You knew about the importance of content marketing when you were making plans to launch a start-up. The competition in any industry is huge, so you have to make efforts for attracting your target audience.
The early stages of marketing are mostly focused on content promotion. You still don’t have social media followers and email subscribers, so you need to get the attention of potential customers through top-notch online publications. That’s where content marketing comes in.
If this is your first time dealing with this method, you might have few questions:
- Is any kind of content acceptable?
- Should I make it long or short?
- What are the most current topics? Should I focus on evergreen content?
- Do I simply focus on the quality or do I use keywords?
If you thought content marketing was simple, you’re in for a surprise. The good news is that you can get better as you practice. In the continuation, we’ll give you useful tips on how to develop the content marketing strategy for your startup.
1. Start With The Strategy
You can’t simply start writing promotional blog posts and articles. Before you get to that point, you should analyze and understand the behavior, preferences, and questions of your target customers. When you have those insights, you can start crafting great articles, videos, post, and other forms of online content.
These are the most popular approaches for strategizing:
- No strategy
Having no strategy is a strategy, in its own wicked way. According to this method, you can write without wondering what the audience wants to see, and you can publish it whenever you want to. You think of a topic and you elaborate on it. This approach can be useful for start-ups, since it keeps you motivated and flexible. However, remember that you must always stick to your niche and maintain the quality high. - Analyze the competition
Find the most popular topics and turn them into better content. When you check out the publications of competitive brands, you’ll already know what questions and issues your audience has. You can tackle the same topics, but you have to add more value and uniqueness in your content marketing. - Write for your customer persona
This is the most effective approach, although it requires diligent planning. When you find information about what your potential buyer wants to get, you can create convincing content that will make your start-up a star.
You can choose any of these three methods to develop your content marketing strategy. The important thing is to have a plan, stick to it, and upgrade it as you make progress.
2. Keyword Plans Are Necessary
The content marketing strategy has one main purpose: bring more visitors to the main website. You can achieve that effect through social media sharing, but that’s hardly enough. Keywords are attractive for the search engines, and that’s the kind of traffic you need. If you make the right keywords seem naturally into your articles, you’ll benefit in two ways:
- You’ll provide focused content that gives solutions to your readers.
- You’ll get more traffic from the search engines.
These tools can help you make keyword plans:
3. Turn To Storytelling
As a start-up marketer, your main concern is to emphasize the strengths of your product or service, as well as the advantages you have over the competition. That may turn into dry listing. Storytelling is a more appealing form of sharing information, which helps with branding. The content marketing campaign of Scentbird is a good example of how a start-up can attract the audience through stories. The team publishes short stories for perfumes on the blog.
When you’re writing stories for your brand, you need to keep the unique voice and tone consistent. You can start by explaining the reasons and motives behind your brand, and the journey of development of your product or service. This personal story will help you awaken the emotions of your readers, since you’ll show the goals and struggles behind the solutions you came up with.
The experiences of your users also make great stores. You can share them in the form of testimonials. Engage some influnecers to share the results your solutions helped them achieve. Your audience will be glad to know about the experience of other users.
4. Choose The Right Medium
A focused approach is necessary when you’re trying to promote a new brand. If you tried to be present on all social media, you would only end up overwhelmed. The choices are endless: magazines, radio, newspapers, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, WordPress, Quora… You can use all these media to tell your marketing story, and all of them can help you engage the audience. The important thing to decide is: what platforms can help you market your business really effectively?
You’ll find your answer through research. Test and analyze different media and choose the ones where your audience shows the most activity. It’s best to focus on only two platforms at start. When you achieve great results and you notice that you can maintain that activity going, it’s okay to include one more platform.
Remember: you’ll need an altered content writing and promoting strategy for each of these platforms. Podcasting, for example, relies on storytelling, whereas Pinterest imposes the need for visual content. That’s why you should stay focused on two or three platforms.
5. Rely On The Right Content Writing Tools
The factor that brings the loose ends together is quality. Without quality, you’ll only produce more useless web pages to add to the chaos that’s already present on the web. You don’t want that. Remember: you should always deliver quality and valuable solutions for your audience.
Content marketing is not simple. These tools will help you maintain the quality levels high no matter how many articles you publish:
You have to promote very readable and clean content. Complicated words and slang will only push your audience away. Thanks to this tool, you can produce content that everyone will understand.
If you need help with your content marketing strategy, you can hire expert writers at this platform. AssignmentMasters gives you access to professional editors, too. They will polish out your content, making it more focused and readable.
Choose the topics you’re focused on and Feedly will give you daily updates of the content that’s popular online. With this tool, you’ll understand what your audience likes reading and you’ll get hints of the strategies your competitors rely on.
This is a classic tool for content marketers. You can use it for keeping all your resources and ideas in a single place.
It’s not easy to promote a start-up. However, the process is really fun. There are tons of options to explore, so you can experiment and keep discovering new challenges with your content marketing strategy.
[Main Image: iStockphoto, Trout55]
Michael Morris is a digital expert. He is working in several niches. He not only follows digital trends, he is a trend maker. He is working o creating his own blog dedicated to online marketing.