Digital content

In today's digital age, online content is one of the primary ways to differentiate your brand from competitors. Different industries use digital content to create meaningful experiences deployed across different channels using a variety of formats. 

What is digital content?

Digital content refers to any type of media that an organization uses to engage with visitors, customers, or users of their website or applications, distributed by online delivery systems. 

With more organizations now depending on their online presence to attract and retain customers, digital content has become a vital resource in digital marketing. The term encompasses every type of publishable media from streaming video, downloadable guides, images, live broadcasts, or a piece of gated information. The primary intention of digital media and content is to generate new leads and source additional information about a potential customer with the aim of converting them in the future. Typically, these types of media or assets are managed using a digital asset manager (DAM). 

How digital content works

Each piece of digital content has an intended audience that expects a certain delivery method from the producers. Content marketing has become one of the key tools in all promotional materials but also serves other needs that customers want satisfied. 

When designing digital content, the aim may be to:

  • Educate -- Tutorials and "How To" guides enable users or customers to help themselves while using your site or application and build some brand awareness in the meantime.
  • Entertain -- Media that creates a strong emotional response in visitors by being engaging enough so that it prompts them to share it with other people. 
  • Persuade -- Any content designed to create an emotional response and entice customers or visitors to take the next step, including something as simple as a call to action (CTA). 
  • Convert -- Providing users with clear statements to make decisions that help them convert from previous usages (free subscriptions) to another (usually profitable) offer available from the company. 

Marketers and customer experience (CX) designers use different digital content formats to achieve specific goals during every customer journey. Digital content creation ultimately aims to serve the company's goals and grow revenues, increase the consumer base, or attract new leads using a variety of digital channels and delivery methods. 

Benefits of digital content

Digital content is a cost-effective and efficient method for brands to engage with their customers and users. Historically, delivery systems include television advertisements or print media to get a specific digital marketing message across to potential customers. 

Today, digital content spans all facets of a person or organization's online experience and you can optimize delivery using a content management system (CMS). The three main benefits of digital content are:

  • It's a cost-effective way for brands to deliver specific content using multiple digital channels to evoke responses from customers as and when required. 
  • Can help spark different social interactions, create organic engagement, and build meaningful connections between the brand and its customers to create lasting business relationships. 
  • Allows organizations to design different experiences for individual visitors or users and leverage these approaches to grow revenues or expand the consumer base of the company. 
  • Using digital media, you can reinforce a narrative or elicit a conversation from customers and help the brand become part of everyday conversations on different digital platforms. 

CMS tools help you to create content, store the files, execute workflows during the design stages, and schedule the publication (or delivery) across different digital touchpoints. 

Digital content best practices

Your digital content can could come in any kind of format. You can choose to write informative blogs, create engaging visual experiences, or use social media platforms to engage with your audience. Each option available to you can help increase your conversions, foster engagement with your customers or audience, and educate visitors about your product or industry. 

To achieve these goals, your digital content should:

  • Be considerate of the audience and experience you are designing the content for and ensure it serves your intended purpose.
  • Use optimized language in the content to enable organic discovery using techniques like search engine optimization (SEO) and engagement on social media platforms. 
  • Be based on experimentation and multivariate testing to ensure it creates a meaningful response in your audience. 
  • Deliver valuable experiences that users want to share with other potential customers, creating organic discovery of your brand and its associated services. 
  • Store content in a central location like a digital asset manager (DAM), to make it as easy as possible for the team to author, iterate and keep track of digital assets.

Content creators have the option to build different types of digital content like engaging advertisements, blogging long-form articles, design meaningful infographics, record podcasts, and create interactive experiences on social media like LinkedIn. Using experimentation and testing will help identify which strategy is best for you and your brand based on analytics. 

Digital content process and framework

Succeeding in the promotion of your brand using digital content marketing requires an effective strategy, adequate tools, and innovative ideas. You can establish a framework that ensures you achieve your goals and continuously optimize your content design and delivery processes. 

Considering every digital touchpoint in each user's journey is the best way to optimize your digital content strategy. When building a framework, follow these steps. 

1. Plan

Gather information from your existing target audience, customers, or visitors and research how they experience your content. Identify target demographics, study your key competitors, review past digital content performances, and define the future goals you'd like to achieve for your brand. 

2. Research

Once you know what your customers engage with, you can research different topics and identify which digital content formats will suit your brand. Identify solution-centric keywords, create content that beats your competitors, and build a strategy intended to maintain the effort until you realize the ROI required. 

3. Publish

Finally, you'll want to deliver your content as and when required to optimize the effects and foster real engagement. Use all available digital channels to create your content (with a CMS) and find a DXP (digital experience platform) that optimizes the delivery of your digital content across all available channels, ensuring a unified experience to customers. 

Optimizing your digital content delivery with Optimizely's DXP

A DXP that provides you with experimentation, continuous optimization, and integrated delivery capabilities across all digital platforms will help take your strategies to the next level. Optimizely (formely Episerver) provides you with all the tools required to ensure you can deliver digital content that creates meaningful experiences and optimizes the entire digital journey for every customer. 

Optimization-as-a-Service is the next step in digital content curation, staging, and delivery in our online and connected world. Optimizely provides you with all tools needed to deliver your content, test different iterations of media, and create unified experiences across all digital channels.

To find out how Optimizely can help improve your digital content strategies and delivery processes. Check out Optimizely's DXP