Digital Content: Importance, Types, and How to Use it to Boost Your ROI

Today, the world is moving around digital content. Every day a large number of populations are shifting their preference from traditional forms of media consumption to digital media. 

This phenomenon creates opportunities for brands to build their presence online and stand out in the overall field of competition. A brand can create content to satisfy the audience’s curiosity and entertainment needs while fulfilling its digital marketing purposes.  

Go through the blog subhead by subhead to get a comprehensive idea about digital content and how to use it to generate maximum ROI.     

Table of Contents

• Why is Digital Content Creation So Important for a Business? 
• What are the Types of Digital Content that You Can and Should Use?
• How to Create Digital Content Properly?
• How to Create a Digital Content Strategy?
• Frequently Asked Questions 

Why is Digital Content Creation So Important for a Business?

What is digital content for a business?

In short, it helps businesses reach and interact with target audiences and convert them into long-term customers; a lot faster and more efficient than traditional marketing.  

Nowadays, an increasing number of people expect quality content from the business they support. So, a business that wants to up its digital marketing game, should invest in digital content or digital content creation. 

Now, let us tell you straight what goals that would help you achieve. 

1. Brand Awareness

Brand awareness has several levels. It can be a simple encounter with the brand’s product and/or services, or it can be having a thorough knowledge of the brand and nurturing a special value for the brand name.

As a new brand, acquiring new customers by increasing visibility on the digital platform is the starting point. As consumers become more aware of the brand they will search more about it on Google. 

So, long story short, it is a crucial first step to letting your audiences know what you are about. And there is nothing like digital content that can help you with that. As you continue to read through this blog, you will know what types of digital content you should create and how.  

2. Lead Generation

For any B2B business lead generation is a key factor for growth. A thorough lead generation strategy includes a myriad of methods to get the job done. 

For example, you can prioritise blogging to generate leads. Success is guaranteed when you have an effective strategy to write blogs. 

Or, you can keep email marketing as your predominant strategy. Here, along with the necessary tools, keeping the creativity of your emails up is a must to grab the attention of prospective clients and convert those leads. 

Apart from these two, you should also use strategies like web page optimisation, sales engagement outreach, Google ads, social media marketing, content marketing, cold outreach, etc. to cover all ground.    

3. Conversion Rate

If one follows successful companies and the ones who are striving to make a name for themselves, each of them publishes new content very frequently. They may have separate goals in mind, but to act properly they need to master digital content creation.

With each new content, a successful brand gets more and more visitors which ultimately drives their overall business growth. Whereas, a new business gets new customers through powerful digital content equipped with compelling CTAs. 

With quality content and consistency, you can surely raise your conversion rate. Furthermore, optimising the conversion rate is one of the best ways to establish a loyal customer base.  

4. Customer Loyalty 

How? 

The simple answer is a customer stays most engaged with a brand immediately after purchase. If you are unable to meet the needs of that customer, you fail to convert that first sale into a long-term customer relationship. 

So, to ensure the long-term success of the business you have to keep conversion rate optimisation (CRO) in mind. 

Alongside that, a business can invest time and energy into simple and effective content optimisation to support internal modifications.   

Now, with the best business practices you will start to build a gradually increasing customer base.  

What are the Types of Digital Content that You Can and Should Use?

As we got to know that a lot goes into fulfilling a business’ primary goals, it would be helpful to know the types of digital content that work the best. 

If you run a Google search “types of digital content” you will find articles citing more than 100 types of them that include memes, chrome extensions, software, book summaries, and so on. However, only a handful is relevant for a business. 

So, here we list the most ROI-generating content types that the industry uses: 

1. Blogging

Blogs are a great idea for businesses to reach the target audience and make them life-long customers. Generally, a group of professional content writers who have a deep knowledge of the business and their services create blogs. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits of blogging for business: 

• It helps drive traffic to your website. 
• It plays a significant role in converting traffic into leads. 
• Blogs help a business with link building. 
• It keeps you connected to the market at all times. 
• Blogs can express your genuine grasp of a subject and establish authority.  
• It distinguishes a business from its competitors. 

So, considering investing in website blogs would be a smart move guaranteed to bring concrete results.   

2. Videos  

Marketers are using video content more rapidly than ever, which is evident from the current rise of Reels, Livestreams, and Webinars across various digital platforms including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and so on. 

Video marketing has become a new strategy for businesses because: 

• Videos boost conversion at a rapid rate. 
• Google loves video content. 
• Mobile users like to watch videos. 
• The format is easy to explain your product and services. 
• The video format is super easy to consume.   
• This format provides considerable ROI. 

A business should think about how to use video content for its marketing purposes, not only because everyone is doing it, but to use its versatility. 

3. Infographics 

It is a fact that we humans are visual learners. As images appeal to us better than written or spoken words, businesses use them to the best of their abilities. They use infographics to share information in a concise way that is aesthetically pleasing. 

Let’s look at how infographics help a business: 

• Infographics increase your content’s exposure. 
• They improve decision-making by speeding up information processing. 
• They increase information shareability by leaps and bounds. 
• Infographics help build high-quality backlinks  
• They make it easy to track results. 
• They directly contribute to improving your ROI. 

An extensive strategy for content marketing should always incorporate the use of infographics as it contributes to so many levels in useful ways.

4. Podcasts 

The emergence of podcasts is recent and it has caught the market like wildfire (with 464.7 million listeners worldwide). It is now one of the most efficacious ways to reach your target audience, build a brand, and so on.  

So, how does a podcast make businesses reach their goals? 

• The barrier of entry is low, and it is very easy to make. 
• It helps businesses reach audiences who are actively seeking out content. 
• Podcasts can help you establish yourself as an authority in the industry. 
• In the industry, you can establish yourself as a thought leader through your podcast. 
• Podcasts are high-impact marketing tools that have minimum costs attached. 
• It provides an opportunity to collaborate and network with various businesses and entrepreneurs. 

You only need to have a topic that you are passionate about, and some basic equipment; and you are ready to share your knowledge with the world.  

5. Original Research

Legacy, novelty, and value are original research domains that others can hardly build up to. If a business wants to cater to the audience’s curiosity to learn new things or provide new evidence to help them make a better decision, this is the way. 

Original research would be beneficial for a business as: 

• People tend to be fascinated by new information or insight. 
• This unique offering will establish you as a thought leader in the industry. 
• You will be able to provide data that will have a quantifiable value for a reader.
• Empirical data is comparatively more trustworthy than other sources of information. 
• Depending on the nature of the research, the value can last a long time. 
• It will continue to make the readers engage with the content. 

To see long-term benefits with original research, you need to preserve the value and novelty of it. If you do that, you would be able to cut costs and still reap excellent rewards.  

How to Create Digital Content Properly?

If we boil it down to the basics, any type of digital content production process has three phases: 

1. Research and Planning

Research and planning is necessary to generate ideas. 

You can start by researching your audience. Use questions like Who is your target audience? What do they want? And finally, how can you help fulfil that through your content? 

You can use Semrush’s market analysis tools to conduct the research too. You can even use their tools to generate topic ideas (if you would like to brainstorm or you are starting from scratch). 

While conducting topic research, you will be able to discover broad content ideas and subtopics to work on. 

The next step will be keyword research. It is best to use Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool that you can rely on. However, it is up to you to decide (based on your specific circumstances) how you would use the “search volume” and “keyword difficulty” results. 

Look for keywords of your choice, and keep them for the next phase.  

2. Content Development 

Before going to the development part, it applies to every piece of content that you develop; you should consider your audience. Make sure that it answers a question that your audience has. Or, it should provide a genuine solution to their problem. 

Now, with topics on your hand, you have to categorise them and assign a content format for each. It will depend on the goal of the content. 

For example, you would use a how-to video or a blog post if you want to raise brand awareness. You would use a research study or compose an ebook if you want to generate leads. 

After you have created specific content ideas, generating a content plan would be ideal. It will help you map out requirements for your content development and how you would complete the tasks. 

A content plan must include a brief for every topic you have chosen. The brief would contain details such as “the reason to create this content”, “who is responsible to create this (assigned creator/external agency)”, “internal linking opportunities”, “editing details”, etc.

Whatever the format is, you must ensure that the goal of the content is clear.  

3. Measurement of Performance 

Is it odd that the creative process does not end even after the content is published? 

No. 

You have to make sure that what you have published is giving you the results that you wanted. You would do that by figuring out what went wrong and making corrections accordingly. 

You can track the progress of your site’s content in Google Analytics. You can track the performance of your content based on content-specific goals. Make sure to learn about Google Analytics to use it extensively. 

You can also connect Google Search Console accounts and Google Analytics to get a comprehensive idea of your foothold alongside the competitor data. 

All it remains in the content generation process is the refinement of the content based on the feedback. 

How to Create a Digital Content Strategy?

Be it your selection of the content type, or the process of the content creation itself; all will be more fruitful if you have a proper content strategy. Digital content strategy will give you a proper road map to drive your vehicle (content marketing and/or digital marketing) on.  

Let’s take a look at the five steps for building an effective content strategy: 

1. Evaluate What You Have

If you do not have an account of how much of your content is out there on the web it could lead to mismanagement (a.k.a. content chaos). 

The first step to creating an effective strategy is to do a full inventory check. It will prevent you from creating duplicate content and meaningless competition. You will also find out the content that needs an update to generate ROI again. 

2. Set Goals 

Do you have a set goal? Increase sales? Generate more leads? Increase brand awareness? Or, it can be a combination of these. Whatever it is, your purpose has to be clear. Its clarity would guide the content generation process and its distribution.   

How to make a clear goal? 

Make it more realistic and achievable. Try to keep it brand-specific, timely, and measurable. 

Additionally, include KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to know if your brand has reached its goals or not.  

3. Set Up a System 

To make an impact, content has to go through several layers of professionalism before publishing. For example, it will need final touches from SEO writers, copywriters, editors, graphic designers, and so on. 

A business needs to identify what roles each department/individual is playing in the content generation process. Creating a layout of the process and setting the best practices would not go in vain.   

4. Execute a Gap Analysis 

It is crucial to know what content is already out there and performing to figure out what you need to make. 

By analysing the available content you have to work out what needs of the audience are still not met. That is the gap. What remains after that is for you to figure out how to fill the gap in the best way possible. 

5. Get to Know Your Distribution Channels  

As there are so many channels of content distribution, a business might end up using the spray-and-pray approach (where they publish content anywhere and everywhere and hope for positive results). 

To succeed in the content game, you have to know about your audience’s habits (or, where they spent their time online). Based on this you could make calculated decisions that really make some difference. 

Final Takeaway

For a business there is no debate of whether to use digital content or not, but how they are going to use it. With the above guidelines, a new business should be able to set up its own strategy and move farther towards an increased ROI over time.  

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What makes good digital content? 

Good content should answer queries, provide solutions to problems, offer help with products or services, make aware of the bard, add credibility to the business, etc. 

2. What are the 5 Cs of digital media? 

The 5 Cs of digital media are Content, Community, Conversation, Collaboration, and Conversion. 

3. What are the 7 Ds of digital marketing? 

Discover, define, design, develop, deliver, distribute, and determine. These are the 7 Ds that are set up to help a business bring effective and successful products to the market.