Digital Content and How Do I Make It More Intentional

Table of Contents

It Starts With the Marketing Plan

Target Market

Create a Content Strategy

For digital content to be effective, it must support the goals of the business. Unfortunately, many small businesses use blogging and social media in a way that is just the opposite, posting content that has little to do with the business. For online content to be successful, it must be intentional. There must be a plan and strategy behind it and each blog or social media post must support the goals of that plan.

Being intentional means you are performing these tasks with a purpose behind the action, not doing them in a haphazard fashion. But for some, the idea of being intentional might not come naturally. So, we offer some tips on how to make your digital content more purposeful.

It Starts With the Marketing Plan
- Target Market
Create a Content Strategy
- Types of Content
Editorial Calendar
Related Resources
Getting Started

It Starts With the Marketing Plan

Every business should have a business and marketing plan. From those documents, you can find the mission statement and marketing goals of the company. These items will identify what the company is trying to achieve, how it will reach those objectives and the demographics of the target market.

Target Market

Having that target market information is particularly important, because it tells you the make up of the audience for which you will be creating content.

For example, a retailer that sells lawn mowers might identify its target market as males aged 30 to 55 who own homes. Messaging to this group would be very different than messaging to a group of young, single mothers who live in urban apartments.

Understanding your target is key for identifying the type of content to create and the persona voice to use when creating it.

Create a Content Strategy

As mentioned above, the business and marketing plan should have the company’s goals listed along with the mission statement. From these, you can get the official view of what the company is about and what it wants to be.

Staying with the example of the lawn mower store, a possible mission for that business could be, “to provide the best home lawn care equipment and service in the area.”

Types of Content

Once you understand that mission, it is much easier to create a content strategy that supports it. The content strategy should identify various types of content that you will create or share online. Remember, the content should support the mission statement while also appealing to the target market.

Some possible content categories for the lawn mower business might be lawn care tips, lawn mower care tips, landscaping tips, and so on. These are all topics that surround the mission of the business, that of providing the best lawn mowers and service in the area. These are also topics that a homeowner might search for and find helpful. Thus the helpfulness of the content might lead prospects to your website.

Editorial Calendar

Now that you have selected the content categories, identify sources that you will draw upon for each one. Some categories will most likely be curated from websites, while others might be created by someone at your company in the form of a blog article or even content on your website. Once you’ve identified the sources, create an editorial calendar and place these items in it at regular intervals.

If working with social media, assign the various content categories to a specific day of the week. The categories will serve as subjects for the posts on those days. For example, the lawn mower retailer might post lawn care tips every Tuesday, lawn mower maintenance tips on Wednesdays and landscaping tips each Friday.

Blogs

For your blog posts, you can follow a sinmialr method. Let's say you plan to create one blog every week. Instead of assigning the categories to days of the week as you did above with social media, you would assign the blog topic categories to one per week on a rotating basis.

Now, looking forward, you can plug in specific topics to the category/days.

The Wrap

With this method, your social media and blog posts will be planned out and be intentional. This process removes the uncertainty some face when it's time to make posts. When you are unsure what to post, you will post anything you can find out of desperation, which will cause you to stray from being intentional.

Planning your digital content in advance will keep you on track.

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