Jumpstart Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing Strategy: Most startups waste their time with a hit-and-miss strategy for their content marketing.

If you are handling a startup and want to increase your online presence, reach out to your audience, and take the world by storm, you will have to spend some serious time and effort on your content marketing strategy. But don’t fret; nothing is that hard if you work smart. That’s why in this post, we are going to look at some of the steps you can take to jump-start your content marketing strategy.

Know Your Target Audience

When you set up your startup, there are plenty of things you should have done before day one. One of these includes market research to know the kind of people who will most likely be attracted to your products and services. With the information that you have gathered, you can further refine it.

You can create unique buyer personas for the different types of consumers that you will be getting in touch with. These buyer personas can then be used to create content that is sure to be appealing and engaging to your audience.

Think of Your Strategy

You may be excited to proceed with your content marketing efforts ASAP. However, there’s not much point in going about it if you are still unclear about your strategy. What you have at this point are your buyer personas. You can start from there.

In your strategy, outline the many details on how you want to engage your audience through content marketing. You can think about the frequency of your publications, where you will post your content and the types of contents that you will use. Along with this, you will have to think and decide who will be writing the contents. Will it be you or will you look for a writer who can write those for you?

One important thing to remember here is that you should be able to commit yourself fully to your strategy. Writing them down is just the first step. You have to execute your plans. Writing your ideas down is also good because you can make changes along the way. You can write a note about what worked well for you and what didn’t. You can tweak it as you go along with your content marketing strategy.

Choose Your Team of Content Creators

As a startup company, maybe your budget is still tight, and you may not be able to spend a lot of money on content. However, you still have to make sure that you still place some budget for your marketing. This will go a long way in getting you where you want to be.

What you can do here is assign a person from your team to make the contents. If there’s no one available, you can always do it yourself. But if you do have a writer and marketer in your team, then you are already in good hands. What is ideal is that they know about SEO and online marketing. They have to be knowledgeable about those things so that they can be efficient in your content marketing.

If you do not have those two in your team, you can check out freelancing sites and look for reliable writers. This is one way to keep your costs down. Another is to be patient and find the cheapest bids. Or if you have money to spare, you can seek the help of creative agencies. When then have submitted their work, you can then edit it to suit your standards better.

Determine Your Topics

In your content marketing, you should have a steady flow of content getting published. To do this, you should keep a list of topics you want to write about. If possible, brainstorm with your team about the things you want to share with your audience. Make sure to write about the topics that emerged from your brainstorming sessions. Once you’ve got a list, it will be easier to ward off any writer’s block that comes along.

You can look into sites such as Quora and Reddit to see what most people are interested in and curious about in your niche. You can even be more specific about your topics. Doing so will allow you to generate more ideas. You can break down a problem into bite-sized pieces that are easier to read and comprehend.

For the topics that you have determined, you should also think about the platform where you want to publish the contents. Along with this, also consider when you want it posted. If you can iron this one, executing your strategy will be a lot easier.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Different

Your goal should be to stand out from the crowd. Don’t be afraid to not fit in. Do something that will benefit your audience and different from what other startups are doing with theirs. One way you can do this is if you can develop interactive content. You can look into the home page of the blog of Neil Patel, QuickSprout. When you input your URL into it and give your Google Analytics permission, it will be able to get data from your site. It analyzes it and gives you ideas on how to create better content.

You can also try HowMuchCostAnApp. There, you will be guided through a step by step “if-this-then-that” process. This will help you in deciding what kind of features you can put in your mobile app and its cost. These two are just examples of the interactive content you can offer your audience.

Pick a Platform

When you’re all excited about publishing your compelling content, you may be thinking of posting them on all of the social media sites. However, try to slow down a bit and reassess. Publishing content on all social media platforms will make you waste a lot of time as well as money. What you can do is refer to the market research that you have conducted so as to know where to find your prospects online.

You’ll see if they like Facebook or if they prefer Twitter more. If your startup is a B2B company, never forget to post on LinkedIn. You can use analytics so you can see the platforms that work well and those that don’t.

As you go along, tweak your strategy accordingly. This will let you narrow things down and determine the most efficient channels and platforms for your target audience.

Takeaway

When you have successfully followed the steps above, it’s starting to get the ball rolling and publish your content on ideal platforms. Remember, though that this is just the first step of your content marketing strategy. You should also be able to promote your content. Otherwise, it will just disappear and be forgotten.

You have to get serious about your strategy in content marketing. Be active on social media platforms and engage your audience. You can promote your old content along with your new content. As long as it is still relevant and that it is among your best contents, it will get a lot of mileage.

Don’t forget to use analytics in every step of the way so you can continually get it better and optimize your contents as well as your overall content marketing strategy. Keep in mind that content marketing is always a work in progress, and you can always get better at it.