When we’re talking about content, there’s a misconception that goes unnoticed.
Any guesses as to what that is? Allow me to explain.
Content is often mistaken for entertainment pieces consumed on a screen of pixels.
But when you take a deeper look, you realize that nothing could be further from the truth.
Digital content is nothing short of a strategic goldmine that not only entertains your audience but also unlocks new levels of online visibility, from lead generation to brand awareness and recall.
But how do you tap into its vast potential? And how can you do so using videos?
In this article, I’ll give you the complete roadmap to building a reliable digital content strategy.
Along with insights on why it’s important, how to build one, best practices, and how videos can take your strategy to the next level.
A digital content strategy is a plan developed by organizations to create, publish, and manage useful and relevant content to attract and engage a specific target audience.
At its core, it involves the systematic approach of:
But here’s where things take an interesting turn.
In today’s landscape, you can see content of all shapes and sizes: blogs, infographics, podcasts.
And it’s no surprise that explainer videos (or video content in general) have surged in popularity as the go-to content B2B and B2C businesses use in their campaigns.
In fact, according to numbers from Website Planet, explainer videos are the most common type of marketing video content used by 73% of marketers, followed by social media videos.
Explainer Videos are the most common type of video content used by marketers (Source: “55+ Video Marketing Facts, Stats & Trends in 2024” by Website Planet)
These numbers clearly show that a preference towards a digital content marketing strategy that is video-centric isn't merely a trend but a necessary step to meet consumer and business demands.
I’ll go as far as to say that any digital content strategy in 2025 (or beyond) that doesn’t have a roadmap to utilize videos in it won’t stick very long.
But the importance of a digital content strategy doesn't end here. Let’s take a deeper look at the benefits in the next section.
A digital content strategy is essential for any business looking to establish a robust online presence.
And as we saw in the previous section, when your strategy is centered around videos, particularly explainer videos, it becomes significantly more effective.
Let’s take a detailed look as to why that is now:
According to a recent finding by TrueList, 43% of B2B marketers and brands had a well-documented content marketing strategy in place.
A majority of B2B marketers prefer having a well documented content strategy in place (Source: “Content Marketing Statistics – 2024” by TrueList)
Any guesses as to why this is?
Simply put, content marketing is a game of engagement.
Any business, B2B or B2C, that cracks the code to customer engagement with content marketing essentially has a winning strategy in their arsenal.
But this only comes when they have a reliable digital content strategy in place.
Think of a digital content strategy as the planning phase of your campaign and your content marketing strategy as the execution phase.
And to make customer engagement even more effective, relying on a video-centric digital content strategy is the way to go.
An explainer video captures attention quickly and holds it by simplifying complex topics and stimulating visual and auditory senses.
This heightened engagement leads to better retention of information and more impactful brand interactions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite important for businesses.
According to the latest numbers from Backlinko, SEO is the most implemented marketing tactic among B2B marketers.
SEO is the most important marketing tactic used by B2B businesses (Source: “10 B2B SEO Statistics” by Backlinko)
The reason: Enhanced brand and product visibility.
But figuring out the ropes of SEO can be hit-or-miss really.
At least if you’re not using the right medium for your SEO efforts.
Having a digital content strategy removes the guesswork from the equation when it comes to implementing SEO content strategies.
Creating a detailed strategy (more on that later) gives you a proper checklist that adds intent to your execution.
Search engines favor websites with video content, recognizing them as rich media relevant to user queries.
Including explainer videos in your strategy can boost your site’s SEO, making your business more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs) and driving organic traffic to relevant service pages.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about “conversion rates”?
I’m assuming that for all intents and purposes, it’s just another digital marketing metric.
But when you look deeper, you find that it’s much more than that.
It’s a number that quantifies how many people you convinced into becoming your customer.
A digital content strategy makes your conversion efforts more targeted and effective by outlining:
A video-centric digital content strategy builds upon this specificity even further.
For example, using videos like product demonstration videos (or any other relevant kind of explainer video) can convey your product’s value and functionality in a way that static presentations can rarely achieve, leading to higher conversion rates.
Explainer videos, in particular, have a direct impact on sales, as they help potential customers understand the benefits of your offering and USP quickly and make informed purchasing decisions accordingly.
Here’s an interesting survey from Nielsen that you should be aware of when it comes to video marketing (and content marketing in general).
Their comprehensive 2023 Brand Lift Report found that there were 5 key drivers to brand lift in emerging media. With brand recall being the top-most driver.
Brand recall is the most important driver towards brand lift (Source: “In emerging media, brand recall is the biggest driver of lift” by Nielsen)
Nielsen went ahead and found that brand recall had a 38.7% influence on brand lift, followed by baseline brand awareness at 37.5%.
Brand recall has the highest average influence on brand lift, followed by baseline brand awareness (Source: “In emerging media, brand recall is the biggest driver of lift” by Nielsen)
So what can we infer from these numbers?
And a video-centric digital content strategy kills these two birds with one stone.
It outlines all your content pieces into a comprehensive list so you can see which content can help you in your brand awareness and recall campaigns.
Using video content makes this a bit easier as their use of visual and audio elements makes them highly memorable.
Which then makes your strategy a question of:
Which video content piece feels more memorable and will grab attention the quickest?
The content that answers this question undeniably becomes the forerunner of your campaigns, with your digital content strategy then giving you a roadmap to leverage it to the fullest.
I want to establish some context here.
Versatility across marketing channels isn’t about taking one content piece from one channel and publishing it unchanged on another channel.
Versatility is strategic in this discussion here. Perhaps a better name for this activity is content repurposing.
Content repurposing unlocks visibility for new and existing content in ways unimaginable. And when you use videos for this, it becomes even more effective.
The latest numbers from Kapwing make my argument undeniable.
Videos are the most effective methods for content repurposing (Source: “Why Marketers Should Be Repurposing Their Content” by Kapwing)
Having a digital content strategy helps you tame the chaos called content repurposing.
It outlines which content to repurpose, where to repurpose, and future opportunities for repurposing.
Making your efforts strategic, quantifiable, and driving results in the process.
This is perhaps the best way you can utilize the versatility of videos to leverage multiple marketing channels, like website landing pages, social media, email marketing campaigns, and beyond.
To learn more about content repurposing, I recommend you check out: “Content Repurposing: Enhance Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy!”
Creating a digital content strategy isn’t exactly a “execute once, reap benefits forever” kind of activity.
Whether you’re creating text-based content or visual content like infographics and videos for your social media video marketing campaigns, your strategy needs to be reliable and flexible enough that you can build upon it in the long term.
In this section, I’ll help you do exactly that using the following steps. Starting with…
Everything begins with purpose. That’s the single most important thing that drives results.
The same applies to digital content as well.
I want you to begin by asking yourself these three questions:
The answers to these questions will help you create a mental picture of your ideal content piece.
These questions apply to all types of content, especially video content where specificity is crucial.
Once you get clarity on your content objectives, it’s time to look at the other side of the coin.
This is a step that’s universal across any marketing campaign you can think of.
Why? Because your content is the point of contact for any ideal customer that comes across your business.
In other words, your target audience gives your content meaning.
So a comprehensive target audience analysis is a non-negotiable step in your digital content strategy.
In your analysis, try to accurately determine:
To make your process even simpler, I suggest you use one of the following two methods:
To learn more about the first method, I would recommend you check out this article next: “7 Steps To Determine Your Buyer Personas”
As for the second method, we have a detailed video that explains the 12 major kinds of brand archetypes and how they’re unique from one another, which you can check out here:
Once you have gathered all the insights you need, it’s time to move to the next step.
It’s easy to think that your digital content strategy will mostly revolve around creating new content.
But in reality, such a strategy would be limited at best.
A robust strategy fulfills two primary content creation objectives:
So your first step here involves conducting a detailed content audit.
This will give you a bird’s eye view of all the content you have published and also reveal opportunities for new content in the process.
There are several free templates to expedite this process too, one of which is given here from Wordstream.
A content audit template (Source: “How to Perform a Content Audit: The Definitive Guide” by Wordstream)
Once your audit is complete, you need to build a content repurposing strategy for existing content (which I covered in the previous section under Versatility Across Marketing Channels)
Regardless, for all the content opportunities you found along the way, you need to plan a course of action for that.
Let’s discuss that next.
Take a look at your new content and categorize them into content types.
If you’ve identified new opportunities in video content, categorize them on the basis of type of videos.
Some popular types used by businesses include (but aren't limited to):
Once you have identified which type of content you’re going to make, the next steps more or less fall into place.
But I want to emphasize something important here.
When it comes to video content production, you can either go live-action or animation, with our recommendation being animated video production.
You also have a choice of either producing your videos in-house or hiring a video production company to do the job for you.
Based on your video content objectives and content marketing budget, you can choose a path that you see fit.
Your content calendar is an intuitive dashboard that shows you which content goes when and where.
It prevents you from publishing content haphazardly.
Why is it necessary? Because your audience has expectations from you.
When they see that you’re posting the right content at the right time, consistently, they trust you more.
And when they trust you more, your content is recommended more and that increases your brand visibility.
Just like we saw in the step for content audit, you can find several free content calendar templates online, like this one from Backlinko.
A simple content calendar outline (Source: “What is Content Calendar: How to Build One + Free Template” by Backlinko)
While the above content calendar is made on Notion, this outline can be replicated across any spreadsheet application of your choice.
Remember, a reliable content calendar is something you’ll stick to.
Keep it simple and build upon it as you improve your digital content strategy.
One thing that we saw in Step #3 was the importance of taking into account new and existing content.
For new content, however, the production needs to be adjusted every single time. While that’s understandable based on different content types, it might interfere with content consistency.
So to prevent this, create a comprehensive checklist that outlines every major component of your content production workflow.
This single point of reference can help you be more streamlined with any piece of content that you publish.
For video content, building a checklist is highly important as that correlates to the success of your video marketing campaign.
To learn more, you can check out next: “30-Point Video Marketing Checklist To Tick Off Before Starting”
By the time you reach this step, you already have what it needs to make new digital content and leverage existing content as well.
It’s now time to put the finishing touches so your digital content can work in the long run.
Publishing your content, to the right people, at the right time, is important as we saw in Step #5.
But if the right people can’t find your content, your efforts are dead in the water.
That’s where SEO comes into the picture.
Some basic strategies that can help your content visibility include:
For video content, SEO is not only an option but a necessity as many search engines prefer to rank videos over other content pieces by categorizing them as rich content.
So if you’re leveraging video marketing and want to crack the code on SEO, we provide a comprehensive roadmap which you can check out here: “Video Marketing for SEO: A Guide to Boosting Online Visibility”
By this point, you might have already started publishing your content according to your content calendar.
But your job is far from over.
You need to constantly engage with your audience and monitor content performance to find opportunities in the future.
Closely analyze important content engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, impressions, etc.
Do this on a weekly basis and take notes on where your existing content can be improved through optimizations and repurposing.
Once these opportunities have been identified, include them in your content calendar so you can stay proactive in the long run.
Now that you have a robust digital content strategy in place, it’s time to build a solid foundation so your strategy doesn’t fail you when you need it the most.
Here are some best practices that can make your digital content strategy even more effective:
I hope this article proves to be a useful resource in your digital content marketing journey.
We discussed the importance of having a strategy and also saw a step-by-step guide on creating one that’s reliable and robust.
Ending our discussion with some best practices that unlock the full potential of your strategy in the long run and firmly establishing why a video-centric approach to your strategy pays dividends along the way.
One thing can be concluded without a doubt: Digital content strategy isn’t a one-time event.
It’s a constant cycle of iteration, feedback, observation, and improvement, which requires you to be proactive every step of the way.
And once you embrace this fact as the absolute truth, your digital content strategy, coupled with the power of explainer video production, can unlock new horizons for your brand never thought possible.