Content is king and the rise of search and social media only reinforces its position as the most important part of your digital communications strategy. However, it takes time to develop the kind of content and communications that will drive traffic, build customer loyalty, improve search engine rankings and improve your return on investment, time most of us don't have. In this article, we look at why content is important and offer you some simple advice.

Why is content so important?

Content is the reason people engage with you in the first place and it's the reason they will come back. To quote a recent econsultancy.com marketing strategy report;

"What do you need to get up the search rankings? Links. And what do you need to get good links? Good content that people want to link to. What do you need to fuel successful, engaging, social interactions? Good content that people care about. What do you need to differentiate yourself as a brand online, particularly where you're selling something other people also sell? Better content and service certainly help. What do you need to improve your conversion rates online? Better content and user experience."

A good content strategy takes time and effort.

You can't squeeze your existing content into your web, mobile and social channels because it won't work. You can't only post to your website either, because mobile and social spaces are just as important. You also have many different audience types to consider; your customers, partners, and staff all want information tailored to their needs.

You will only get the most out of your search, social, email, advertising and promotional activities, if you create regular content that is relevant to your customers on the channels they are using. It takes time to develop but it will help to build your brand, engage your customers, and improve your bottom line. Remember the Dell case study? Dell made $1m from Twitter in 18 months by uploading information on their discounted products.

Start by getting a good content plan in place.

An overarching content strategy is essential and will help you to measure the results of your efforts.Your content plan should contain an outline of all activity over the coming months including what it is, when it will be released and where it will be distributed. It's a good idea to work at least a month ahead so that you always have a constant supply of content to help you through busy periods. A monthly brainstorming session with sales, customer services and marketing staff will help you to work out the types of content that really addresses your customers' needs.

Share the workload and identify responsible individuals.

Many organisations are restructuring their teams, roles, and responsibilities to ensure that they are creating and managing the content process effectively. Start by identifying the key people in your marketing team, consider hiring a dedicated content developer who will help to manage the process from day one, work out who will create your written, spoken and visual content and who will publish and monitor it. A good team around you will give content the central role it deserves.

Choose a mixture of content types.

Create content that really helps your customers. It can be informative or entertaining, but often it's both. Take Blendtec for example, their humorous 'Will It Blend?' campaign on YouTube helped to drive "a five-fold increase in sales". If you need help with ideas, look at your website analytics for popular pages or try Q&A sites to see what questions people are asking. Another trick is to repurpose your content by breaking it up into blog posts and tweets.

It's not all about copywriting and editorial though, you can find new ways to interest and help your customers. Infographics, animations, podcasts and videos can often more easily answer your customers questions or help them to better understand how things work.

Get the best out of all the promotional channels.

There are a myriad of marketing channels to help you to get the most out of your content. Social networks promote word of mouth referrals and recommendations and a loyal fan is definitely worth more than someone who is not a fan. Did you know that people "share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook and over 5 billion tweets - about a quarter of which contain links to content - per month."

Ultimately, social networks are a great place to tune in to the conversation, glean ideas, offer incentives or rewards and to build loyalty. They can help considerably with your search engine rankings too, for example each link to your content will result in you being placed higher up on Google. In fact, search engines are a key reason for creating content in the first place, nearly two-thirds of consumers (61%) use search engines to help them in their product research decisions leading up to purchase. (econsultancy, July 2010).

Track your content and measure its success

Content development takes time and costs money so it's essential to track and measure your activity. In order to do this you need to be clear about your objectives. Are you planning on building brand awareness or improving your conversion rates?

Measuring conversions can be as simple as installing Google Analytics. You can use a combination of third party sites too, for example, when you promote your content via your social channels you'll be able to look at trends such as fans, followers, mentions, retweets etc. Once you have analysed your baseline you'll be able to set some key performance indicators and see the impact that your content is having on your KPIs such as increases in traffic and conversions.

How are you rising to the content challenge?

There's a lot to think about and even more to do. If, like many people, you're finding yourself short on time or you need some expert advice to help you get more from your digital communications, we're here to help you.