Digital transformation is shifting the call desk to chatbots, print ads to blog posts, TV ads to YouTube videos, and sales to freemium products.
Companies, in moving from brick-and-mortar services to the digital world, use content to facilitate their digital transformation and how they deliver value to their customers.
Each of those channels requires digital content. A well-orchestrated content strategy is integral to digital transformation because content is how companies deliver a digital customer experience.
Content drives digital transformation
Without content strategy as a roadmap, digital transformation can be an expensive journey.
Content is the engine behind digital marketing. It is how brands build trust with customers, educate them about their products, and help them solve problems.
Content strategy is a company’s plan for achieving business objectives with content. An effective strategy describes the audiences you want to talk to and the channels you plan to use to deliver your message. It specifies the types of content you will write for those channels and why your message is valuable for customers to hear.
Your content strategy codifies how you define success and how that success is measured.
A coordinated content strategy leads to outstanding digital customer experiences
In a world where our interactions with customers are increasingly on digital platforms, the best customer experience and content win.
To make sure your content is focused on your customer, not your product, have proactive conversations with your customers. This can happen through feedback surveys, product communities on Reddit, or industry webinars.
Listen carefully to your customers’ pain points and needs and what they are looking for in a solution.
This work informs every part of your content strategy, so share that strategy with all of your internal teams. Sales, marketing, and customer service all need to be operating from the same playbook.
Keeping communication open across divisions leads to a consistent message to customers. That consistency and reliability build trust and loyalty.
Content leads to sales and business growth
Content, like every part of a business, is only as valuable as its ability to improve the bottom line. An effective content strategy nurtures new customers and retains existing customers.
Fortunately, content is a proven marketing tactic for delivering on business objectives.
Great content starts with deep keyword research combined with detailed customer profiles. In the digital era, this is the most effective way to ensure your company is attracting people who would find your product useful and then giving them information relevant to how far along they are on their customer journey.
Data like page views and click-through rates can help you determine the effectiveness of efforts near the top of the funnel.
Once people learn more about the challenges they face, and the potential solutions, content is also the answer for how to engage prospects in the middle of the funnel.
Readers engage with great content because it focuses on their needs and pain points instead of features and products.
To establish authority and credibility, speak directly to prospects and provide better information to them than your competitors can.
Companies can offer valuable and unique resources like ebooks, research reports, or tutorial videos in exchange for information like emails and interests. This lets future conversations be more personal and tailored to what matters most to prospects.
Signups and metrics like engaged time offer insights into the success your team is having in generating high-quality leads.
Content is how you get to know your customer
Whether it’s a personalized email, a landing page, or a Facebook post, digital marketing teams can keep their content strategy front of mind by asking why a piece of content is worth spending the time to create and amplify.
The best gauge of whether content is “worth it” is whether this is content visitors can’t find anywhere else. Unique content takes more work, but that extra effort can pay dividends.
For example, Mantis Research asked 644 marketers around the world how they felt original research contributed to their business goals. They found 94% believe conducting their own research strengthens their brand authority, and 88% of the companies taking the time to conduct original research plan to continue investing time and resources into it.
The original data gained from those efforts are the seeds for unique, useful content. This one-of-a-kind content gives your audience information they can act on and positions you as an authority in your industry. This makes it more likely your audience will look your way for answers, and that they will remember you when they’re ready to purchase.
Your content shouldn’t be frozen in amber once it’s published. Measure its success based on its purpose to understand whether it is reaching customers at the right time along their journey and in the right place.
If the piece is designed to reach visitors at the top of the funnel, you might track the number of website sessions or organic clicks. For content in the middle of the funnel, return visitors, email signups, or ebook downloads may be a better way to track success.
Quantifying the return on investment of your digital marketing efforts is easier than it was with traditional advertising.
The right analytics tools help you see what content converts readers to leads and how long users are engaged on your website. By tracking mouse movements and clicks, your team knows if erroneous results like tabs left open on a browser are skewing results.
Modern digital marketers commonly reuse the same piece of content in multiple channels, and different audiences have different needs based on where they discover content. A tool that displays in one place how a piece of content is performing in each channel makes it easier to build a more effective journey for customers.
Content enables digital transformation at scale
Content doesn’t just live as long columns of text on a website anymore. It is images, video, and audio, and it lives on channels ranging from tablets and phones to watches and TVs.
To scale, content must be reusable for different needs, easily created, and quickly edited. An agile content management system (CMS) is the tool for the job because it features a content hub, leverages team workflow tools, and can deliver content to an array of digital channels.
An agile CMS allows businesses to quickly create consistent, branded content for use on digital channels ranging from blog posts to emails.
Beyond customer-facing uses for agile content, content can be put into different formats for customer service teams or sales representatives, promoting collaboration and saving time across the organization.
More uses for the same content drive up the value of that content and drive down the cost.
Investing in content provides compounding returns for organizations. Like financial investing, it can feel like hard work for marginal results in the beginning. Over time, every piece of content published drives more organic traffic, produces more leads, converts more customers, and engenders deeper loyalty from users.
An agile CMS and content analytics unlock digital transformation
Global spending on digital transformation is expected to explode from $1.8 trillion in 2022 to $2.8 trillion in 2025. To keep pace, marketing executives will have to develop a digital content strategy that serves the entire company from customer service to sales.
An agile content management system (CMS) like WordPress VIP is a foundational tool for executing that strategy because it allows marketers to create, publish, and adapt content fast, and a content analytics solution like Parse.ly allows them to build a data-driven content strategy that turns readers into customers. For a personalized demo of the platform, reach out to us today.
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