Marketing your service or product is a significant goal for startups, and having the right content can help you reach out to the appropriate audiences and establish your brand while reducing resources.
This step-by-step tutorial, packed with valuable tips and information from the top SEO and content marketing experts, will assist you in the following:
- Plan a successful Content strategy for your business
- Create an efficient content marketing process
- Create and implement the relevant goals of content marketing
Why Should Startups Invest in Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a cost-effective way to build brand recognition.
For instance, LiberEat, an innovative technology company focused on food safety, developed an approach to content that aims to increase its user base at the least cost.
In just three months they:
- Increased their organic traffic by 100 percent
- The organic conversion rate increased by 25 percent
- Attained sustainable growth
Organic content such as blogs or leads, guides, and video content can be a lasting impact. If you keep it up, it can draw traffic to your company for a long time.
Similar paid advertising strategies like specific search or social advertisements can be excellent ways of identifying particular audiences. They can also be a significant short-term impact.
Compelling content can help you:
- Get potential customers on your site and turn them into leads
- Establish trust with your targeted public by sharing reliable information
- Increase the visibility of your brand to the people who are interested in your brand through SEO
There’s simply no way you could genuinely do content marketing without it, according to Austin Mullins from Conversion Media:
There needs to be a way to avoid the importance of content marketing. Even if you’re getting customers through (adverts) but without some content that can guide them through their journey and help them convert to customers, it’s doubtful that you’ll succeed in building an effective business.
Austin Mullins, Founder of Conversion Media
Do Pre-Launch or Early-Stage Startups Need Content Marketing?
Does content marketing make sense even if you’re starting or don’t have a market?
Content marketing is undoubtedly beneficial to early-stage companies as well as small-sized enterprises.
Jitesh Patil, SEO and Content Manager for Toggl, explains that content can be an excellent tool to create the initial buzz and awareness about your brand.
As a startup, it is essential to be noticed. You need to make content that others are producing to avoid getting caught. Explore the possibilities like Angi, who asked children all over the globe to draw their dream rooms and create their ideas. If you’re working on a budget, you can research using public data, such as Rave, who transformed the IMDB database into the “World’s Most Popular TV Shows Infographic.
Jitesh Patil, SEO & Content Specialist at Toggl Plan
For instance, top-of-the-line content like videos and blogs can help you determine the level of interest in your products or services.
It also opens up discussions with your group to gain more feedback.
Lower funnel content, such as case studies, will aid in nurturing this audience and also generate the first lead.
9 Steps to Building a Powerful Startup Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s now examine the most critical steps you should take to increase awareness for your business and accelerate its organic growth by utilizing content.
Step 1: Create a Foundation for Your Startup’s Content Marketing
Before you start creating content, be sure to create a solid foundation for the organization. This includes ensuring all parties have the same view and that the assets are all put in order.
Insisting on the Buy-in of Stakeholders
The support of your CEO or board of directors, investors, and other key stakeholders is vital to secure the funds required to support marketing with content.
To do this, you’ll have to:
- Be honest and transparent.
- Benefits of marketing via content
- Explain how you’ll define and determine success.
- Set realistic expectations
For example, let’s say your business is in a specific niche, such as software for automating documents. The keywords within this particular niche are likely relatively insignificant search traffic.
If you talk to the CEO of your company or its investors, they may ask: If your keywords don’t bring in enough visitors, Why even bother with content marketing?
An understanding of your audience as well as the overall strategy, could aid you in answering this question better.
After speaking with your customers and sales team, you discover that your ideal customer’s lawyers have two issues that are common to them. They need help maintaining the balance between work and family and adopting the latest technology.
With this knowledge in mind, you can create a specific content strategy that concentrates on helping your readers reduce their work through automation and discover new technologies for legal use.
This way, you can draw more targeted leads and, over time, establish trust with your target audience to dominate your market and boost the demand for your solution.
Prepare Essential Marketing Assets
Be aware that content will only be effective if additional channels and marketing properties are in place.
Businesses that publish content without taking into account the consumer journey into consideration will often save money.
Take into consideration the following aspects:
- Make sure you have a clear picture of your overall brand identity and product positioning, as in your messaging
- A well-optimized website has all the necessary pages
- Create conversion routes (e.g., CTAs to obtain an unrestricted trial or demo)
- Design follow-up workflows (e.g., to follow-up leads resulting from content)
- Install analytics to be capable of tracking the progress
For instance, examine Spruce, an online real estate technology company business and startup in the field of title. Its website makes the main goal clear on the initial page.
The company also makes it simple to convert by putting prominent buttons to request a demonstration in the front.
They back this up with the following:
- A newsletter via email to stay in touch with their customers
- A blog that is full of informative content that is tailored to the audience’s particular desires
- Webinars and conferences where they can discuss current industry issues
In the end, content marketing has to be specific to your business and your customers’ needs. It requires time, planning, patience, and a lot of work. You can’t expect overnight success.
Mullins states that it will become easier to rate new content in time, and the cost to acquire customers will decrease.
You must be operating within the correct time frame. If you’re beginning to work on increasing the organic reach of your site, you’ll be destined to lose money, and it’s a way that will grow.
Austin Mullins, Founder of Conversion Media
Step 2 2. Align Your Content With Your Business Model
Nothing is more crucial than ensuring your content will yield tangible outcomes. In a recent interview, Mark Rogers from Animalz shared with us:
Content strategy should specifically be linked with the model of business. If your content strategy is not helping your company, you’re just losing time.
Mark Rogers, Content Strategist at Animalz
The first step is to ensure you are clear about where you are.
- Teams: Who are you working with? Do you have any skills gaps? Do you require hiring or outsourcing?
- Income: Which is the Monthly Recurring Income (MRR)?
- Budget What is the marketing budget you have for the upcoming quarter?
- Competitors: Who are you taking on? What are they offering that you can’t and, in turn? What is the best offer for your market?
- Price: Are you in the market? Are you selling at a bargain or too expensive?
- Marketing How are things going? What’s worked so far? What can be cut or improved? What goals have you set?
Setting Your Content Marketing Objectives
When you clearly grasp your business’s present performance and status, it is possible to set achievable objectives for your content marketing.
Your business goals will be the basis of your strategy for marketing content.
Your goals should include:
- Simple: What do you wish to accomplish?
- Practical: Based on your current benchmarks, resources, and skills, Can you meet these goals?
- Limited: What are your deadlines? What are the resources you should invest in the issue?
- Measurable Which are the most critical performance indicators and metrics?
To illustrate:
“By the end of 2022, we want to boost our startup’s brand awareness by increasing organic traffic by 50% with a budget of $60,000.”
Step 3: Develop a Deep Understanding of Your Target Audience
In truth, all the fantastic content on the planet is only helpful in knowing your target audience. Therefore, it is essential to understand the objectives of your clients as well as their pain points and concerns.
Identify Your Audience Type
The first step is to consider the type of business you run and how it could affect your customers’ needs. So, for example, do you want to target individuals (as in a B2C company) or other companies (B2B)?
Although the fundamentals that guide content marketing in B2B or B2C are the same, their target audience’s preferences and preferred channels can differ.
There are simple and quick rules, but here’s what you must consider.