Creating a digital content strategy in 2023 sounds horrifying because of how competitive the internet is and how dramatically social media changes overnight.

What if I told you that you could still create a strategy for your website, social media, and other digital spaces? What if I told you that you could do it in five easy steps without going broke, taking any significant risk, or stressing out and being overwhelmed? You can do just that!

In this article, I will show you the five easy steps in creating a digital content strategy for an internet and social media space constantly changing for better and worse.

Step 1 – Your Digital Content Strategy Must Have a Niche

Having a niche for your digital content strategy is your number one priority.

Covering a specific industry or topic in today’s fast-paced and widely used internet is essential. Every type of brand, business, or space has a niche attached to it. A niche is a specific topic or industry in which you’ll promote your content.

My niche for this blog is content creators and marketers. I write tips about content creation, digital marketing, social media, and search engine optimization. These topics all boil down to the content creation and marketing niche. I focus all my efforts on that niche so my brand can be easily identified by the audience I wish to serve.

Retaining a familiar audience or consumer base will be significantly challenging if you’re random about what content you serve. You must choose a niche to begin to plan for your digital content strategy.

Step 2 – Define Your Content Output for Your Strategy

It is vital to have a content output objective when creating a digital content strategy.

This is what your content will provide. After you choose a niche, it is still essential not to be random. That means you need to define what your content will resolve to those consuming it. The best way to do this is to solve problems. What are the top questions in your industry’s community? What are the most challenging topics? If you can find a way to solve those problems and focus your content on those topics, that will create a perfect content output objective for your digital content strategy.

I focus on solving problems in content creation and marketing for both internal and external spaces. This means your website and websites you don’t own but participate in for your niche, such as social media. Another related blog like mine may focus on industry news or product reviews.

Having a niche is essential, but it’s also imperative to focus on what content you will provide for that niche because that is how you will capture and retain an audience who consumes your content.

Step 3 – Create a Brand for Your Space on Your Digital Content Strategy

Because the internet is so over-saturated and used by billions every day, branding is more important than ever in this day and age.

You got to build a brand to win at your digital content strategy and business planning in general. A brand gets noticed. A brand gets remembered. A brand stands out from the overly large crowd that is currently consuming content on the internet. Brands win and keep winning, while others who don’t brand tend to crumble.

In my hiking and outdoor recreation space, I created not just a brand but a local brand. Aside from understanding my niche and knowing exactly what my audience wanted, I focused much on my brand’s visual aspects. My photo, colors, wording, thumbnail styles, and expectations are the same on my website, and across all the platforms I use. I even invented slogans and custom words easily recognizable by my audience as my brand.

If you’re not adding branding to your digital content strategy, you’re making a big mistake that will likely ruin your business or space.

Step 4 – Choose Your Channels Wisely

When creating your digital content strategy, you must choose the correct channels for your niche and audience.

There are so many channels to choose from. If you select all of them, you’ll overwhelm yourself and likely burn out. If you don’t select the proper channels, you might not connect with the right audience you desire to communicate with. Before deciding what channels you wish to work with, you need to research each one based on if your audience is present if a community has been made, and if they’re requesting and consuming content you plan to create.

I ultimately created my website and mailing list to ensure I can keep my audience in case social media closes. Getting on social media is still worth it, but it’s essential to understand that social media is a rented space. You can lose it anytime and lose everything you put into it. You agreed to that term when you signed up for it.

It is wise to have a well-balanced mixture of owned and rented channels across your brand as long as you don’t overwhelm yourself.

Step 5 –Your Digital Content Strategy Should Outline Content Management

You’ll fall down quickly if you don’t have a plan for managing and distributing your content across all your channels.

Lucky for you, you can turn everything into content in this day and age. But managing and distributing that content is a whole different level of challenge. This is especially the case when you are using multiple channels. You must plan how to push your content out across various channels in your digital content strategy. Consistency is a priority when it comes to content marketing. You need to be consistent about delivering your content.

The most incredible tool I’ve taken advantage of for content management and distribution is scheduling features. Based on my content calendar, I can create, edit, and schedule content to be published on certain dates and times. For my website, I use the scheduling features built into WordPress. For my newsletter, I create my issue throughout the month on Word and then add it to Mail Chimp when I send it out. I use their built-in scheduling features or Buffer Scheduling on social media if the channel doesn’t have the best tools available. I try to stay a week to two weeks ahead of schedule.

If you don’t properly manage the distribution plan of your content, your performance and consistency will fail because you’ll quickly overwhelm yourself or your team, for that matter.

Creating a digital content strategy isn’t as complex as it appears. If you follow the advice above, developing and executing the strategy will be much simpler than ever imagined. I do this for every brand and space I create, allowing me to have multiple businesses without being overwhelmed. If you want more tips like the ones mentioned above, please follow me on Twitter.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers who follow this blog. Shawn also offers various services for extra help in content creation and blogging.