Epicosity headed eastward this week to check out the 2016 Digital Summit in Minneapolis, which kicked off with a series of workshops on the digital marketing landscape.

Quinn Whissen from Vertical Measures was on-hand to outline proven tactics for strategizing your content creation.

Here are a few of the highlights of the discussion.

Long-Term Results

Building out content via a blog or other formats isn't a one-and-done, immediate results-bringer. It's a long-term commitment toward results that lives or dies by your commitment to creating things your customer base and target audience truly wants.

From creating posts and long-form content that resonates with the live humans you eventually want to convert into customers to following the rules to get your site in Google's (and other search engines') good graces, it can take many months before your pages are indexed and you start seeing organic traffic to your various pages.

So be patient.

Talk to Your People

Coming up with topic areas that will please your key audience segments isn't as easy as getting your marketing crew together and picking out what you think is best. There should be a lot more going into this "ideation" process.

Take, for instance, your sales or customer service teams - they are, after all, the ones at the ground level actually speaking with your customers. Before you make assumptions or even educated content topic decisions based on your innate knowledge of your industry or even proven measurements like page views and clicks, talk to your ground-level team. Ask them what the customers are asking when it comes to your products and services.

Take the time to get the information from the horse's mouth.

Broaden Your Channels

Getting web visitors to look at the content you put out is made or broken by what channels you use to distribute or promote it. And just "having a Facebook page" isn't going to get you 100% there.

To truly see results, you'll need to get yourself (or your decision-making leader) used to the idea of spending a little to make a little. (And I do mean spending a little- you'd be surprised what just a little bit of investment will do to your digital momentum.) 

And while promotion is a great way to use social channels to send people back to your website, sometimes a just as effective tool is distributing (or repurposing your content and hosting it in an entirely different space such as YouTube or Pinterest) can have a great effect.

Publish to sites your audience already visits - take your content to them to boost your viewership.