Guide to Building a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Early-Stage Startup

Young entrepreneurs don’t view content marketing as a priority, and as a result, they have a lean budget for content creation. Instead, they allocate more money to other options such as online ads. However, content marketing is a legitimate way to grow your business online.

Further, content marketing can help you drive traffic to your website, thus build a decent lead base.

The guide will tell you why a content marketing strategy is essential in kickstarting your early-stage startup growth and how to create one.

Why is Content Marketing Essential for Startup?

It’s Effective and Less Costly

People don’t care about press releases unless they are from giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. So spending money on press releases and their distribution is a flawed strategy because they won’t give you the traction you’re seeking.

Instead, allocate more budget on guest post strategy because it’s a direct path to getting coverage. Generating informative, helpful articles that appeal to the target audience and publishing them on authoritative sites can help you drive traffic to the site, build high-quality backlinks and increase your Google rankings.

Further, generating opinionated thought leadership content may help you get on evet planners and media publications’ radar for speaking and interview opportunities.

Inbound marketing helps increase business leads

Paying Facebook or Google for ads can be costly, depending on your niche, and it can be as high as $50 for every AdWords click. Also, you’re not sure whether the lead will turn into a sale even after spending that much.

However, generating high-quality, unique content can generate links and discussion that builds a high ranking site on Google. So, with insightful content, you can naturally rise without paying for the privilege in order for the site to stay at the top of the search results.

The Benefits of Content Marketing Strategy

• A blog post fuels SEO which helps your site rank high on Google, and this also translates to more traffic and leads.
• Featuring branded elements on your content can help your readers recognize and remember your company, products or services.
• Content is an excellent alternative to ads. So you can create valuable content instead of ads that readers find annoying and install ad blockers. Actually, most people read about the products they want to buy on blog posts and listen to videos instead of ads. Readers are looking for brands that put them at the heart of everything they do because they are fed up with ads.
• Through content marketing, your brand can become a thought leader, and the audience is concerned about what adds value to them. That means through content, you can provide the much-needed solution that can help people solve their problems, and on the other hand, they will perceive you as a reliable source of valuable information.

Building a Content Marketing Strategy

Startups’ founders need to realize that content marketing is a long-term strategy and not a project. And so every brand should have a documented strategy because it provides goals and organization to your effort, thus maximizing content performance.

Organizations with a documented strategy are successful because they are highly committed and have sophisticated content marketing. So as startups are getting founded every day, they should have a documented strategy if they want to succeed in content marketing.

Here is how you can build a content marketing strategy.

What do you want this strategy to achieve?

It’s important to define what you want your content marketing strategy to achieve. These goals will help you when implementing them. Therefore, highlight your main intentions of developing this strategy. That means that you should state whether you want to increase the traffic on your site and by what percent, build a lead base oh how many email addresses using the free trial signups or how many app downloads.

Each of your goals should have a specific number to help you measure your success accurately.

What content types will you use?

You have to define the content types you will produce even before selecting the specific topics for your articles. The following are various types of content that your startup can use to attract target audience.

• Videos
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Blog posts
• Email newsletters
• Guest posts
• User-Generated Content White papers
• Case studies
• Press releases
• Webinars and more

These content types are unique and can help you achieve certain marketing goals. For instance, the guest posts will help you drive traffic to your site and increase awareness of your brand and offerings, while email newsletters will help you collect email addresses from these leads.

An early-stage startup can use free online tools to lower its content marketing budget, for instance, when designing images for social media posts, blog posts, and infographics.

What does your target audience want from you?

Have you defined your target audience? If so, you definitely know their problems, interests and goals. This is vital information because it helps you decide the topics that your content will have, and it’s referred to as customer-centeredness. Therefore your target audience should drive your content production but not you.

For instance, the best performing content is mostly created to answer common and relevant questions that your target customers have.

So you have to find out these issues and questions through:

• Online surveys
• What your competitors are focusing on
• Study industry reports and customer profiles

So using a list of keywords and information that you have gathered, prepare your content and prepare for its distribution.

How will your target audience find your content?

The following are some of the most effective distribution channels that you can use to reach your prospective customers.

• Email
• Social media
• Website/blog
• SEO/organic search
• Display ads
• PPC/paid search
• Content syndication

The cheapest distribution channels for startups are website/blog and social media. Therefore they can share your posts, videos and more to direct traffic to their landing pages.

Still, conducting an email marketing campaign can be less costly; however, the brand has to accumulate a lot of contact data from its leads. So it’s recommended to use blogs and social media first and then add email marketing after building enough leads and contact data.

How will you measure your results?

Measuring your performance will help you achieve your goals or improve anything that is not working well. The following are the metrics that you should track to see whether your content marketing campaign is achieving its results.

• Onsite engagement
• Lead quality and number
• SEO performance
• Website traffic
• Authority rank
• Sales

The metrics that you want to track should depend on your content strategy and startup goals. For instance, this is the way to measure your website traffic.

Google Analytics is the best free online tool for measuring your website traffic. It gives you information such as the number of people that visited your website and particular pages that they were interested in. You can see that by clicking on Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages.

More so, the tool will give you the source of traffic. This data helps you to know what you’re doing right and where you can improve in your content marketing strategy. You can get more helpful information, such as suggestions on how to improve your landing pages performance.

How will you create unique content?

Up to this point, valuable content is the only key element of your content strategy that is remaining. So now you have to decide what types of content you will be creating and how regularly you will publish it. Consistent is key, and so you have to schedule your content properly so that it can be displayed in Google search results.

Your target audience should be the primary source of your content ideas, or you can use online tools to generate the list of most popular content according to your keywords. This will help you write unique content on similar topics so that you can get a fair share of traffic as well.

Analyze and Improve

Creating and publishing your content regularly is not the end, and your job is not yet done. You have to monitor its performance using Google Analytics and adjust or improve it to maximize the benefits.

Content marketing evolves with your business, so monitoring and adjustment is a requirement for advancement.

Conclusion

Content marketing doesn’t require a huge budget, and you can monitor its performance using free tools such as Google Analytics.

Therefore your early-stage startup has a good chance of building and using its content marketing strategy to drive traffic and increase sales using these steps discussed in this post.