Ever wonder what digital content creation means? You may have heard the term bounced around the workplace, especially in your marketing department. Our step-by-step guide will take you from the definition to practice, and will be the ultimate ‘how to’ for your digital content creation.

What is digital content creation?

Digital content creation is the process by which topic ideas that appeal to your audience are created as written, visual, audio or video content. It is an effective way to communicate with, educate or entertain your audience.

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” – Bill Gates, Content is King, 1996

How to start making digital content

Digital content creation is incredibly valuable to your marketing. Hubspot notes that content creation is a “human, helpful, and holistic” way to create a rapport with your audience. With digital marketing content writing, your brand is able to reach a vast audience as well as allow for regular analytics on your buyer persona and what they want to see from you.

There are a variety of tools out there to help you create your digital content. From digital content marketing software to free video and picture editing applications. The first step to creating your own content is to identify what you are going to need to achieve your marketing goals. Once you know what you want to achieve from your digital marketing, and what you will use to do this, the real process can begin.

The 5 ‘Ws’ of digital content creation

Step one: The ‘why’

As with so many things in business, you have to ask yourself ‘why are we creating this?’ From a business perspective, knowing your reasons for creating content drives both your return on investment and your team’s morale. Think of content creation like a cog in the engine of your business. If there is unnecessary production, resources are wasted and motivation falls, whereas focused and useful content production will boost your marketing campaigns.

Your content should hold value for both you and your customers.

When we create something, we think
will our customers thank us for this?

Anne Handley

Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and Co-founder, ClickZ.com

Step two: The ‘what’

This is the measurability side of content writing. Once you know why you are writing content, know you need to know what the content should achieve. You need to be asking yourself:

What should our audience get from this?
What is the point of this piece?
What analytics do we want to collect from this?

It is about taking your content to the next step. It is all well and good to create content you believe to be necessary for marketing, but now you need to identify what makes it necessary.

Essentially, you know your goals, you know your content ideas, but do you know your audience well enough? There is no point in content writing that doesn’t get read. You might feel that you would benefit from a piece of content that addresses a recent trend, but you need to ask yourself what the use of that content actually will be. Jumping on a trend might seem like a quick win for your brand awareness, but you risk frustrating your target audience with what may seem like ‘spammy’ and irrelevant content, and ignoring your long-term strategy. Creating content that you can analyze is a necessary part of regularly re-evaluating your audience and their needs, and creating a piece that covers a recent trend but isn’t relevant to your customers is not a useful addition to data.

Step three: The ‘who’

If you haven’t already identified your buyer persona, then you definitely need to. Digital content creation is about knowing your audience and who is going to interact with your online content marketing. Read our guide to learn how to map your content to your buyers’ journey.

Click to read No gaps content mapping: How to enable an irresistible buyer journey | Turtl

Traditional marketing talks at people.
Content marketing talks with them.

Doug Kessle

Co-founder and Executive Creative Director, Velocity Partners

Content creation is a conversation with your audience. Our purchase decisions are emotional decisions. With so much of today’s marketing being online, your digital content creation should be reaching people that want to hear from you.

Hubspot reports that 40% of customers expect a response when posting feedback on a social channel. Your digital marketing should aim to open that conversation as well as maintain it. In order to do that, you need to know who you are talking to.

Step four: The ‘where’

Digital content creation is found on multiple platforms. There are so many different marketing channels that it is important to identify where you want to post your content. Each channel offers a unique opportunity to market yourselves digitally.

Twitter reports that 80% of advertisers’ inbound customer service requests happen on their platform. With the limited character count, Twitter allows for quick content and responses, whereas LinkedIn is ideal for longer, more detailed content. You can also explore ‘story’, ‘live’ and ‘reel’ features found on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. With over 500 million stories posted daily, and a reported one-third being viewed from business accounts, the ‘where’ of your digital content is extremely important.

Everyone consumes online information differently so it is important to be found in as many places as possible.

Step five: The ‘which’

This is essentially the ‘which for which’. By this we mean, which content is to be posted on which platform. As mentioned, there are so many different channels, each with unique and valuable uses.

When posting your digital content creations, you need to align the content’s uses to its target audience. You do not want to be repeating the same content on each platform, and if you do find yourself needing to do that, make sure you stagger your posting times.

Instead, you need to tailor your content to the suited platform. If you are creating a poll in order to open a conversation with your audience, you need to ask who you are reaching? Stories allow for microcontent, which disappears after 24 hours, so a poll could be a great way to gain analytics on your content through a short interactive piece. A long form piece or video may be of more use on a platform such as LinkedIn, as the shareability of LinkedIn posts allow for a greater reach.

It’s not the best content that wins.
It’s the best-promoted content that wins.

Andy Crestonidia

Co-founder and CMO, Orbit Media

This Allianz Care Turtl Doc shows the use of polls to promote interactivity and feedback.

Know where your digital content creations will have the most impact and value for your brand. Know who your audience is, and what analytics you want to gain from them and you can know which platform to post on.

Goals, roles, and filling content holes

Your next step from here is to ask yourself one main question: is your digital content working?’

It is important to ensure you are hitting the business goals you set and measure your content’s performance. Equally, it is important to note any gaps in what you are producing. If there is too much long-form content, do you want to be creating videos instead? Ask yourself if the content is fulfilling the role you designed for it, and if it is your digital performance will be creating a new marketing standard for your brand!

By regularly reviewing your content stats and your customer interactions, you can address your digital marketing strategy to better fit your audience’s needs. Your digital content needs to provide value. This may mean you find yourself posting too much of one form of content, and perhaps not enough of another.

An excellent example of this is GIFs. Often used to quickly explain complex ideas, GIFs have become a modern digital content treasure. It is very easy to fall into a trap of finding a comfortable routine of what you want to post, instead of acknowledging what your audience wants you to post. Focusing too much on one form of digital content may create a gap in your marketing strategy. Just because you have positive responses to one post does not mean that should be the format you use from then on. Ensure you are re-evaluating what content actually hits your goals, and therefore where any gaps may be. This is how you ensure your team holistically approaches their marketing content. You can easily assess who needs to be working on content for different channels and different content forms; meaning your content and business goals are regularly being hit.

Today’s marketing climate requires you to be engaged, relevant, and informative. By using a content feedback look, you’ll ensure your business and marketing goals are being hit, just like Telenet and Leadfabric did.