper understanding that will really help you when it comes to the next step: creating content.
3. Develop Your Content Type For Your Channel.
It doesn’t matter how your customers want to be engaged, whether it’s emails, social media posts, blogs or visually, you need to produce content!
Your content will be the thing that will drive your digital strategy. Without content, you don’t really have anything at all!
The number one rule that you need to follow is: Give your customers what they want in the way that they want it. If you spent a bit of time on the steps above, you will have a good idea of what that looks like.
For example, I wanted to grow an audience on LinkedIn. This audience is business focused and short video (vlog) content was growing and getting popular. Guess what I gave them? I was able to grow from 1000 to over 4000 followers in under 3 months.
Here some examples of the sort of content you can produce to help your audience:
1. Blogs
Creating a blog is probably one of my favourite ways to create content! They are perfect for improving your website SEO as long as they are planned based on keyword search terms.
You need this mix of content in your blog to make it super valuable:
- 33% Pillar posts – these are blogs that are really, really long and contain a lot of value. They need to be at least 3500 words long and tackle a topic in detail! I reserve these for keywords that are a little bit more competitive and can be delved into deeply.
- 33% Social posts – these are blogs posts like “the top 10 beard trimmers” or “5 ways that you can communicate better”. These tend to be highly shareable and clickable when cross-posting to social media. These need to be at least 1500 words in length.
- 33% Direct response post – These blog articles are a direct response to a question. They need to be at least 1500 words in length and answer the question that the keyword is focused around.
For each of these types of articles, you need to include lot’s of multimedia. Infographics, videos, custom images and downloads for them to be truly valuable!
You should aim to have at least 30 articles on your blog – get them up as soon as possible – and then aim for 50 in about one year. This will lay the foundations for true growth.
2. Videos
Videos should be playing a more significant role in content strategy workflow. Videos that contain YOU are going to increase your professional value quicker than anything else!
I do not care about vanity metrics such as likes and comments. What I care about is sentiment in the comments. Are people engaging? Are they saying positive things?
Videos help you grow your personal brand. If you don’t believe me – I have people coming to my website via a google search that have googled my name…it is clearly working to grow awareness and drive engagement with me as a professional. I know it can do the same thing for you!
Spend a lot of time on the narrative and hook (the first 5 seconds) of the video. These are going to be what grabs and holds the audience’s attention. If you need help with creating video content check out my FREE guide!
3. eBooks
Producing your own eBook is another important thing you should consider. An eBook can be used for collecting email addresses and growing a list of people that you can then contact later on with offers or more value!
EBooks generally provide a detailed process or explanation about a particular product or service sold by the business. Part self-help and part info product – eBooks are great for growing authority in a field.
The power of using eBooks include the perceived value of information in a book form. Some of the things to consider when creating an eBook include the number of pages that you are offering (more is perceived as a higher value!); the content should be clear and well presented. One of the things that scare people who are considering producing an eBook is the investment that’s required to write one. But don’t be put off! The investment is returned many times over if used properly.
You can even roll your blog posts together into an eBook! Doubling up on content is one of my favourite productivity boosters.
4. Create a checklist
A checklist is another content marketing strategy that gives you a simple way to grow authority with your audience. In the list, you should include the essential steps that you need to accomplish at the end of the specified period or process.
This can be used as a download in exchange for an email or just as extra value in a blog post.
Always ensure you re-purpose the content in your checklist into an ebook or it can be split over any social media posts too!
5. Infographics
Using infographics can be a winning strategy for content marketing as long as they are designed beautifully to lure the audiences to reading them.
Infographics give easy to digest, visual information about a specific subject. Infographics rely on the use of visual statistics to display information quickly to an audience.
Some things to consider when creating an infographic are making sure that your topic is relevant, to your potential customers.
Moreover, it is essential to ensure the infographics are designed by experts and time is taken to give them the wow factor.
6. Podcasts
Podcasts are another type of content marketing that has several advantages if you use them as one of your content marketing options.
By using podcasts you will be able to interview the experts in an industry, which are essential tools to help a business to stand out among many competitors.
Podcasting has amazing power for acquiring new customers and also helps in building trust with your targeted or existing audience.
If you are considering using podcasts, take a look at my blog on the reasons podcasts fail and how to fix them!
Finally, just make sure that every bit of content you put out is useful. If it’s useful people will share it and it’ll help awareness grow for what you do.
4. Create A Schedule That You Can Actually Keep To.
Once you know the type of content that will work for your business, build out a timeline to stay consistent. It can be easy to just produce a load of content in the early days because you are excited!
Stop, take a deep breath and ask yourself if five blog posts a week is achievable for the next year, at least.
If it’s not, it’s time to reconsider!
Use a free project manager like ASANA to keep everything organized and to set deadlines for content. Keeping everything in one place will help simplify the process a lot!
5. Get Creating, You!
This is the nonglamorous part of digital strategy. Content creation is slow, time-consuming and can feel like a huge waste of time. Unlike social media posts, there’s no instant feedback and immediate dopamine hit that you can enjoy.
But hang in there my beautiful friend – it’ll be tough but keep producing!
This is all about momentum and planting the seed! For SEO blog post efforts to bear its fruits, you’ll need to wait at least 6 months. Frustrating, I know!
As the weeks and months pass by, you’ll be tempted to outsource the content creation work. But you’ll need to write all of the content yourself in the first few months, at least.
Audiences can smell authenticity a mile off and if your posts/videos or other content don’t wreak of it, you’re going to miss the mark!
6. Measure the results
This is where you can look back at the top three goals that you set for yourself in step one.
How did you do?
What do the engagement stats look like for each bit of content that you produced? I take a look at:
- Organic traffic
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- % engagement
Don’t be put off if you haven’t achieved all of the goals you’ve set for yourself.
Are you close? What do you think you can do better?
This is the stage where you can celebrate, because you have done an awesome job, or acknowledge that you’ve got a little bit more to learn about your audience.
No matter what the outcome, you need to stay focused on the fact that you need to provide value to your audience and customers.
Here are the things that I feel like will never go out of fashion and are quite often overlooked or poo poo’ed for shiner newer digital strategy approaches.
Get these things sorted and you’ll be in for a great run!
The big three digital strategy things that will not be going out of fashion.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Sure, your product or service is great but is it reaching the right people as they are searching for it?
Search engine optimization can really help your products/service/brand reach the people who want what you’re offering.
There are experts that recommend updating your SEO up to four times a year. Google updates its algorithm more than 500 times a year so it’s best just to check in regularly.
While we are on that…it’s good to know what Google is up to but don’t be persuaded into trying to hack the algorithm! Being helpful, consistent with advice and customer focus will always align with what value Google is trying to provide it’s search customers.
Work with them on that and you’ll always be fine!
Helpful content – the best digital strategy practice!
Get Blogging!
Posting relevant and valuable content drives traffic to your website and social media pages, while also increasing your ranking in search engines.
The experts recommend creating at least ten long form (over 1500 words) specific topic blogs, 10 really shareable blogs (top 5 tools etc) and 10 super helpful pillar posts (over 4000 words) is what you need to start seeing great SEO results.
Each post you create is one more indexed page on your website, making it more likely customers will find you when searching online. It also indicates to search engines that your website is active, which will help surface your content to the top of search engine results.
Video Content
Invest in video production capacity. The amount of video created and posted online is insane and will only get more popular as channels adapt to the way audiences want to consume content!
The good thing is that it is cheaper and easier than ever to create video content. That is both good and bad news – there’s a lot of really bad videos out there. But follow some simple steps and your content will be looking awesome in no time.
Make your marketing mobile.
Even if a desktop version of your marketing content looks great, be sure to check that it looks just as good across a huge range of devices.
Your audiences expect across platform websites and services. The better accessibility you can provide your audience, the more likely they are to come back for more and trust your products and service.
Remember that authenticity reigns supreme in any of these strategies. Once you have that, an online presence allows you to connect with your audience and build a brand that they’ll continuously want to engage with.
Easy right :).
Do you want help making your business run in line with digital strategy best practices? Get in contact to discuss your requirements! I can’t wait to help you out!
