_ Digital content development guide

This is a guide for digital content development and how to do it effectively. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to build a website from scratch or if you want to prepare training materials. Use these tips to help guide you.

Do your research

Firstly, you must gather as much information as possible. Assess what the purpose and expectations are. What are the reasons for creating this content? The more research you put in, the more structurally sound your foundation will be. A strong starting point that has a clear goal will make the development process more streamlined.

Some areas in which to focus your research; target demographics, audience behaviour, main competition, goals, past site performance, company vision, and learning outcomes. Of course, it depends on what type of content development you are aiming to pursue. For example, educational and training content will not necessarily require data on website analytics.

With marketing content and website development, blog topic analysis is important, further research will need to be put into SEO (search engine optimization) and competitor topic analysis. This ensures that you will be developing content that will be relevant and effective.

Build out the framework

Use the data that you have collected to build out your framework. Keep your goals in mind, and if you are designing content for a learning/training course, then focus on the learning objectives. Map out the educational material that will create a flow of content that gradually steps up to more advanced topics. Make sure to include checkpoints that may include quizzes and scenarios that track the learner’s progress.

This is also the strategy phase of content marketing, here content strategy and the editorial calendar are discussed. With econtent development for marketing, deliverables need to be scheduled and an important part will be deciding on the topics you want to turn into content.

Write and create

You have your framework and your strategy. Here comes the fun part of writing and creating. If you have done your research correctly, then you will have an understanding of how your audience communicates and how they prefer to consume information. Using this data will help you write in a style that appeals to them.

The content you create may not always be in the form of text, there are many creative ways to make content interesting and captivating. Audio recordings, videos, infographics, imagery, and presentations are just a few. Think about the content and how it can be delivered in an impactful way.

Optimize, publish and promote

Once you have finished developing your content, it’s time to let it out into the world, or more like the World Wide Web. For content marketing it is important that the content is optimized for maximum search-ability, so make sure keywords and related keywords have been incorporated, meta descriptions polished, hyperlinks attached and alt-text optimized.

Promote your content to ensure that it is accessible and has a wide reach. With training material, eContent development has many benefits because it allows the learner to have more control of the speed at which they learn and where they do it. SO make sure that it is easy to find.

Assess and review

Digital content development is a continuous process of making adjustments. That is why is it crucial to look at performance and data to improve results. Identify if there are weaker segments and identify the reason why it is not performing up to expectations. This can lead back to the research step to investigate ways in which to improve.