Content marketing for startups, is that necessary? Yes. Are you new to the startup playground and are wondering what content marketing has to do with you? Your business relies on marketing. Content marketing is as essential as your business strategy. Today, marketing is everything. Without marketing, reaching the audience with your products and services is impossible. But how can content marketing help your business grow and reach your target audience?
Over the past decade, studies have shown that content marketing generated 97% more backlinks and 55% more search traffic, leading to 5x more leads. We have curated a list of strategies for content marketing for startups.
Why Does your Startup need content marketing?
Ask yourself what you want from your startup. It’s customers! You build products or services that must reach your potential customers or prospects. People prefer content about the product that you sell. They are interested in reading about the facts and figures to make buying decisions.
People have started relying on Google for solutions. They go to the internet to get answers to their questions. Google rewards this trust by returning trustworthy articles on the SERP result page. Your audience will also discover your business through the useful, trustworthy blog article you have posted on your website. Once they are at your website, there are a lot of possibilities to turn them into customers.
Not just lead generation, your content is readily available on your website all the time for others who are searching for a solution to their pain points. When you have more content about your product, you build trust and are considered an expert in your niche.
How Relevant Is Content Marketing for Startups?
Before starting your business, you can reach your targeted audience through content marketing strategies, blogs, social media posts, and related content. They offer a testing ground to open up conversations and get feedback from the audience. You can start building your content by getting ideas from industry experts and also include case studies in your content strategy. The early benefits of the blog are that you get regular visitors, develop a community, and attract new prospects.
9 Best Strategies to Follow
1. Find an Idea that Sells
The first step in content marketing for startups is to find an idea that sells. When you start a content marketing campaign, you have no idea where to start. For a fail-proof strategy, you can pick ideas from already successful content. Or, you can research and find out what your audience likes. There are numerous tools to find trending and popular topics for your content marketing strategy. For example, you can use tools like BuzzSumo to find articles that have been shared the most or are currently trending. You can filter the results according to your domain and implement those ideas into your strategy for startups.
2. Align Your Content Marketing Strategy with Your Business Goal
Your strategy should outline your business and deliver what was promised to your customers. There is no generic template for a business; you need to develop your strategy. It should be detailed enough to address your target audience and accomplish your business goals.
Business goals differ from business to business. For some, it might bring traffic; for others, it could be the sales or subscribers. Whatever the goal, the content strategy must achieve these through the content. Repurpose your blog post, and break your large article into smaller pieces of shareable content on social media to bring more traffic to your website.
Your website must include either a subscription form, collect emails, or invite the user for a Call to action (CTA) and redirect them to your landing page.
3. Set Content Marketing Goals
Create your startup goal for an effective content marketing strategy, such as delivering service to a business or an individual. You must make a note that the service that you offer to users is new and useful. Your goal must also be to deliver ethical and timely services to your customers. Ensure that your content marketing goals follow SMART KPIs that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Content Marketing Plan – After setting a goal, which is the first step in your business, you can proceed with your plan. Your plan includes how you are going to achieve your business goal. It consists of a long-term, short-term, weekly, monthly, and quarterly plan.
The content plan consists of what content you will write, who will write it when it will be published, and on what channels you are distributing your content.
Content Marketing Strategy – In its wide connotation, the content marketing strategy implies the planning, developing, and managing of content. It includes keyword research, creating different types of content such as blogs, visuals, and webinars, and how to implement CTAs in your webpage.
4. Understand Your Target Audience
Your marketing strategy is effective only if it leads to your business goals. First, you must strategically identify the audience from whom your service would benefit. This can help you determine what kind of topics, ideas, and keywords you need to work with. Your target audience can be another business or an individual.
In a B2B, identify how you can bring value to their business by analyzing theirs and their competitors’ sales. You can run campaigns to pitch to them and talk about your solutions. Through email marketing, you can show how your service answers their pain points.
When your startup offers a software solution that an individual can use, do research to find your user’s behavior, demographics, psychographics, and challenges.
5. Write Guest Posts
An effective step in content marketing for startups is to write guest posts. With a startup company, you might be struggling to build an audience for your business. You might have the perfect solution for your customer and stellar content, but your business isn’t going anywhere without any buyers. Think of another marketing channel when it is hard to market your startup product effectively.
The simplest way is to write guest posts on established, reputable, and high-authority sites. There are already customers and loyal followers of these blogs, and when you collaborate with such businesses, you get valuable backlinks that drive traffic to your website.
6. Create Impressive Visuals
Include visuals that explain your products, services, and business flow in your content marketing for startups. Visual content marketing includes images, videos, and infographics on blog posts. Our brain is crafted to perceive visuals as they are more engaging and appealing to the target audience. It leverages human visual systems to convey information quickly to achieve your content marketing goals. You can plan for any of these visuals, such as:
- Infographic.
- Video.
- Photo.
- Gifs.
- Screenshots.
- Illustrations.
- Statistics.
- Slideshare.
- Interactive content.
- Virtual Reality Videos.
- Graphs.
7. Identify Your Content Pillar
Establishing your content pillar and gradually spinning clusters around it is best practice. Generally, the pillar content is a long-form article that covers the basic details of your product. It must invoke interest in the readers to delve into the details by clicking on the links in the article, which are the cluster topics that talk briefly about a subtopic.
SEO strategy focused on content pillars help you rank for multiple keywords on search engines. Better rankings make your brand reach more people, get more traffic, and more leads.
Tone – you can set the tone of your article as formal, informative, humorous, and interesting. It depends on your target audiences, such as the youth section or other stakeholders.
8. Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is nothing new and uses a celebrity’s power to affect others’ purchasing decisions using his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with the audience.
Online influencers collaborate with a brand in digital marketing to market their products or services. For a startup, include influencer marketing in the content marketing strategy to plan the budget and research what goes well with the audience.
9. Decide on Your Distribution Channels
The final step in content marketing for startups is to decide your distribution channel. After you are done with your content marketing strategy, plan on promoting your content on any marketing channels to distribute your content effectively. You can share and promote the content that you create.
Distribution channels are divided into three main types: owned, earned, and paid. Owned channels are your website, your social media handle, and the blog posts that you create. Earned channels are the mentions on social media, shares, likes, reviews, and guest posts. Paid channels are Pay Per Click (PPC), targeted ads, influencers, and retargeting.
FAQs
What serves as content marketing’s primary objective?
By producing and disseminating relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media, content marketing is a marketing tactic used to draw in, hold onto, and grow an audience. When it’s time to buy what you sell, people will think of your company first thanks to this strategy’s promotion of brand awareness and establishment of competence.
Why Content Marketing Is a Good Investment for Startups?
Publishing content for your company is just a small part of content marketing. As more individuals become aware of the importance of content marketing, the industry is flourishing. Also true for new businesses. As a startup, you can have a limited budget, making it impractical to invest in numerous marketing strategies. This is where content marketing comes to the rescue as a way to save money while making sure your brand reaches the right demographic.
Can content marketing be relied upon by a new brand?
In spite of the fact that content marketing is crucial for startups, 90% of B2B organizations use it as part of their marketing plan, according to a recent study by CMI and MarketingProfs.
Closing Thoughts
Content marketing for startups is becoming more essential in executing your business plans. You might have cutting-edge technologies, services, and products. But how will you take it to your target audience? How will people know that you are giving them the solution they need? Through content marketing.
Research what your competitors are doing and try to imitate their proven winning strategies. You can brainstorm for new initiatives and try to experiment with those in your content marketing strategy. Keep innovating and embracing newer technologies; your audience will love it when you try things to reach them.
Do you own a startup business? Are you wondering whether to adapt content marketing for your brand? We encourage you to go with the idea and if you feel you need some advice, suggestions, or win-win strategies, feel free to contact us. Keep reading our latest blogs for more content marketing tips for startups and different case studies.
