It’s more than creating a business plan. Your startup marketing strategy must be designed to increase awareness and expose your brand to the right people. The difference between success and failure could be in the content marketing of startups.
Content marketing is an excellent tool for startups. It helps spread the word about your business. You may only know that you exist if your business is brand new. Many content marketing tips are geared toward established companies. However, it will only help you if your audience is built.
You will need more resources to market if you are starting. Content marketing is an excellent fit because you can create a highly successful content marketing plan with a small budget.
For content marketing, set goals
Startups are more critical than any other type of business to be efficient with their resources and time.
When starting a business, you often have a limited budget and a small team. There are also hundreds of tasks that require your attention.
Startup founders work long hours because 80-hour working weeks are standard. When you start a business, you’ll likely work with others’ money or bootstrapping. You are trying to do everything yourself, and you must manage many essential things for your business.
In this situation, the last thing you want is to save time on marketing activities that don’t bring you any benefits.
Content marketing should be part of every startup’s marketing strategy. It offers a higher return on investment than other forms of marketing.
You can’t just assume that content marketing is a one-off effort and expect to see a high ROI. To ensure that you stay on track and are efficient with your time, it is essential to set goals and revisit them regularly.
It’s best to concentrate on a few key performance indicators (KPIs) when setting goals. Before picking these KPIs, you must know what you are trying to accomplish with content marketing. This could include:
Building brand trust and awareness
Traffic to your site
Increase followers and engagement via social media
Generate leads and sales
Most businesses will have many of these goals. It is best to focus on a few key goals when starting. Once you have identified your primary goals, you can define KPIs to measure and track.
Your KPIs should be related to your website, emails, and social media metrics. You should usually define specific numbers like:
You can only have a certain number of people on your email mailing list.
Increase your website traffic by a percentage.
Reaching a certain number of social media followers
You can improve your search engine rankings by aiming at a specific SERP rank or increasing your main keywords.
Increase brand mentions online by a percentage.
Reduce your website bounce rate by a certain percentage.
Each month, a certain number of whitepapers or e-books are downloaded.
Increase your conversion rate by a certain amount.
Understanding and defining your Audience
Next, you need to clearly understand who you are talking to when creating your content. This is a crucial step because if you don’t get the point, your content will be less effective, regardless of how high the quality is.
It is an excellent tool for understanding your audience. You can create buyer/audience personas that represent crucial segments of your audience.
An audience persona can be described as a fictional character representing a particular audience segment. It can be hard to imagine the audience you are writing content for. This mental picture and description can be helpful for you when you are writing content for an audience.
This is not a way to create personas from nothing but to study your target market and audience to understand them better. This research should include the following:
Demographics like age, gender, and location.
Their preferences and likes
Their problems and needs
What they do online and what social networks.
Which type of content do they prefer to consume? Short social media posts, long-form blog posts, infographics, or videos?
Search for Competitors and Current Content
It’s worth researching your audience and other businesses in your niche or industry.
What kind of content is this type of content producing? What content is attracting the most attention? What is the audience’s online communication with them?
Based on successful businesses in your area, these questions will help you create a plan to achieve success. This is where AI and automation software can be beneficial. You can try out the many competitive Intelligence tools on the market and choose the ones you like the best.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should copy all content from another blog. If you can identify the best content, you can save time and maximize your ROI by creating similar content.
Plan out, publish, and promote your content.
You should know the type of content you want to create and where it should be published.
Next, you need to plan your content marketing activities using a calendar. The content calendar will allow you to stay on top of content promotion and production and help ensure your content marketing aligns with your overall marketing strategy.
It doesn’t matter how busy you are or how little time you have; sticking to your content plan is essential. You won’t get any results if you publish a lot of content quickly and then stop publishing for several weeks. A content calendar is your best tool to help you stick to a publishing schedule.
Analyze your Content Success and Recommendations
Once you publish a piece of content, your job still needs to be completed. You must constantly analyze your content marketing campaigns to identify areas that need improvement.
This is where you should refer to your KPIs to measure your progress and optimize content processes. Reaching your content goals may take a while, but that’s okay.