We’re excited to share our Digital Strategy Daily Tactics with you. This plan is specifically designed for business owners and sales teams looking to build an engaged community, convert their social interactions into leads, expand their business through a proven Digital Strategy, and grow and scale their enterprise.
Knowing when, where, why and how you post content to each of your social accounts and website is crucial to your brand’s success. But, Customer Education is just as important as promotion. If you want to make an impact, your content needs to serve a purpose beyond driving traffic to your site.
It shouldn’t be rocket science. You know what problems your product or service solves and how you plan to help your Dream Customers with your solution — you just need a place to gather your thoughts, record your progress, and share what works.
BrandYou.Website’s Digital Strategy Daily Tactics can guide your business with strategies and tactics to educate, inspire, and persuade your buyers — and we’re here today to guide you to expanding your Digital Strategy. So continue reading to discover how to start turning your website and social media into top-performing Digital Strategy.
Content Calendars, Social Media, and Email Alignment
Digital Strategy Daily Tactics is a content calendar and the lynchpin to successful execution of your Digital Strategy. Whether you're a veteran business owner or just beginning, it will serve as a useful tool to organize your efforts and streamline the process of producing and delivering your content to your audience.
A good Content Calendar is an organized document that shows what you need to publish when and where. It also keeps track of what stage each piece of content is in (ideation, outline, writing), who's responsible for each piece, and how it fits into your overall Digital Strategy.
For most businesses, however, a Content Calendar goes beyond the basics. It's a way of organizing your thoughts around what you want to say to your Dream Customers, when you want to say it and how often.
A Content Calendar will help keep your team on the same page, ensure that your content is consistent, and ultimately improve your customer conversion rates. Your content calendar is the beating heart of your Digital Strategy, the one place where you can see all of your social media, email, and blog content in one centralized place.
1. The Digital Strategy Daily Tactics Template
So, how do you use a Content Calendar to plan all your website publishing, social media and email marketing?
Here is a free, easy-to-use template: make a copy and start using it now.
No matter which content calendar you decide to use, having one will help ensure you are not just creating content, but are creating content that is aligned with your overall Digital Strategy.
2. Set a Consistent Publishing Schedule
Before you put the Content Calendar to work it’s important to first know how often you should be posting a week to achieve your goals. Most website blogs and social media accounts aim to post at least three times per week. There are exceptions, of course, but a minimum of two pieces of content is a good baseline to start with.
Understanding when and how often to publish your blog content or make social media posts is critical in the success of your Digital Strategy. Your audience is online and active on specific days and at certain times of day. Make sure you’re posting when they're most likely to see it.
Setting a schedule and sticking to it will allow you to anticipate traffic and increase your audience engagement. You’ll also have plenty of time to gather images, do research, author communication, SEO strategy, and plan out your topics.
PRO TIP: Try scheduling out your content at least one month in advance. This is not to say you can't schedule content further in advance or less in advance, but it's important to have a framework like the Digital Strategy Daily Tactics so that you're not scrambling to figure out what to publish next when the due date rolls around.
To find out how often you should post on your blog, think about your ideal schedule and then look at the statistics for each of your posts over the last months. Find out which days and times of day tend to perform the best and adjust according to those guidelines.
3. Know Your Content Strategy Goal
Any content you create should be used to educate prospective buyers. Everything you publish, whether it's a blog post, social media, infographics or video, should teach your audience something new about your business and the value of your product or service.
It's not enough to simply promote your company or product; if you want to earn a return on your Content Strategy investment, you need to show prospective buyers why they need you. To do this, you need to prioritize content creation around The Big 5.
The Big 5 are the topics that every customer asks about the products or services that you provide and your competitors. If a buyer is searching online for a product or service that you offer before they buy, and they find content where they can get answers about what they need on your website, then they will more than likely convert into a customer.
The Big 5 include:
Pricing and costs: How much does your solution cost? (Factors, considerations, what defines value, etc.)
Problems: The negatives about, or issues with, your solution that buyers ask about.
Versus and comparisons: How your product or solution compares to similar products or solutions.
Reviews: Honest and unbiased opinions and observations about your product, solution, etc.
Best-of articles: What the best solutions available are.
A customer's journey from the time they are aware of your product or service until the time you get a payment or sale is like an ocean wave. At the top of the wave, is where Content Strategy plays a critical role, buyers are just getting to know you.
Toward the bottom of the wave, when buyers are ready to commit to a purchase but still have questions, your content can influence their decision making—and help close that sale.
The best strategy for generating content ideas is to begin at the bottom of the sales funnel and work your way up even though lots of businesses approach this in reverse.
With this approach your content can influence serious buyers first, which generates a quicker return on investment. There'll be less time spent creating content that doesn't deliver value. And you'll grow more confident that your Digital Strategy aligns with what your audience wants at those specific points in the buying cycle.
4. What is Keyword Research?
The goal of Keyword Research is to understand how the marketplace is looking for information and answers to their questions on a particular subject.
Keyword research is the first step toward creating an effective Content Strategy. Keyword research will show you the most searched-for terms used by your Dream Customers in relation to your business and industry, as well as related keywords that you might not have thought about.
It's a lot easier than you might think to find out what people are searching for online. Keyword research takes your product, service or business and helps you understand what people are searching for online. The ultimate goal is to develop content that can be optimized for search engines and ultimately ranked at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword research can be used to develop content ideas, optimize existing content and help you understand what is working and what needs to change in your current strategy.
Here are some of the best online Keyword resources available today:
5. Using The Digital Strategy Daily Tactics to Do More
A well-thought out Content Calendar is essential for any business. Internal to your organization there needs to be a daily visualization of what the calendar looks like, what it's supposed to do for your business and how it can make it work best for the organization's needs.
Based on Marcus Sheridan’s They Ask, You Answer, BrandYou.Website’s Content Calendar cover's the following areas:
Prioritization keyword for the content piece
Craft a URL for final publication (you want that tailored to your keyword)
Decide on a featured snippet
If so, what should be in that featured snippet
What is the call-to-action, plan in advance, instead of having the content ownership pick it
Content Manager assigns content ownership
Set final draft dates: 1st Draft Due Date? Final Draft Due Date?
Set Publication Date
Create for you team personalized guidance videos for each piece of content. This video will guide content owners where begin rather starting completely from scratch each time
Include key points that should be included, extra direction to the content owner or extra you want to add about the topic
With a solid understanding of the core components of your Digital Strategy Daily Tactics, you'll be better equipped to fill out your strategic calendar so that it becomes more than just a list of ideas and topics.
6. Assign Content Ownership
Now it's time to get your organization moving in the right direction. In order to get buy-in from your team you need to sell the vision of your Digital Strategy Daily Tactics editorial process. Your Content Strategy is not just about the content, it is about how the content needs to be delivered in order for it to be successful.
Regardless of who is responsible for choosing the topics, it's important that everyone is brought-into the editorial process. That means you should spend time talking about the kind of information that your organization wants to provide to its customers and prospects.
You should also ask for input about how your Dream Customers want the information delivered:
Through Social Media?
Through an eBook?
A webinar?
A blog post article?
A podcast?
As the business leader you are the shepherd of the organization's Content Strategy, you are responsible for getting buy-in from your employees, team members or other partners. Providing context to the purpose of each piece of content and why it matters will help them understand the importance of its creation.
Information is king. We need to be able to inform our customers of new products, promotions and more without delay. The faster we can create this content, the faster we can get it out to customers and make sales. A lot of this has to do with having a dedicated team that understands their roles and what is expected from them.
Everyone on your team needs to be on the same page, and that means the same document. By assigning content to specific team members, you'll be able to plan better who will be involved in each stage of the creation process.
7. Assign Due Dates and Final Deadlines
When you have your entire Digital Strategy Daily Tactics set up, you can start to assign deadlines to each piece of content. Create the schedule in a way that makes sense for your business and includes all of the articles you plan to publish for a designated period of time.
Scheduling editorial deadlines for your content posts is an important part of content planning. Without a timeline, it's difficult to determine when content should be created and published, how early you can start promoting it, or what the optimal time is to schedule a content delivery.
Deadlines help everyone stay organized and accountable. Your entire team will know when a particular piece of content is due to be finished and published, which in turn helps them budget their time better because they'll know ahead of time when they need to focus on creating content.
When you provide a concrete deadline for your content, it forces you to think about the best time to publish them, which is usually determined by your goals, objectives and overall Digital Strategy.
8. Who Tracks Progress and Keeps Your Digital Strategy Daily Tactics Up-To-Date?
Content needs to be published on time and on schedule. If it's not, that means your sales, marketing, and social media channels aren't getting the attention to detail they need to ensure success for your organization.
Tasks like updating your website, adding campaign banners, or publishing social media content should be tracked in a Content Calendar so you can monitor progress and see when updates are going to be published.
The best way to make sure things stay on track is to assign ownership of all your content to one person. Maybe it's you, or maybe it's someone else on your team — but someone has to own your organization’s Content Calendar.
That person is typically called a "Content Manager." This person is responsible for ensuring that every piece of marketing copy and content goes through a formal approval process before it goes live on your website or social media accounts.
The Content Manager is the driving force behind your company’s social media and web content. They are in charge of making sure everything your audience sees is clear, concise, and on-brand.
Put the Digital Strategy Tactical Plan into Action
Once you have your Digital Strategy Daily Tactics in place, you’ll know exactly where all of your content will fall for the week, month, quarter and year.
Now that you know how to avoid content creation chaos and plan out a successful strategy that keeps your potential customers coming back again and again it’s time to get started implementing the plan that works for you and your organization. The Digital Strategy Daily Tactics will make it easier for your organization to create the content that matters most to your Dream Customers.
Need Help?
Our team would love to provide feedback on your online strategy! Schedule a strategy session with Brand You to see how we can help you bring your Digital Strategy to life in your campaign.
