Why 'content is king' in digital marketing strategy

Imagine you've happily prepared a healthy meal for an important guest who is supposed to support your business, only for your food to be rejected after tasting because though it looks good the food is tasteless. That's how a digital marketing strategy looks like to a potential client when it's devoid of good content.

Like finding the right amount of seasoning to make a food tasty, preparing a content marketing strategy can be very tricky. Too much or too little content can kill a marketing strategy plan, just the right amount of well researched and structured content for any brand can stand the test of time.

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The power which content wields has duly been acknowledged by digital marketing strategists, so much that it has been categorized into a discipline of its own. While some practitioners believe it plays a huge role in building of proper information for a brand, others believe content plays a huge role on a campaign by campaign basis.

Understanding the phrase 'content is king' in digital marketing means truly knowing the kind of content your brand is creating, who it's being created for and for what purpose it's being created. There's also a need to understand the brand and consumer context, matching these to the best route to reach your customers.

This in turn will shape the kind of communication that is good enough to make people love and share your content.

But what exactly is content marketing?

The term is quite broad but it aims at matching valuable content (either information or entertainment) to your customers’ needs at any stage they are in the customer decision journey (CDJ).

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It focuses on engaging content, which means TV marketers must think more like publishers than advertisers of a product.

All these have been made possible by the Internet which has helped tremendously in connecting directly customers and brands through a number of accessible online platforms.

According to recent definition by the Content Marketing Institute, "it is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action (Content Marketing Institute, 2013).

This simply covers everything on both the manner which you want your content to be shared to the spaces you share your content, either a website, ad campaigns and competitions, blog posts or social media platforms.

A world renowned content strategy consultant Kristina Halvorson created a model which clearly explains the different approaches to content marketing strategy.

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The model divides content strategy into two: The content and people component.

The content component is further divided into substance and structure. Several questions which should be asked by brands include:

Substance: Who are we trying to reach and why?

Structure: Where is your content? How is it organized? How do people find your content?

Under people component there is the workflow and governance, questions which should be asked include:

Workflow: How does content happen?

Governance: Politics, guidelines and standards involved (Halvorson, 2010).

Content has one objective - "driving profitable customer action". This only happens when content marketing is looked at in terms of staff, tools, processes and outcomes. In all content should be created with a strategic goal in mind.

At RDM, we provide clients the right amount of well researched and structured content not only to target the right audience but ensuring communication is effective enough to keep your competitors away from your customers.

Article written by Oge Okonkwo

This is a feature by RDM