What Is Digital Content?
Digital content is a medium for communicating with your target audience to build a loyal customer base.
It takes many forms, including:
- E-books, blogs, articles, and newsletters
- Podcasts, music, and audiobooks
- Videos, movies, TV shows, and live streams
- Games, apps, and software
- Social media posts, comments, and messages
- Websites, landing pages, and ads
Why Is Digital Content Creation Important?
Content marketing is a powerful way to build relationships with potential customers before they even decide to buy. You’ll be top of mind when they’re ready to make a purchase.
When you create helpful content consistently, your audience will see you as a reliable source of information.
Once they trust you as an expert, convincing them to buy your product or service becomes easier. Decreasing your sales cycle and associated costs.
For example, art supplies company Tombow built an extensive library of art technique tutorials by influencer artists.
Budding artists look to Tombow for developmental art content. Return visits signal brand trust and build positive associations.
When the artist is ready to buy new supplies, Tombow comes to mind. Without any overt sales tactics, Tomboy has created a loyal customer.
The Digital Content Creation Process
The digital content creation process has three stages: research and planning, content creation, performance tracking.
1. Research and Plan Your Topics
The first step of content creation is identifying who you want to target with your content and what topics they’re searching for. So you can create content that helps and resonates with them.
Identify Your Audience
Audience research helps you understand your user, so you can create content that meets their wants and needs.
Consider things like age, gender, location and profession. As well as deeper insights like buying habits and leisure activities.
Audience research can come from surveys or focus groups. Or by identifying and analyzing your competitors’ digital audiences.
Semrush’s Market Explorer makes this process easy.
Toggle to “Find Competitors,” select your location, enter your domain. Click “Research a Market.”
Toggle to “Audience” for details about your competitor’s target audience, including their top social media platforms and most-visited websites.
The better you know your audience, the more targeted your content will be. Which saves time and money. And shortens your sales cycle.
Generate Relevant Ideas
Armed with audience research, identify and research relevant content topics.
Some of these will come naturally. For example, if you own a natural pet food brand with a budget-conscious audience, relevant topics could include “benefits of natural dog food” or “how much does natural dog food cost.”
The Topic Research tool simplifies the idea-generation process.
Simply enter a subject area to see sample headlines, questions, and related searches.
Create a list of the ones that make sense for your brand, then move onto keyword research. To capture a larger potential audience.
Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the relevant words and phrases people type into search engines. So you can create content for those keywords that reach more potential customers.
Put simply, keyword research ensures that your business-relevant topics are also ones people search for.
The Keyword Magic Tool can quickly identify keywords to target.
Start with a broad search term, like “cat toys,” and click “Search.”
The tool provides a comprehensive list of keyword ideas related to your search term. Along with key information like search volume (average number of monthly searches) and KD % (difficulty rating).
For more targeted results, eliminate irrelevant subtopics. Or filter your results by “Questions” for keyword phrases to answer in your content.
Easily compile your list of target keywords by clicking the plus sign to the left. Manage and track your keyword lists with the Keyword Strategy Builder.
2. Create High-Quality Content in Multiple Mediums
Search engines prioritize helpful content that meets search intent. Which means your content must address the reason for the user’s initial search.
Helpful content also creates loyal customers.
Creating helpful content starts with understanding the best format for your given topic.
For example, “how-to” content could be well-suited for video. Whereas a voice-over video can quickly break down research data for a reader to skim.
Check the search engine results pages (SERPs) to see what type of content typically performs well for your keyword.
Let’s review best practices for the most popular digital content types.
Blog Posts
High-quality blog posts allow you to cover a topic in detail, which builds your authority and reader trust.
Plus, they can generate significant site traffic. Like this bakery that used blogging to grow its organic traffic by 214%.
To write a good SEO blog post:
- Optimize for your target keyword: Include your keyword in the page title, main heading (H1), and naturally throughout the post
- Use a clear heading structure: Subheadings break up blocks of text for search engines and users to better understand and skim.
- Provide user-friendly, helpful content: Use short, simple sentences free of jargon or cultural idioms
Further reading: How to Write an SEO Blog Post: 11 Key Tips
Gated Content
Gated content is a lead generation strategy in which content is accessible to users only after providing contact information, like an email address.
Which authorizes the business to send additional marketing emails.
The user gets useful content. The business gets a marketing lead.
You can gate any content, but long-form, higher-value content performs best. Because users have a greater incentive to hand over their contact information.
Gated content is often:
- White papers
- Ebooks
- Templates
- Webinars
- Research reports
The landing page that houses your gated content should be keyword optimized for search engines. And have concise, compelling copy to encourage people to sign up. As well as a clear call to action.
Like this example from Shopify, encouraging people to sign up for a free business plan template:
Graphics
Graphics can supplement written content or serve as a standalone content type. In both cases, they offer an engaging way to reach users with multiple learning styles.
Plus, blog posts with at least one image get twice as much traffic as text-only posts.
To maximize your efforts, repurpose visual content across platforms.
For example, add an infographic to a blog post to break down complex information. Then share the visual on social media to attract traffic and links.
Free tools like Canva, ImageOptim, GIMP image editor, and Pexels can help you visually enhance content and create new content types.
Videos
Video content continues to gain popularity. Just look at shortform video app TikTok’s download count. And YouTube remains the second-most popular social media platform.
Most modern businesses invest in both short- and long-form video content. Because one can be repurposed from the other. And allows you to reach a wider audience.
YouTube is free to start, and is a solid place to feature educational content related to your products, services, or industry.
Semrush, for example, shares content about SEO and marketing topics, like:
- SEO predictions
- Marketing career development
- Platform-specific SEO strategies
Repurpose longer YouTube videos into shorter videos and optimized for TikTok, Instagram or Youtube Shorts. Or create your own take on social media trends (like fan-favorite TikTok account Duolingo).
Not sure where to start? Here are a few ways to generate video content ideas:
- Repurposed blog posts
- How-to videos or tutorials
- Product demos
- Educational content about your industry
Podcasts
Podcasts allow for a personal connection with your audience. And can have massive reach. Sixty-two percent of U.S. consumers listen to podcasts, with numbers growing year over year.
The best-performing podcasts address relevant problems your audience is facing. And offers a conversational and approachable way to solve for them.
Not sure where to start?
- Interview influencers within your niche
- Give your take on industry trends (another example of thought leadership)
- Compile listener stories and read them on-air
No matter the show style you choose, aim for a consistent show schedule. To build trust.
3. Measure Content Performance
Measuring content performance informs your ongoing content strategy by telling you what’s working and what isn’t.
The performance metrics depend on the content type, your business goals, and which part of the marketing funnel you’re targeting.
For example, look at time on page and engagement metrics for content higher in the funnel. Clicks and conversions become more important for content near the bottom of the funnel.
Measure the performance of your website content in Google Analytics.
To see important metrics like:
- How many people visited the page
- How long they spent on it
- Whether they interacted with any buttons or forms while on the page
In Semrush, connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to view your own data alongside our estimated competitor data.
With a business account, access analytics from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
To see:
- Which content got the most views
- Which content got the most interaction in the form of likes, comments, saves, and shares
- Which content didn’t perform well
- The section of a video or blog post where the user clicked away
Analyzing the data and spotting patterns helps you refine your existing content. And inform your future digital content strategy and production.
Start Creating Digital Content
Ready to create your own digital content to further your business goals? Semrush’s content marketing suite has a range of tools to help you create high-quality, targeted content. From topic research to creating SEO content templates and AI SEO writing assistance.
Start with a free trial today.