Your Eight-Step Strategy for Content Marketing Supremacy
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to a larger audience and generate leads (and an essential element of an effective digital marketing strategy for startups). It can help startups build brand identity and connect with potential customers. It’s also highly cost-effective, with an amazing return on investment when planned and implemented strategically.
Content marketing is the platform on which inbound marketing exists. It is the fuel that powers organic traffic, and that’s the potential to grow your customer numbers exponentially.
How does this happen? Imagine producing a piece of content that is considered so valuable that everyone who reads it shares it with their ten best friends. That’s not a trickle of interest in your product or services. That’s a tsunami. And not one of those visitors to your website has cost you a single cent more to attract than your original investment.
How to strategize content marketing for startups
A content marketing plan is a must-have for startups. The plan will help you understand the needs of your audience and identify the right channels to reach them, and the content that will engage them.
Here are our content marketing tips for startups, developed as an eight-step content marketing strategy.
-
Align your content with your business model
A business model is a plan for how a company will make money. It’s the blueprint that guides everything from how you create content to who you target and what pricing strategy you use.
A business model can be as simple as “We sell products,” or as complex as “We sell advertising space, we sell data analytics, we have an e-commerce site, and we offer consulting services.”
No matter what your business model, it’s important to align your content with it. That way, you’ll know how to create, publish, distribute, and manage your content to maximize ROI. This is a process that helps you:
-
Align content strategy to your company’s goals
-
Know your audience
-
Plan what content to create
-
Decide where to publish the content
-
Manage the published material
You shouldn’t move on from this step until you have documented all the above.
-
Understand your target audience
Understanding your target audience is crucial when it comes to content marketing. You need to know who you are talking to and what they want. The more relevant your content is for them, the more likely they will be to share it with their network. The following are some ways to gain a better understanding of your target audience:
-
Determine their demographics (age, gender, location)
-
Find out what they like and dislike
-
Consider their buying habits
-
Find out what they do on social media
-
Review their browsing history
It’s a lot of research to do ─ for example, by surveys, interviews, or other forms of feedback from your customers, and by examining your highest-value customers currently ─ but this work must be done.
-
Choose the appropriate keywords
Keywords are essential for SEO strategy because they tell search engines what your content is about, which helps them decide how to rank it. And ranking is essential because the higher-ranked your content is, the more likely it is to be visited by your target audience.
It's important to remember that keywords are not just limited to words on the page ─ they can also include words in the title and meta description, as well as in other areas of the page.
-
Create value content to help your audience achieve its goals
Stop thinking about your company as one that sells products or services. Think of yourself as a publisher, too. The content that you produce must be informative, engaging, entertaining, and valuable to your audience.
-
Get inspiration and ideas for your content
Sometimes the perfect topic or idea can be hard to find. Oftentimes, startups ask themselves, “What am I going to write about? What should I write about?”
This is an area in which real value is added by using a content marketing agency for startups. They have access to data, information, and tools that will benefit you directly when brainstorming content ideas and creating a content diary.
We’ve collaborated with clients who have found it difficult to produce more than a handful of blog post ideas ─ within an hour or two of brainstorming together, we have produced 6 to 12 months of valuable and effective draft content titles.
-
Choose your format and distribution channels
There are many formats and channels that you can use for your marketing efforts.
Blogs are one type of format that has been used by marketers for years now.
Social media is another popular channel for marketers because it allows them to connect with people in real-time and promote their content on the fly.
Podcasts and videos are recordings posted on the internet for downloading to a personal computer or portable media player.
Webinars are also another fantastic way to reach people online because they allow you to share information live with an audience while also getting feedback from them in real-time as well.
Focus your content on the content format and channel where your audience is most likely to be found.
-
Repurpose your content to squeeze all the juice out of your ideas
In truth, you’ll need to use several channels to reach your audience ─ focusing on where you are most likely to find them, and augmenting it with other channels to support your main content production. And so, we come to repurposing.
Repurposing content is a wonderful way to get more mileage out of your work. It’s when you take an existing piece of content and use it in a unique way or for a different audience.
For example, if you have authored an article on how to get your cat to stop scratching the sofa, you could repurpose that article into a blog post about how to keep cats from scratching furniture in general. You could also repurpose that article into an infographic on the same topic. Then produce a podcast, and social media posts too.
-
Use tools to improve the quality of your blog posts and other content
Content quality is essential. Fortunately, there are many tools that you can use to improve the quality of your content.
For example, at the writing level, tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway can help you avoid poor spelling and grammar. Research tools (including Google) are essential to ensure you don’t publish erroneous information. You should also use systems like SEMrush to help write content with the highest SEO value.
By the way, there is no substitute for using a professional writer. They will save you time, produce high-quality, audience-engaging content, and deliver content that uses all the tricks of SEO to attract and retain a valuable audience.
You’ll also need to continually monitor and adjust your content production based on visitor numbers, click-throughs, time on page, bounces, conversions, and a host of other metrics that a content marketing agency has the tools to monitor. Again, all of this is essential to maximize your ROI.
At BlabberJax, we specialize in developing effective and successful content marketing strategies and execution for startups, helping our clients to develop their digital presence and take advantage of it within their marketing budgets.
To learn more, use the form below to contact BlabberJax now.