This is how digital content strategy works
Why thoughtful marketing prevents costly mistakes
What is actually meant by content strategy?
Content strategy is behind every single activity in content marketing. It starts with the analysis of the status quo, monitors planning, content creation and distribution, and finally the successes achieved. Content marketing strategy ties everything together, and should be seen as the fine-tuning of specific campaigns, formats and platforms.
What does good content marketing strategy planning look like?
When it comes to content marketing strategy, you should first decide where you want the journey to end up. It starts with a look at the current state of affairs: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? Who do you want to address? Take the time and deliberate with colleagues or external consultants with a brainstorm. Describe your target groups in the content strategy as precisely as possible. We always recommend creating personas, i.e. fictional people who represent a target group with their age, profession, family, hobbies and names. At greatcontent, for example, we have a persona called Maureen. Maureen is 35 to 45 years old and has been a marketing expert for ten years. Max studies business administration and works for us as a freelance copywriter to pay for his holidays. How do we know our target group so well? From experience, analyses and feedback that we regularly collect and evaluate from our customers and linguists. In addition to defining the personas, a content strategy sets goals. What do you want to achieve with the published content? Your goal could be the launch of a new product or the strengthening of the brand identity. Another goal could be to make your company more visible on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, TikTok oder LinkedIn . Once you have defined your goals, the respective topics that need to be addressed seem to automatically arise.
Strategic content creation: how to avoid the most common mistakes
The goals, target group and content of the content marketing strategy have been decided - but the planning is not over yet. Which formats is the best fit? Do you want to build a company blog and landing pages? How often should your newsletter circulate and does your website cover all the core content or is some missing? You can keep track of all this with an editorial plan. Here you’ll establish what is going to be published and how frequently. You’ve probably got quite a few creative ideas about your content marketing strategy flying around by now. Great work!
Next step: Resource planning.
Who does the work? The question here is whether you have enough staff inhouse to competently complete the work, or whether it makes sense to outsource the editorial content. There are agencies like greatcontent who specialise in (multilingual) content creation. Once the search engine optimised content is finally published, it still has to find its way to the target group. That is where the content distribution strategy comes into play.
Remember the mnemonic PESO
Online banners, campaigns on Google Ads, sponsored social media posts or native advertising via Outbrain
Publication of specialist articles in relevant magazines or product reviews by users
Social media channels
Own website, blog posts, exclusive newsletter
How do you stay in control of your content strategy and keep it optimised?
Once the content is online and communicated, evaluation closes the loop. After all, you want to achieve a specific goal with your content marketing strategy. Continuous control is required to keep an eye on the results. You should check the key performance indicators (KPI) regularly. Selected data are the basis for an objective assessment of performance. These include quantitative factors such as access rates or likes as well as qualitative indicators. Feedback, comments, specialist articles or surveys can also be evaluated for this purpose. In this way you can find out which content the target group likes, where important questions remain unanswered or which content is unnecessary. The numbers should always be analysed with your goal in mind, and the content marketing strategy should be adjusted accordingly.
Why do you need to plan digital content?
Good content arouses interest, creates trust and motivates people to buy or conclude a contract. The content strategy accompanies the entire consumer journey: From the first click on an SEO text to the conversion. Readers who are engaged with good content won’t jump ship - which is noticeable both in the search engine ranking and in your sales figures.
What are the different types of digital content within content strategy?
Digital content comes in many shapes and sizes - and new ones are always emerging. It makes sense to choose a framework for your content marketing strategy in which you sort your digital content according to type and function. This is called content mapping. The consumer journey is a classic content mapping model.
The ideal consumer journey in an e-shop:
Your customer has a question or a problem. The search for an answer begins. Because you have a strong content strategy, your blog is in first position. Touchpoint number one.
Wow, your posts are really good. The user believes you can help them. They sign up for the newsletter. They browse the e-shop before buying.
Shortly after the customer has left the e-shop, your newsletter ends up in their inbox. There they find more specific information and reports from other customers (testimonials).
Customer buys.
The e-shop is recommended to friends. The content marketing strategy works.
Your content strategy should have touchpoints for all five stages of the customer journey. So you can accompany the customer from the beginning (awareness) to the end (loyalty). So far so good. Now of course the question arises, how do you effectively create content that engages your target group? The Hero-Hub-Hygiene model exists for just this. (LINK)
Imagine a pyramid. The foundation is the hygiene content. That covers everything that is fundamentally important. For example: the "About Us" page, FAQ lists or product descriptions. In the first stages, you put a lot of working into it, but once up and running it only needs updating when there are changes to the content marketing strategy.
- Hygiene content: This is content that is relevant over the long term, such as FAQ lists and how-to guides. This content is also known as evergreen content. It only changes if you drastically change your content marketing strategy.
- Hero and Hub Content: When creating hero and hub content for the first time, you should definitely hire professional writers. They produce excellent content perfectly tailored to the briefing. When it comes to localisation, you can rely on the support of neural machine translations, i.e. human hybrid teams. Artificial intelligence, AI, ensures rapid translation into all required languages and post-editors are responsible for correcting any minor errors.
Bringing the hero hub hygiene model and consumer journey together results in a strong content strategy.
How does smart combination work in content marketing?
First, you need to decide the type of content needed for your content strategy. Should a completely new text be created or would a version in another language suffice?
How is digital content cleverly created?
Having your own teams available for content production is a real luxury. But in-house production tends to be expensive and slow. It uses up staff resources and can create some level of inflexibility. If texts on the desired topic are already available, it’s easy and cheap to modify and reformat them. However, there is a risk of creating duplicate content and publishing content that is irrelevant for your content marketing strategy. A third option is to hand over the creation and translation of texts to freelancers or agencies. Companies use existing resources and established work processes. And if you are still looking for the right agency for your content strategy, we would know someone ;-) We have been creating and translating content for numerous industries for ten years. greatcontent employs a team of linguists with the best technical infrastructure and combines content production with artificial intelligence. So you benefit from the best of both worlds! Some companies also use mixed forms and have their own team of authors work with greatcontent.
Man or machine? Who creates the text?
That always depends on the individual project. With large quantities and localisation, we usually rely on concentrated strength and human-hybrid teams.
- Copywriting: We develop suitable briefings and layouts for your content and have them written by professional linguists.
- Human hybrid: With the support of artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms, we automatically create texts and translations that are then edited by native-speaking post-editors.
- Translation: greatcontent works with certified translators and also relies on the support of AI here
Editing and proofreading for the right response when reading
To coordinate and, where necessary, adapt the produced texts to the match the brief.
The linguistic correction and optimisation of computer-translated texts by post-editors ensures high standards and lowers the costs by avoiding implementing multilingual content strategies.
This method is also part of the post-processing. The tools use learned phrases and expressions to ensure consistent texts.
Localisation goes far beyond simple translation. If you would like to roll out a product or a brand in a new market as part of the content strategy, the design, colours and possibly the name of the product must also be adapted. In general, the cultural preferences in the country must be addressed. In terms of text, we adapt jokes to suit the native language and, if necessary, select new images.
According to the context, greatcontent translates the content of texts as precisely as possible for different target markets.
On the basis of the briefing, our native-speaker authors create unique texts from scratch, perfectly tailored to the respective target market.
Is this also available as an all-round carefree package?
Of course it is! Under the Managed Service we completely take on the project management for you, from the casting of the linguists to the creation of content and the management of the translations, to quality assurance. And if you want, we can import everything directly into your system via an interface at the end of production. We have been working with multilingual industry-specific texts for over ten years. Over 30,000 linguists writing in over 30 languages and a constantly updated IT structure make this possible.
Tell us about your content strategy and the texts you want!
We have been creating multilingual specific texts for content strategies in numerous industries for ten years. Over 30,000 linguists work with us, some with the support of machine tools, and guarantee fast localisation in over 30 languages.
