What platform is best to create short content?

Twitter is great for short content.

Why Should You Have a Digital Content Strategy?

In an increasingly online world, understanding what digital content is and how to use it can mean the difference between a thriving and a failing business. There are many different types of digital content to choose from and many different ways to implement that content. So understanding what digital content will work best for your business can be difficult to understand. The answer will vary from business to business and campaign to campaign, making the answer all the more elusive. Through this article, you will learn what digital content is and how you can utilize it in your marketing strategy to make this topic a little easier to understand.

Table of Contents

What Is Digital Content?

What is digital content and how does it differ from more traditional content like magazines, television, and billboards? Digital content refers to any content available online. It can include text, audio, video, and images. If it is online, it is digital content. This article you are reading now is digital content.

Digital Content Vs. Traditional Content

Digital content offers an increased amount of interaction with your target market that traditional media can not offer. For example, you can always be connected to your target audience by answering questions in the comments.

Digital content can also increase customer interaction through interactive content. If you add a link to your website, all the viewer has to do is click the link to be led to your website. Because of what digital content is, it can cut out the steps in the middle like typing in the website URL yourself or Googling the website, which traditional media can not. What is digital content if not a way to build great customer relationships that will lead to greater customer retention?

Digital Content Strategy

Every business should take advantage of the digital landscape and implement a digital content marketing strategy. While the details of what digital content creation strategy will work best will change from business to business, some rules hold no matter what the digital content you create is.

The most important rule to follow when creating content is to verify that every piece of content you create is relevant and useful to your target audience. Your audience should not question why they are seeing your content.

Another good rule to follow is to keep your content engaging. Effective digital content is engaging. Your viewers should want to read your article, watch your video, or look at your social media post. Creating an engaging post means you add a bit of entertainment value to your post. This doesn’t necessarily mean cracking jokes every other sentence or using gaudy visuals, but a little bit of flare appropriate to the platform and content can go a long way when attracting your target audience. An engaging post makes the viewer want to interact with what the digital content is composed of.

Creating Your Own Content

As you create your digital content, these are questions you should ask yourself to be most successful.

What Is the Purpose Of This Content?

Do you want to show off your business’s expertise on a subject or do you want to let your customers know about changes coming to your business? Do you want customers to buy a new product or just remind them that you exist? What you want out of your digital content will influence every other choice you make. The digital content should serve your purpose, so the purpose should not be decided after it is created.

What Type Of Digital Content Will Best Serve My Purpose?

There are many digital content options to choose from. Both the medium and content are choices you need to make when creating digital content.

An article can educate, inform, or tell a heartwarming story, but it is just words, so the lack of a face to the words and lack of sound can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the message you are trying to convey. A video offers the opportunity to engage your audience through moving images while also educating them, though it might not be appropriate for all messages. A static graphic is great to get information across quickly, but messages that require more information would be better suited elsewhere.

Where Should I Promote My Content?

Outside of digital content made strictly for social media, social media is a great way to promote your content. For example, you have written an article on your business’s website. You can post the link on your company’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to increase traffic to your article and website.

What Platform Will This Content Be Hosted On?

The place you choose to post your content is just as important as the content itself. Choosing the right platform will make reaching your desired audience easier.

The platform you choose should complement the purpose of what your digital content is. For example, Twitter is good for short content. This should be used for short messages, jokes that compliment your business’s message, responding to customer questions and issues, and promoting other digital content. Long articles and case studies could be posted on the company’s website. People visiting a business’s site are likely already interested in the business’s services, so the content should show off their capabilities. Where you place your digital content can affect how people digest your message.

Do I Have an Effective SEO Strategy?

An effective SEO or search engine optimization strategy will make your content more discoverable. You should start by researching keywords. Find what people are searching for concerning your content. This preliminary research will tell you if this topic is even worth creating content for. If there is no audience for your topic, creating the content could be a waste of time and resources.

This research can also tell you what words or phrases you should make sure are included in your digital content. For example, the keyword “what is digital content” is a keyword for this article. This is the phrase people are searching for concerning this topic. It might even be the phrase that you Googled. Using the right keywords helps push digital content higher in Google’s search results leading to more clicks.

Digital Content Creation Tools

Hiring a professional for content creation can be costly. Not every small business has access to the necessary funds and must create its own content. Creating engaging and useful content can be daunting if you are not artistically inclined, but some programs and websites can help you with digital content creation.

Canva

Canva is one of the most popular graphic creation tools. With template options for every type of content and free-to-use graphics, everyone can be a graphic designer. The free version has a lot to offer, but if you want access to certain graphics and export options you will need to upgrade to the pro version for $12.99 a month or $119.99 a year for up to five people.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a tool to check for grammar and spelling errors. These functions come with the free version, but for at most $30 a month depending on the payment plan you choose, Grammarly will give suggestions for vocabulary enhancements, clarity, and concision, check for plagiarism and help you adjust the tone of your writing. From articles to social media posts, Grammarly can help keep your work error-free.

PowToon

PowToon allows amateurs to create engaging video content. Like Canva, this tool offers a variety of tools to make video content creation easy. PowToon offers a free version, a Pro version for $19 a month, a Pro+ version for $59 a month, and an agency version for $99 a month.

Giphy

A little bit of movement is a great way to capture people’s attention. Giphy offers a library of premade gifs that you can edit for your purposes and the ability to create your own gifs. Gifs are a great way to make relatable content.

SurveyMonkey

While best known for their survey services, SurveyMonkey also offers a variety of other, similar services. You can use SurveyMonkey to create quizzes customized to fit your brand. Quizzes can add a level of interactivity that further engages your audience. Business plans are $25 per month per user for the Team Advantage plan and $75 per month per user for the Team Premier plan.