A Holistic Approach To Digital Content Creation
Content creation is the cornerstone of every solid digital marketing strategy. Without engaging content that appeals to your target audience, your digital marketing efforts can fall flat. Creating content that resonates with your audience helps build trust in your brand and authority in your industry, which will ultimately lead to more business.
However, many businesses make the all-to-common mistake of focussing on one or two types of content or a single aspect of digital marketing, like blog posts or social media content, rather than taking a more robust and holistic approach to content creation.
Why is taking a holistic approach so important?
Taking a more comprehensive approach to content creation and digital marketing is crucial to growing a brand and increasing sales in the digital landscape.
When you focus mainly on growing your social media following and advertising products and services on social media, for example, you are limiting your growth potential by ignoring all other aspects of digital marketing, such as email marketing, blog posts, SEO, PPC advertising, and more.
By creating content for all digital marketing avenues relevant to your business, you will benefit in a number of ways:
- Increase Visibility
A holistic approach to content creation ensures that your brand, and by extension your products and/or services, is visible on all digital platforms, making it easier for your target audience to find you. This will inevitably increase engagement, drive more traffic to your website, and lead to an overall increase in conversions.
- Increase Brand Loyalty
By uniting all your digital marketing efforts, you can increase brand loyalty and trust with your customers. With consistent content and brand messaging across all platforms you are present on, you will create a strong and recognisable brand identity. This increase in loyalty and trust can result in more referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations, repeat business, and can help guide people through your sales funnel.
- More Cost Effective & Higher ROI
Holistic content creation is often far more cost effective, with a higher return on investment, than many traditional marketing methods or when tackling each digital marketing area separately. With a holistic approach, you can unify your content, spending less time creating multiple different types of content, combine channels and reach your target audience more cost-effectively, and track and measure your campaigns more effectively, making more informed decisions to increase ROI.
- Understand Your Audience Better
With a unified approach to content marketing you gain a better understanding of your target audience, their likes and dislikes, purchasing patterns, and needs, all by analysing the data from multiple channels. When you gain a better understanding of your audience, you can create much more targeted (and effective) digital marketing campaigns.
How do you take a holistic approach to content creation?
Approaching your content and digital marketing efforts holistically isn’t just about creating content on as many different platforms as possible. You need to ensure that the content you are creating is relevant to your audience, engaging, consistent, and suited to the specific platforms you will be using.
Here are the main steps to take when creating a holistic content plan:
- Analytics
In the digital marketing world, data is so important. We cannot stress that enough. Data. Is. Vital. Look at your analytics, research your target audience (their pain points, preferences, and behaviour), find out who amongst your audience is on which platforms (as demographics will differ from platform to platform), and look at who your competitors are and what they are doing on each platform. Use online analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush to help you.
- Strategy
Once you have identified your target audience, researched who is on what platform, performed your competitor analysis, and researched what type of content works best on different platforms, it’s time to get your digital marketing strategy in place. When creating a content plan, you’ll need to differentiate between channels so that you produce the type of content that will work best on each one and for the portion of your audience that uses each platform. For example, it’s no use creating a video that merely lists your services to post on TikTok, when your target audience on TikTok engages best with behind the scenes videos or bite-sized instructional videos.
- Consistency
Although you need to differentiate the type of content you use on different platforms, you still need to bring it all together for consistent messaging. Ensure that the website copy, social media posts, images you use, PR campaigns you run, and email communications you put out each month are all aligned with the planned theme or messaging in your strategy. Keeping things consistent across all channels will build a strong brand presence.
- Be Useful
Useful content is so much more effective than content that reads like a sales pitch. Be honest when creating your content – if you read it or watched it, would you want to see more of that type of content? Would you read or watch all of it? If you’re going in for the hard sell in multiple pieces of content, you’re going to see less engagement than if you produce helpful, engaging content regularly. Think content that answers questions, provides solutions, or offers relevant information that matches your target audience’s preferences, pain points, and needs.
- Entertain and Engage
If your content is not entertaining or engaging enough for your audience, why would they follow the link to your website, fill out the form, or like, share, and comment on your posts? You have seconds, literally seconds, to grab people’s attention online, so make sure your content is appealing, entertaining, and engaging. But don’t mislead anyone with an attention grabbing headline, image, or video that doesn’t match the content.
- Test, Measure, Adjust
Perform some A/B testing with content to find out what kind of content works best with your target audience and on different platforms. Measure the success or failure of the content you put out there and analyse the data to find out why something didn’t quite hit the mark or what worked better than expected. Adjust your strategy and content going forward so that you produce more of the type of content that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t. Never be afraid of a little change and it’s ok to fail or slip up – as long as you learn from it.
When you create content using a holistic approach across a range of platforms, you can broaden your reach, increase your engagement, drive more traffic to your website, and learn what type of content works best for your brand and audience.
It can be a lot of work and it does take time, but it will work wonders for your brand. Of course, you can always ask for help with your content plan, digital marketing strategy, or any aspect of your brand’s marketing. Marketing agencies like Market Rocket have provided invaluable help in growing brands online with content creation, consistent messaging, website development, SEO, social media management, PPC, and more.
Good luck on your holistic marketing journey and enjoy the ride!
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