3 Core Concepts for a Successful Digital Content Strategy

Have you ever sat on a chair with 2 legs, it’s going to be a quick crash boom landing if anything. Three legs is a minimum and ideal is four. Your successful digital content strategy similarly depends on 3 crucial concepts, four if you consider the business objective.

Concept 1: The Customer Journey

Customers go through three different journeys with you. Attraction, Conversion and Consumption. And your content needs to address the customer needs in these stages.

Attraction

In the attraction stage the content helps to get them know a little about your product or service. Conversion

In conversion they either purchase or sign up to a list or subscribe for more information, the content enables them to undertake some kind of transaction not necessarily monetary with you. Consumption

The consumption content on the other hand is designed to help them consume your product or service better. Each of these 3 kinds of content is very different and serves a very definite purpose. One to enable awareness, the other to aid a transaction and the last to aid consumption.

You need to make sure that your content enables the customer journey. Concept 2: Content Stickiness

We’re faced with a deluge of content each day. Most of it is boring, exhaustive and at times difficult to consume and remember. We typically forget 80% of a presentation in less than 24 hours.

Making content stick, memorable is critical. Without this even though your content might be good, it’s not really going to stick around in people’s minds. Creating sticky content is a planned activity. Content stickiness can be achieved in a number of ways. One of the common ways is by creating a unique mascot which provides a distinct voice to your content and enables it to stick in people’s minds. The other is to provide content which directly address people’s problems. There are 7 different ways in which content can be created to make it more effective. By far visual content is the most effective in terms of making it easy to consume and remember.

Concept 3: Network Effect

The challenge with content production is that everyone is doing it, and standing out in the midst of all that content with your content is difficult. More so customer belief in corporate content tends to be low compared to recommendations by friends, family, colleagues, co-workers, others customers and even strangers (e.g. book reviews which one reads on sites like Amazon). Moreover, you can’t do it alone, not all businesses are designed to be content production factories, and you’re never going to have enough budgets to produce the kind and volume of content you need.

Leveraging Social Media and Digital networks the right way – Brand Advocates, Partners (and their networks) – User Generated Content.

You need to leverage your brand advocates to create content. Brand Advocates, your most vocal customers and partners can not only create content for you also help you promote that content across their social networks. User generated content is by far the most powerful content. You truly leverage social networks when you leverage content created by corporate teams, employees, partners and brand advocates.

Leveraging other networks also means repurposing content in different formats (text, audio, images) and across different social networks. Summary

In today’s landscape it’s necessary to create content which targets the different customer journey, is sticky and at the same time leverages user generated content with brand advocates, partners and employees and uses their networks to promote the content.

Like the 3 legs which are needed for a chair these 3 core concepts along with a clear business objective provide the solid base for a successful content strategy.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1iwbNwM