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Creating a content marketing strategy for a startup is enough to make any founder frustrated, not to talk of learning how to use content marketing for startups.
There are so many factors to consider like what kind of content to be created, what channels to use, should you create social media content, what social media platform best suits your business, etc. Many of these questions also need to be answered before implementing content marketing for your startup.
It’s a huge priority to market your startup’s product because how else do you reach your target audience? But planning to use content marketing for startups without having a solid, long-term strategy can lead to failure. Without a laid-out objective, a direction, and ways to measure your success can make your efforts be in vain.
In this age, it’s not new knowledge that content is king in any brand’s digital marketing strategy. In fact, Semrush’s poll on content marketing shows that 67.9% of people think startups should invest in content marketing in their early stages of building. This, and other reasons are why it’s important to use content marketing for startups.
In this article, I’ll discuss reasons why it’s important to use content marketing for startups, if your startup needs content marketing, should your startup invest in content marketing, the types of content your startup can create, and ways your startup can use content marketing.
Does Your Startup Need Content Marketing?
Learning to use content marketing for startups is important because content marketing is a cost-effective way of building brand awareness for startups and small businesses. Content marketing can help you connect your startup with potential customers with search engine optimization (SEO), by sharing valuable information with articles and blog posts. Hence, this can be a very effective way of generating website traffic and leads that can be turned into potential customers even if they’ve never heard of your company before.
On the other hand, using paid advertising channels like targeted search and social media ads are powerful ways of reaching targeted audiences and can bring effective short-term success if used rightly. However, organic content like articles and blog posts, lead magnets, video content marketing, etc have longer effects when you use content marketing for startups like yours because they bring enough traffic to your business’s website.
If your business is new or hasn’t even launched you can use content marketing to create awareness for your business to build a fundamental audience for your startup. So you don’t need to worry about the stage your business is at. Pre-launch, or early-stage, content marketing can build your startup’s awareness if used rightly.
A lot of confusion might spring up when it comes to determining how to use content marketing for startups like yours based on the stage your startup is at. A great way to begin your content marketing is to create low-funnel content line case studies (especially if your business is B2B), blog posts, and articles.
Should Your Startup Invest In Content Marketing
The major question is, without content marketing, how do you reach your audience? Can you see why you need to use content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours now?
Content marketing helps you reach your desired audience and without content marketing, there’s no way for you to achieve that online.
Being transparent is the key to convincing your CEO, investors, or board to invest in content marketing for your startup. You need to be extremely clear on the benefits of content marketing for your startup and show what content marketing strategy you’re using, and the metric you’ll be applying to measure the success of the strategy while also making sure to set realistic expectations for the content marketing strategy.
For instance, people that invest in startups that operate in a very narrow niche might see that there’s not enough traffic for their focus keyword so they may ask, “why bother?”.
In reality, sometimes, you need to build your brand’s awareness and demand for your product first using content marketing.
In this case, to use content marketing for startups like yours, this is where top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content and SEO come into play. Startups facing this challenge find out they attract hyper-targeted traffic with their content, meaning they can dominate their niche soon enough.
It’s very important to not be over-expectant with content marketing as it doesn’t give overnight success. It requires proper planning, time, patience, hard work, and dedication.
You have to operate at the right time, in the right niche. At the inception of your marketing strategy, while working on growing your organic traffic, you’re going to lose money, but it’s a channel that compounds in the end. As you build authority within your niche, it gets ranking new pieces, making your customer acquisition cost from the channel generally low.
Hence, while ads are doing great for your business in the short term, if you’re focused on reducing your customer acquisition cost, organic traffic and marketing is a really great investment so, it’s important to use content marketing for startups like yours.
Types Of Contents Your Startup Can Create
With the internet’s growth daily, there’s no limit to the types of content you can create and use for content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours. The only factor that might determine the type of content you can create is your budget and imagination. However, asides from these factors, here are the types of content you can create for your startup or small business’s content marketing:
Blog Posts And Articles
Blog posts and articles are top-of-the-funnel content that is effective in starting a conversation and sharing important information with your audience. You can announce your product launches and updates, information about products, etc with your audience. If you’re looking to use content marketing for startups like yours, blog posts and articles are great content types you can use.
Lead Magnets
Otherwise known as gated content, this content requires an email address or any other form of contact details before it can be accessed. This content can be used to grow your email lists thereby creating leads for your business. Lead magnets are valuable assets for startups looking to use content marketing to build a mailing list or lead list.
Sales Enablement
This content can be used to support your sales team in answering frequently asked questions, client onboarding, and demonstrating how to use your product or share product knowledge and processes. If you want to use content marketing for startups like yours, developing this kind of content is a productive way to link sales and marketing efforts to create a stronger bond between the two areas.
Social media content
Social media is the most used part of the internet hence, it’s important to use content marketing for startups in this section of the internet. Creating content for social media is very easy as this content may include texts, images, and videos. It’s an awesome place to create your brand awareness with content, get feedback, and talk to your audience directly.
Email Marketing
After building your lists with lead magnets, you need to create email contents to be sent to your email subscribers. The email is the most underrated mode of marketing that requires a very low cost of running and gives a high success rate because you’re communicating with your leads directly. With this, it’s important to use content marketing for startups like yours.
Videos
With how some specific social media platforms are leaning towards sharing video content, it’s important to use video content for your startup. Videos are perfect for explainers, product walk-through, and descriptions, etc.
Videos can push traffic to your business’s website hence why you need to use content marketing for startups like yours.
Podcasts
Although it’s not so important for startups to use this type of content, podcasts are a budding model of content marketing that’s seen its rise during the pandemic days. Now you can have a loyal podcast audience looking to listen to you talk about your products or services.
7 Productive Ways Your Startup Can Use Content Marketing
To use content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours, it’s important to understand the most effective techniques to create and distribute content on the internet. For utmost success, the importance of having a working content marketing strategy cannot be overemphasized. Here are ways you can develop effective content marketing strategies:
Research Industry Hot Topics
As a startup, you’re definitely just starting out with your content marketing hence you might be a bit lost on creating a successful content marketing strategy. To use content marketing for startups like yours, you need to research your industry and content that has already been successful. This means you need to research content that’s been applied successfully to your target audience and come up with better content ideas to beat them.
You can use tools like Buzzsumo and exploding topics to research trending and popular topics to aid you in creating content for your content marketing.
The aim of a good content strategy is to create content that’s completely fresh based on results gotten from your research. What you create should be more useful, engaging, and interesting than content created by your competitors.
Choose Your Keywords And Get Creative With Content Ideas
To use content marketing for startups and create successful content, keyword research is important. It’s important to get the right keyword because you need to reach the right audience.
There are several keyword tools you can use to research your keywords and choose. You need to also decide if you’ll be using short-tail keywords on long-tail keywords although it’s advantageous to use long-tail keywords as they help you make your content more specific and reach a more specific audience. It also aids in making it easy for search engines to find your content whenever users use the keyword.
After determining your keyword, you need to get creative with content ideas. You can get content ideas from forums, news, publications, etc. With a little research, you can get that next content idea for your brand.
Here’s an article to help you with keyword research for better SEO practices.
Choose Your Channel Of Distribution
To get the most of your marketing strategy when you use content marketing for startups like yours, you need to go where the audience is. Make sure to focus on the right channel at the right time.
You can choose social media, email, blogs, or even all the channels. With a good content schedule, you can implement all the channels of distribution by choosing the days and times you want to engage the particular channel of distribution. You can research the best times to engage each channel to help you create a better, and more effective content schedule.
Be Consistent
Consistency is key if you want to use content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours. It’s important to dish out content on a regular basis to build authenticity with your readers and authority with the search engine.
Your content marketing should have a content schedule that you adhere to steadily. You can have blog posts created weekly, social media posts every three days, etc. depending on your goal for your content marketing. You can even send in weekly digest emails to your email lists to engage them and turn them into potential customers in the long run.
Write About Topics In Your Niche
To set yourself apart from the crowd and create unique content, you can write about niche topics that are not talked about in your industry. Instead of creating competition by going for broader topics, you can use content marketing for startups like yours in a better way by writing about topics within your niche that are barely talked about.
The advantages of this include- reduction in the level of competition you face, the establishment of authority within your niche, making your brand unique from the crowd.
Finding and writing about niche topics in your industry requires you to research the most specific topics in the industry. To achieve this, you can focus on using long-tail keywords while doing your keyword research.
Use The Right Tools
There are tons of content planning, collaboration, and SEO research tools on the internet. You can take advantage of this to create better content and use content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours.
Automate your content planning, production, and analytics. These tools will help you create better content that helps you get successful with your content marketing strategy.
Measure Your Success
Most content marketing strategies leave out this step but it’s very important to measure the success of your marketing strategy to know how to tweak the strategy for better success.
This will help you determine if your content marketing strategy is successful or not. With tools like google analytics, you can easily measure the success of your strategy. This helps you use content marketing for startups and small businesses like yours in better ways.