Musings from GroupM: The Key to a Successful Digital Content Strategy - Heather Frahm - MediaBizBloggers

I am always amazed when I ask marketers to define their digital content strategy and I get blank stares. What about you? Does your Web site content align to your brand strategy? Is the information tailored to your target market segments? Does it clearly communicate your product or service's key point of difference? Are you placing your content where your audience is looking for it (aside from on your Web site)? Most importantly, does the content provide the information that your target consumers are looking for and will it help drive business objectives?

You're one of the proud few if you answered yes to all of the above questions. If you answered no to even one of those questions you could be missing a great opportunity.

As digital marketing budgets continue to increase, so does the importance of having a good content strategy, execution and success metrics. Content strategy is a layer of brand strategy that provides insight into topics and areas of interest that a brand should leverage in communication channels and throughout its marketing mix.

Successful brands communicate their points of difference within the context of consumer needs and interest areas to drive engagement, trial, and adoption. Content strategy helps them to do that.

There are three major elements to a good content strategy.

1. A prioritized list of content categories
These are the content categories that will help drive your business and help you to achieve your marketing objectives. You always want to have strong content around your brand and your products, but often that's not enough. You need to think outside of the box to identify content areas that will help place your product in the context of a solution to meet your consumer's needs. Create a brand that consumers want to talk about, and they keep talking about it. As the CMO of Patagonia stated, create and enable contagious content.

2. Content placement recommendations
A good content strategy goes well beyond your Web site. Once you identify the relevant content that consumers want, it's naturally a good idea to put that content on your Web site, but it's also critically important to syndicate that content to other Web sites where your target audience might find it. It's not unusual to see more than 50 percent of search traffic for product related terms going to general information and review sites, such as consumersearch.com, Yahoo Answers, ehow.com, etc. Consumers are looking for unbiased product reviews and product comparisons on these sites. You can't expect to change consumer behavior just by building out content on your Web site. Fish where the fish are!

3. Content format
Once you have identified the content that will help drive your business and where to place it, it's time to think about format. Basic text and static images are good in some cases, but sometimes the situation demands a multimedia format. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a video may trump it.

No matter what your situation, the key to a successful content strategy is to make sure it's aligned to your brand strategy. Otherwise you're risking confusing consumers as well as missing the opportunity to drive your business and marketing objectives home.

Heather Frahm is President and Managing Partner of Catalyst Online, a GroupM company. She can be reached at heather.frahm@catalystsearchmarketing.com.

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