In this post we go over 10 best content marketing tips for startups.
No one can dispel the veracity of the saying, “Content is king.” Because it indeed is king, and over time it has proven to be the lifeblood of any organization or startup that puts out content. Content is one of the ways to keep a brand or startup relevant. For every startup, there are tons of relevant content that they can create to connect with a relevant audience. And knowing how to market the content is key to a successful content marketing campaign. In this guide, we will dig deep into the science of content marketing and provide some effective tips that startups can use to market their content.
10 Best Content Marketing Tips for Startups
1. Keep up with hot trends in the industry.
There are different trends across various industries, and for any content you are going to create, make sure it is in touch with the new things in your industry. Check out popular news outlets, forums, and blogs to learn about viral topics, trends, and breakthroughs. Just make sure any content inspiration you are using is one that is suitable for your target audience.
Your content goal should be about creating something fresh, more interesting, and more valuable than anything that you can find. For instance, if you find an article about a trending topic that you would like to create content around, you can take a step higher than just producing another article. You can create a more detailed infographic or create a script for a YouTube video. Your content should be captivating and of immense value to your target audience.
2. Audience Development and Persona Research
Your content marketing effort is only as effective as the leads it generates. No matter how well-placed your marketing campaigns are or how much reach they have depends on your audience. If you have thousands of views every month and only ten of those views are from your relevant audience, then you are wasting time and effort with your marketing campaign.
Thus, the best strategy is to first identify those that your content will be targeting so that you can know the ideas, topics, and keywords your content will be made up of. Below are the indicators used to identify your relevant audience:
- Demographics: Here, you consider the gender of your audience, their age, location, ethnicity, job position/title, income, etc.
- Psychographics: This where you take into account things like interests, habits, hobbies, beliefs, etc.
- Pain Points and Challenges: What kind of problem does your product or service solve? Relate it to your audience and identify the challenges they might be facing that prompted them to search for your product.
- Type of Content that appeals to them: Is there a particular content format or style that appeals to them?
- Source of Information: Where is your target audience looking for information? You need to know this so that you can get the best distribution channel for your content.
- How is your content helping? Is your content valuable enough to give your relevant audience all the information they are looking for? You have to make sure of this.
3. Make your content brand-reflective
Every brand has a voice and story unique to it. Thus, when you are creating your content, make sure it stays consistent with your brand’s story and voice. This way, you can remain unique and easily recognizable. Make sure your content creators take into account minor technical details like formatting type, fonts, colors, etc. when creating content for your brand.
Your brand’s personality must align with the voice of your content. To set a voice for your content, select some adjectives to qualify your brand, and create your content along with that personality. Is your brand youth savvy, humorous or friendly? Knowing this will help you create more value-driven content that reflects your brand.
4. Make your content SEO-proof
In content creation, creativity is the most important, but with poor SEO, all of that creativity goes to naught. Your target should be to get the best SEO ranking no matter where you publish your content. Tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner are useful for purposes like these. You can make use of them to know the trending keywords in your industry so that you can get good rankings on search engines. Some other things to keep in mind when making your content SEO-proof include:
- Your articles should be long (2000+ words)
- Include high-quality visual elements to your content.
- Avoid stuffing the content with keywords.
- Make the keyword density as natural as possible.
- Make your page speed faster and smoother.
- Create content around multi-faceted and multi-angled topics.
5. Implement the AIDA Model
The goal of content creation and marketing is to achieve conversions. The AIDA model is a useful strategy that digital marketing experts usually recommend to startups and brands. AIDA is an acronym that describes different stages of the customer conversion funnel.
“A” stands for Awareness, “I” stands for Interest, “D” stands for Desire, and A stands for Action. Let’s check out how you can apply this model to your startup brand.
- Awareness: This is the stage of attracting Awareness and where the theory of “Creative Disruption” comes into play. At this stage, you attract the customer’s attention and introduce your brand or product to them. A themed newsletter with a targeted message is one of the common approaches to do this.
- Interest: The most challenging part is maintaining the interest of the customer. At this stage, you have the take the most relevant stuff seriously. Point out the most interesting and valuable facts about your product to the customer to spark their interest.
- Desire: Once you have captured your audience’s attention, you still need to persuade them to realize that they need your product. Posting your content on your social media platforms, adding call-to-actions to your articles and blogs, and hiring influencers or well-known bloggers to talk about your product are all effective in making your audience want to experience your product.
- Action: At this last stage of the AIDA model, and this is where the customer takes action, and the conversion takes place. Some tricks to use include “LIMITED OFFER,” “FREE SHIPPING FOR A LIMITED TIME.” These can get the audience to feel a sense of urgency that they have to take action immediately.
6. Use High-Authority Distribution Channels
One thing that most new startups struggle with is building an audience. No matter how well-crafted your content is, if you do not have an audience to see it, marketing your startup brand may be challenging. This means you have to find a channel with an existing audience similar to yours that will help you reach an established pool of audience. High-authority websites that allow guest posts are perfect for this. By submitting your content to these websites, you can get quality backlinks and traffic to your site, and you will be supplying them with fresh, valuable content. If you do not know how to find the best guest-blogging opportunities, here are some pointers. Search Google with any of the following
Your keyword + “write for us.”
Your keyword + “Contribute.”
Your keyword + “guest blogging.”
Your keyword + “become a contributor.”
For instance, if your startup is a Virtual Reality startup, and you are trying to get your marketing strategy right, you will have to look for websites that offer guest posting opportunities to startups. You can use terms like “Startup Virtual Reality wrote for us,” “Startup guest posting,” etc. to find websites that can host your content. You can then shortlist your choice based on the domain authority of each of them.
Domain Authority refers to the rating of the website’s quality and reputation. A website with high domain authority will give your content better visibility and consequently drive better traffic to your website.
7. Establish your distribution channels
We already mentioned a mode of reaching your audience above, which is guest posting, but you need more than that when marketing your content. You have to establish the right promotional channels for your content. Check out some ideas below:
Organic Search: This is the result of your SEO efforts that determine how your content ranks on search engines. With the right primary and secondary keywords, and the right usage, your content can get a good organic search ranking.
- Newsletters: Email newsletters are effective if you have various content to send out. You can send a fragment of your content as Email newsletters, and create other chances of getting conversions.
- Social Media: Posting your content on different social media platforms is another way of marketing it and reaching more audiences.
- Third-party distribution: You can work with influencers to post your content for you so that you can tap into their audience. According to a recent Nielsen survey, more than 90% of consumers believe more in peer recommendations (influencers) compared to the 33% that trust traditional advertisements. So, you should work with the influencers in your industry to get your content out there and your products to the right audience.
8. Create a Calendar
For effective content marketing, you will have to distribute your content across different platforms and channels. It is also important that you post content regularly so that you can be in the face of your audience all the time. Having a content calendar is one of the ways to keep up the pace of your content publishing. You will find a lot of tools that you can use to create a content publishing calendar, and some of them include ProofHub, Evernote, Trust My Paper, and CoSchedule.
9. Measure your Marketing Results
Now that you have put everything in place and you have put your content out on different channels, you should not observe their performance to see if you are close to your goals yet. As mentioned earlier, content marketing is aimed at conversions, and you have to check if your content is doing that for your startup. A marketing campaign not getting you close to your goals is a wasted effort.
10. Set Up Your Key Performance Indicators
This is the last step in a standard content marketing plan. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are milestones that you set for your content marketing campaign to ensure that you are doing the right thing with your content. Putting KPIs in place will help you track how well your startup is doing in relation to its goals. There are different milestones for every plan you set in motion, and checking these milestones to see if you meet them will help you evaluate your startup’s performance. Key performance indicators for startups may include the amount of website traffic, sales, revenues, SEO performance, social media metrics, etc. KPIs usually deal with specific numbers which may include all or any of the following:
- Bring in a certain amount of revenue over a fixed period (e.g., a month, quarter, or a year).
- Acquire a specific number of email subscribers.
- Achieve an increase in website traffic.
- Improve SEO rankings and, consequently, website traffic.
- Get a specific number of social media analytics and interactions.
KPIs are somewhat similar to your content marketing goals, but KPIs are more specific. After you have established your KPIs, you can then focus on those goals. KPIs are part of your goals, but not all your goals are KPIs.
Conclusion
Whether your startup is new or already established, these ten effective tips for content marketing for startups are beneficial to your content marketing efforts. These tips are straightforward and easy to implement. All you need is to know what appeals to your target audience and the most suitable channels where they can see your content.
Content marketing is unlikely to go away anytime soon. It has proven to be an integral factor for boosting the reputation of companies and startups, and when handled professionally, its benefits are innumerable. Apply these tips when putting your startup’s content marketing strategy together and reap the benefits of effective content marketing.
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