Whatever business you take, regardless of its specifics and scale, content marketing will be a vital part of its marketing strategy. From small startups to large enterprises, content marketing agencies and in-house teams are engaged to solve a single issue – increase brand awareness and revenue.
The main purpose of content marketing is to prove your product or service authority to search engines, audiences, and prospective partners. Let’s figure out the process and challenges that can be solved with this type of marketing.
Why Startups Focus On Content Marketing
After creating a solid product the main task for a startup is to make the world know about it. The terms usually depend on investments and efforts made. One of the most cost-efficient and long-term means is building an organic content marketing strategy.
An effective content marketing plan can solve many issues that may arise in a new project:
- Developing brand awareness of product or service
- Attracting potential customers and generating leads
- Building trust between users and the company
This content marketing plan provides the creation of relevant and consistent organic content. It can have various forms, from blog posts, manuals, and landing pages to videos and podcasts. Any content within this approach can have a long-term impact. If it is regularly updated and maintained it can bring tons of traffic for years. Paid advertising can also be an excellent way to find your audience with a significant short-term impact. In a perfect content marketing world, these two approaches should live in synergy.
Content marketing is cost-effective
In managing young startups, limited resources often become a stumbling block for further development and growth. With this concern in mind, the marketing team tries to find the most cost-effective way to develop brand awareness and attract potential customers.
High-quality and consistent content is the best way for this.
Content marketing for startups requires fewer funds invested. It will not take all money in the world to hire a skilled and experienced content marketing team. Sure, at some point you will have an idea to manage content on your own. But without a professional attitude and specific content marketing-oriented knowledge, this will not be successful. Since content marketing for startups is very flexible, services that will fit your budget can be easily found.
Maximizing the brand presence
Brand awareness is the first aspect to pay attention to while planning a marketing campaign. No matter how good the service is, if potential customers don’t know about it, it costs nothing.
The important thing is to get known to the audience. But it is more important to stay afloat and remain in contact with customers. By strengthening relationships with a customer you bring up a loyal community that can become your brand advocate. Word of mouth still remains the best way to popularize a product.
Attracting and retaining customers
Maximizing brand awareness leads to generating more traffic to the website and further growth of the audience. By making content relevant and providing real value you will attract users. Manuals and use cases will solve netizens’ issues proving the authority and expertise of the brand.
But it is important to remember that there is little sense in attracting customers if you can’t retain them. The common truth of marketing is that acquisition of a client costs more than his retention. That is the cornerstone of Return-On-Investment. Content marketing allows to hold this delicate balance and improve the general profitability of the project.
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy for Startup
As with any project or campaign, content marketing strategy requires detailed research. Let’s have a look at those aspects of research that have a decisive meaning in the plan.
Persona research
For you, as a marketer, it is necessary to figure out your target audience. Identifying who your content is aimed at will help to set a pool of topics and keywords that should be covered in your writing. Here are some of those characteristics that can be crucial in the research.
- Demographics. To determine the type of content that will be helpful, it is necessary to figure out the age, gender, location, and job of your potential customer.
- Psychographics. Information about the hobbies, interests, and habits of potential users will let you choose the topics to write about.
- Type of Content They Prefer. Details about the type of preferred content will help to find a suitable approach, structuring information most properly.
- Pain Points. To be useful and bring value it is important to learn the pain points of your customer to find the specter of solutions to offer.
Industry research
You can’t run the race for the audience alone. Even if you’ve created the best startup service or product you will compete with other brands in the same sphere. Research of the market will help to find relevant keywords and trends to focus on in content creation. It is necessary to understand which approaches work well in this sphere and which don’t. With a responsible attitude and specialized knowledge, a marketing team can find the weak places of your competitors and make relevant content that will differentiate your product.
SEO research
Covering the topic of why search engine optimization is important we would like to emphasize that in overall content marketing strategy SEO research takes the leading position. Making your content readable for people is a big challenge. But a bigger challenge is to make your content visible to search engines and take top positions in search queries. This is a big deal to analyze all those keywords, link building, and traffic generating.
Final Thoughts
Large companies hire full-time content marketing teams to develop and manage their content campaign. But small startups can’t afford this. Young projects just can’t direct many resources to the whole content team. That’s why the best practice is to find a reliable content marketing agency that will provide complete consultation and help you to form and organize your content plan and manage all those SEO activities.
This challenge can be delegated to our talented Grrrow.me marketing team. It will give you more positive results and a bigger impact than managing it all on your own or spending years training an in-house team.
If you are a startup, content marketing is the crucial growth channel for your project. It is relatively inexpensive and has long-term benefits that will have a positive impact on any further marketing activities and digital efforts.