How To Find The Best Digital Content Marketing Solutions For Your Business
As the world becomes increasingly digitized, businesses are in a race to capture the attention of their target audience and establish their brand. And selecting the best digital content marketing solutions for your business as quickly as possible is key to helping you stand out in the crowded digital landscape! With the right strategy and tools, you can create a powerful impact that resonates with your audience and drives business success.
Let’s start with a definition just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
What is digital content marketing?
Digital content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and engaging digital content to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience. The goal of which is to establish trust and credibility with your target audience, ultimately leading to increased brand awareness, customer loyalty, and increased sales.
This definition gives a high-level understanding of the benefits. But that’s not enough. You need to understand the benefits of digital content marketing solutions at a more granular level because you’re not going to see increased sales or brand awareness right away. Yet you need to make decisions about the best digital content marketing solutions for your business as quickly as possible if you’re going the win the race. So, let’s look at some of the other benefits in anticipation of selecting KPIs.
Here are the key benefits of digital content marketing solutions:
Increased reach
Digital content marketing solutions can help your business reach a wider audience, beyond your geographic location and beyond traditional marketing channels. This helps you expand your reach and connect with new and diverse audiences.
Improved Engagement
By creating high-quality digital content that resonates with your target audience, digital content marketing solutions can help your business improve customer engagement and build stronger relationships with your customers.
Increased visibility
Digital content marketing solutions can help your business rank higher in search engines like Google, increasing its visibility and reach. This allows your business to get found by customers actively searching for products or services in your niche.
Better ROI
Digital content marketing solutions deliver a higher return on investment than traditional marketing channels. By targeting your ideal customers with relevant and valuable content, digital content marketing solutions can help your business drive more qualified leads and conversions, and increase its bottom line.
Enhanced Brand Awareness
As already mentioned, digital content marketing solutions help businesses build brand awareness, establish themselves as authorities in their industry, and increase customer trust and loyalty. And we already know that people buy from businesses they know, like, and trust.
As you can see from this list, digital content marketing solutions offer measurable results. That means you can track your business’s success and identify areas for improvement. And you’ll have the data you need to optimize your marketing strategies, improve your return on investment, and achieve your marketing goals.
Now that you have a better idea of the potential power of digital content marketing solutions for your business, it’s time to take a look at what is required to produce a successful digital content marketing strategy.
Key Components of a Successful Digital Content Marketing Strategy
Know Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is always the first step in creating a successful digital content marketing strategy – even if you’ve been successfully marketing online already. You need to know (or revisit and verify) who your audience is, what they’re interested in, and what their pain points are. Once you know what really makes them tick, you’ll be able to create content that resonates with them and addresses their needs.
Select The Types Of Content You’ll Create
There is a myriad of digital content types, including blogs, videos, infographics, e-books, special reports, and podcasts to name just a few. It’s important to choose the type(s) of content that will best engage your target audience and effectively communicate your message. Your selection of the type(s) of content you’ll create also needs to take into account your ability to regularly create it.
And don’t let this step overwhelm you. You can also be strategic about your creation and repurpose content. (Here’s a link to a free tool you can use to help you repurpose content.)
Choose Your Platform(s)
Once you’ve created your content, you need to distribute it to reach your target audience. There are many different channels for content distribution, including your website, social media, email, and so many more. It’s important to choose the most-effective channels for reaching your target audience.
Measure and Evaluate
Finally, you’ve got to measure the success of your digital content marketing efforts. You can use various analytics tools to track the success of your content, such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversions. You’ll want to select the KPIs that are most meaningful to your goals so the data can help you quickly know when you need to adjust your strategy.
Now that you’ve got a handle on what digital content marketing is, its benefits, and what’s required for a successful strategy, we can finally start talking about digital content marketing solutions.
Digital Content Marketing Solutions
Digital content marketing can be labor-intensive. So you need to have the right solutions in place to decrease the amount of time you or your team needs to spend creating and distributing your content.
There are 4 basic tool types you’ll want to consider.
Social Media Management
Social media platforms are a great way to reach a large and engaged audience. You can use social media to share your content, engage with your followers, and build relationships with your target audience.
The benefits of using a social media management tool include helping you to manage multiple accounts, schedule posts in advance, find and address comments efficiently, analyze social engagement with comprehensive analytics, and can enable your team to collaborate on campaigns.
Some examples of these types of tools include MeetEdgar, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Loomly.
Email Marketing System
Email is a highly effective way to reach your target audience and build relationships with them. You can use email to share your content, promote your products and services, and keep your audience engaged.
In addition, there are some stats reporting that you can expect an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. (Unfortunately, there aren’t any details on how these stats were generated, but they are impressive.)
When your list is very, very small, it’s possible to manage your email marketing by hand. But doing all of your email marketing by hand is extremely tedious and, IMHO, a waste of time. So this is definitely one of the tools you’ll want to make a decision on quickly when you’re looking at digital content marketing solutions.
Some examples of email marketing systems are Flodesk, GetResponse, Active Campaign, MailChimp, and Constant Contact.
Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS is a platform that allows you to create, manage, and distribute your digital content. With a CMS, you can easily create and publish blog posts, videos, and other forms of digital content. Probably the easiest way to think of a CMS is that it’s the engine that makes your website work.
Some popular CMSs you may have heard of include WordPress, Squarespace, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, GoDaddy, Weebly, and Shopify. (My preference is WordPress.)
Marketing Automation Platform
Marketing automation is a game-changer for digital content marketing. It can automate repetitive marketing tasks, allow you to create personalized workflows, and streamline internal processes. In other words, they can save you time and effort while still helping you reach your target audience effectively.
I think of a marketing automation platform as what ties together all of the other digital content marketing solutions you’re using or even eliminates the need for some of them. They’re also more popular among B2B businesses.
Examples of these platforms include HubSpot, Ontraport, and GetResponse.
If I were to start a new service-based business today, the order in which I would implement these basic tools is
- Content Management System
- Email Marketing System
- Social Media Management
- Marketing Automation Platform
My first pick is a CMS. The reason is you have to have a website you own instead of relying solely on a Facebook page.
How To Find The Best CMS
There is no one best CMS. To choose the best one for where your business is right now, you need to figure out what your needs are. Here are some questions you can use to evaluate the options:
What do you need your website to do?
Knowing your requirements will help you narrow down the options. Do you need a membership site? Or a shopping site? Or a blog site? Or a photography site? You need to consider both your current and future needs.
What’s your budget?
You want to make sure the system you choose fits your budget now and in the future. You don’t just build a website and forget about it. Your website will need updates for technology and updates for UX (user experience).
Who will be maintaining the site?
This is the person or group or company who will make sure the website is kept up-to-date with technology, that the site is running well, and will make the needed updates for UX.
What CMS do your competitors use?
Knowing the CMS each of your major competitors use can help you create a shortlist of CMS to evaluate.
I’ve changed my CMS 3 times over the years. And each time it was for ease of use. Technology changes quickly, and even if you pick the best CMS for your business now, you may end up needing to switch at some point down the road.
How to Find the Best Email Marketing System
There are a really wide variety of email marketing systems on the market. And with so many to choose from it can be a bit overwhelming unless you know your requirements. Here are some questions to consider as you begin your selection process:
How many subscribers do you currently have on your list?
Most email marketing systems charge based on the number of emails you have on your list. So this plays a big part in understanding the investment you’ll need to make.
What type of email marketing do you plan to do?
If you just plan on sending out a newsletter to your subscribers once in a while, you won’t need a system with a lot of bells and whistles. However, if you want to run an automated series of emails or schedule your newsletters in advance, you’ll want to look at more comprehensive systems.
How easy is this system to use?
You’ll want to make sure that the person or team who will be interacting with this system the most finds it fairly easy to use or that there are easy-to-understand tutorials.
Do you need the system to interface with another app or digital content marketing tool you’re already using?
Maybe you’ve got systems set up on your website that you need to have your email marketing system interface with. Or maybe you’ve got an app that you need the system to interface with. If you need to use data from another source in an email marketing system, you’ll want to be sure it’s capable of absorbing the data.
Do you need segmentation and personalization?
Segmentation allows you to target your email list based on their interests so you can suggest the best content, services, and/or products for them. Personalization allows you to use people’s names in the email and make them feel more personal to the person opening them.
Do you need A/B testing capabilities?
A/B testing allows you to see which of two options performs better. You can test everything from subject line, images, messaging, message length, send times, and CTA (call-to-action) buttons. This way to you can fine-tune the emails you’re sending to elicit the types of open rates and responses you want.
What types of analytics and reporting are available?
In order to evaluate the results of your A/B testing, you’ve got to have analytics and reporting. And even if you don’t need A/B testing now, you’ll still want to understand, at a minimum, your open rates, subscribes and unsubscribes.
What kind of customer support is available?
Everyone I know needs help from the customer support team from time to time. Each system offers different customer support options and the support options often depend on the subscription price you’re paying.
I’ve changed my email marketing system 4 times over the years. And you’ll find you’ll want to change yours too because your needs will change as your business grows.
How to Find the Best Social Media Management Tool
Social media can a great way to attract new people to your website. And when you’re first starting out, it’s fairly simple to pop over to your platform of choice, make a post, reply to comments, engage with other pages or people, and evaluate your results. However, as you add more platforms, keeping up with your business’s social accounts can be incredibly time-consuming. That’s where a social media management tool can come in handy.
Before you select one to purchase a subscription to, you’ll want to evaluate a few things.
How easy is this system to use?
Since this system will be used frequently, you’ll want to make sure that the person or team responsible for social media finds the tool you select easy to use and that there are easy-to-understand tutorials available.
What types of analytics and reporting are available?
One of the features I like the best about my social media management tool is analytics and reporting. I need to have visibility into the effectiveness of my social media campaigns across platforms and having all of the data in one place makes it simple to keep tabs on.
Does it have team collaboration tools?
One of the most frustrating things, when your team grows, is the need for shared logins. Instead of sharing a single login, I recommend getting tools that allow for multiple simultaneous logins to your company’s account each with different access levels. This also gets to the issue of security. You’ll want to make sure the tool is secure because you only want authorized users to be able to post to your social media accounts.
What kind of customer support is available?
Everyone I know needs help from the customer support team from time to time. Each system offers different customer support options and the support options often depend on the subscription price you’re paying.
What type of training is available?
No tool is 100% intuitive. So you’ll want to make sure the tool you select has comprehensive training that’s easy to understand.
I’ve changed my social media marketing tool twice over the years. Again, no tool is perfect and your needs for social media marketing will change as your company evolves.
How to Find the Best Marketing Automation Platform
A marketing automation platform can automate many repetitive marketing tasks required by having separate systems for your website, email, and social media. It can also roll some or all of those functions into a single system.
According to HubSpot, here are some guidelines for selecting the best marketing automation platform for your business:
What existing tools do you need to integrate with?
You’ll want to make sure a marketing automation platform can integrate with the digital content marketing solutions you already have in place.
What are your budget and business needs?
When you’re ready to add in a marketing automation platform, you’ll want to make sure it’s reasonably priced, efficient and effective for what you need now, and that it can grow with you as your business grows.
How easy is this system to use?
Automation is rarely easy to implement, so you’ll want to make sure that it’s something that you’ll find easy to work with. This includes not only the platform’s interface but also the customer support offerings.
Does the system provide the analytics and reporting options you need?
Of course, you’ll want the system to provide a single place to look at all of the data from your other digital content marketing solutions, but you’ll also want to make sure it provides the specific metrics that are important to you. Having reporting capabilities can also make it easier to share the data.
What are the potential limitations of the platform?
Some platforms limit the number of actions in a month or your database/list size. You’ll want to make sure the platform you select can easily support what you need it to do.
This is a long post because there’s so much to consider when you’re on the hunt for the best digital content marketing solutions for your business. And, frankly, this post just sets you off in the best direction for making decisions.
However, since online marketing is an essential part of any modern marketing strategy, you definitely need to take advantage of as many solutions as make sense for where your business is today. Because it’s by having the right tools in place that you’ll be able to effectively and efficiently implement your online marketing strategy to resonate with your target audience and drive business success.
