How to Develop a Killer Content Marketing Strategy for Startup?

The reason why content marketing remains at the top of its game, even in the day and age where most other digital marketing trends tend to fluctuate, is due to the fact that it gives the most consistent results. Adblockers are just a symptom of a much greater disease, seeing as how it would be outright silly to claim that people paid full attention to ads before these plugins were available. What they do with them is merely remove a visual distraction, while the end result remains more or less the same.

Same goes for YouTube ads, which get played in full mostly in situations where one isn’t in a position to click a skip button right away. All of these trends make it abundantly clear that the age that’s arriving shows full promise of becoming the era of inbound marketing. Content marketing is just one of its oldest and strongest aspects. With that in mind, here are several tips on how to develop a killer content marketing strategy for a startup.

#1. Set a strategy

One of the things that shock everyone is the fact that a lot of businesses lack a proper marketing strategy. Sure, they have a general idea of what they should be doing but as much as 48 percent of B2B marketers openly admit that their strategy is not documented. Only about 32 percent claim to have a documented strategy, while it’s still questionable how well-composed and organized these strategies are. Lastly, 16 percent outright claim that they don’t actually have a strategy, but prefer to “wing it” as the situation arises, whereas about 4 percent are unsure when asked this very same question.

#2. Understand your target audience

The next thing you need to understand is that there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of content. The stance you take may fascinate one crowd while infuriating someone else. The jargon you use may make your content ten times more compelling, while to some it may make the text completely illegible. Technical terms you use may create a better immersion into one group, while it may force others to spend hours of research to understand it. In other words, you need to A) identify your audience and B) learn what they want to hear. Identifying your audience is often done through social media monitoring while some customers get paid to do surveys.

As an alternative, you could try to make your topic as neutral as possible but your goal is definitely not to make people not hate you. In order to make conversions, you need to evoke a reaction and the only way you can do that is by speaking to people in a voice they can relate to, use words they understand and stand for issues they are passionate about. To achieve this, you (as a mastermind behind that piece of content) need to become the voice of your target demographic. All of this stems from your ability to conduct a proper persona research.

#3. Pick the type of content you want to write

For most people, the term content marketing is almost synonymous with the idea of a blog post, however, seeing as how blog posts nowadays often exceed 3000+ words, going for an e-book, might not be a bad idea either. Apart from textual formats, infographics, templates, videos, and podcasts are also quite popular, especially since all of these formats are more mobile-friendly than the above-listed blog posts and e-books.

When choosing content types that are rich in visuals, you should choose your images properly. There are many websites that allow you to download free high-resolution images on your desktop and mobile to be later used for content. Once you stumble upon an interesting visual that can do you good in the future, learn how to use cloud sharing options so that you can access it from different devices. For iOS devices, it is useful to learn how to use AirDrop. This way, you can create a folder of images that can be used for future content purposes and reduce the time spent working on an individual post.

#4. Borrow examples from others

At the end of the day, while it’s true that you should be able to do everything on your own, there’s no real reason why you should do so. Adding backlinks to your content gives it more credibility with both users and Google, while it also may earn you some indirect favors with people whose content you’ve linked to. This is also your way of paying them back for supplying you with ideas, statistics, and quotable statements. Apart from this, you might also want to scout out your competition and see if there are any design ideas you can borrow from them.

Conclusion

At the very end, the content marketing strategy you decide to go for doesn’t depend that much on your business model or your industry. The frequency of your posts, their quality and the channels you deliver them through mostly depend only on your audience and the ability of your marketing team. Luckily, there are so many free resources online for you to use, that even a complete lack of experience in this field shouldn’t keep you down for long.

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