In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the number of startups and small business projects. This leads us to increasing competition in almost every industry. If you are operating on a startup or a new entrepreneurial project and you are struggling to scale it, having a powerful inbound marketing strategy is a must.
Inbound marketing—making efforts to earn everyone’s attention and make youfr business easy to be found. In other words, inbound marketing is pulling the customers towards your product/brand by sharing content that they would find useful. Sounds like content marketing? Well, you’re almost right.
Content marketing is an important section of your inbound marketing strategy. Creating and distributing good content helps to drive traffic, leads, sales, as well as increase brand awareness. But it isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for a startup.
In this blog post, we are going to give you 8 content marketing tips tailored for startups to boost their visibility and generate higher revenue. With that in mind, let’s get right into what you need to do to be on the right path for startup success.
- Keep up with the trends
Every industry has its own set of latest trends, viral topics, and breakthroughs. As a part of your content marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you’re in touch with what’s new in your industry.
Tip: Don’t make the most obvious content marketing mistake. Consider the following popular news outlets, blogs, and forums to know what’s in trend these days.
- Create content that reflects your brand
Each brand has its own story and voice. Now, when you’re creating branded marketing content for your startup, you’ve got to make sure that the content that literally reflects your brand’s story and voice into it. Doing this will allow you to become different and get your content recognized by new and recurring audiences.
Tip: In addition to embracing purposeful, brand-driven content strategy, tell your content creator, designer, and copywriter to find their way into technical details like use fonts, color palette, formatting type, etc and make it look like your brand.
- SEO proof your content
Creativity is important, but so is SEO. No matter how creative your content is—if it’s not optimized for higher SEO ranking, it’s not going to work. You need to take advantage of platforms like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Identify what keywords are trending in your industry and are likely to get your brand listed on the first page of the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.
Tip: Focus on the audience research, keyword research, and topic research—in the exact order. Furthermore,
- Write long-form (2,000 words or more) blog posts
- Find topics with many facets and angles
- Format content for featured snippets
- Keep keyword density natural and avoid keyword stuffing
- Improve your page speed
- Add well-designed, high-quality visuals to your content
- Follow the AIDA model
Let’s be honest here, you are not writing and distributing content for charity—you want conversions. Now, AIDA is one of the most common approaches in digital marketing, sales strategies, and public relations campaigns. AIDA basically describes the various stages of customer conversion funnel. It’s an acronym that stands for:
- A stands for Awareness i.e. “Attract attention”
- I stands for Interest i.e. “Maintain interest”
- D stands for Desire i.e. “Create desire”
- A stands for Action i.e. “Take action”
Tip: Here’s how you can use the AIDA model:
- Attract attention: The theory of “Creative Disruption” is one of the best ways to attract customer attention and make them aware of your brand/product. Example: create a themed newsletter, an intensely targeted message, or a graphic on a landing page.
- Maintain interest: The next step is to maintain interest and it’s generally the hardest part. This is where you need to focus on the relevant stuff. In simple words, tell people what they will find most interesting in your brand/product. Example: Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad campaign—a detailed campaign focused on the fact that Wendy’s hamburgers have more beef than others.
- Create desire: Once you’ve got your target audience’s attention, you need to find ways to persuade them to realize that they want to own your product/service. Posting infomercials content across social media, adding more convincing and relatable CTAs to your blogs and articles, and getting well-known bloggers to use and talk about your product is a great way to convince customers that they actually need your service.
- Take action: The last stage of the AIDA model is to get the customer to initiate action. This is where the much-awaited “conversion” happens. Using tricks like “LIMITED TIME OFFER” and “FREE SHIPPING” are a great way to create a sense of urgency and motivate customers to take action.
- Maintain a content calendar
As a startup, it is important that you publish new content in your startup’s name across different platforms. But clearly, there are way too many platforms that you, your writers, and your designers need to keep track of. Creating a content calendar makes it easier for everyone to maintain a steady pace of publishing content and keep the whole writing process organized.
Tip: Don’t even bother using a paper calendar or a manual planner too. There are better ways to create and maintain a content calendar, including using platforms such as ProofHub, Trust My Paper, and Evernote.
- Promote your internal culture
Content marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to brand and brag about your product or services. Sometimes, you can just go for opinion articles, discussion pieces and general news articles regarding a specific industry. You can use your website’s blog to talk about your startup’s culture and future goals—just to arise interest third-party stakeholders and potential audiences.
Tip: When creating a blog, go for user-friendly CMS such as WordPress. Make your blog easy-to-read and subscribe to.
- Steal the spotlight on social media
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc are undoubtedly one of the most powerful digital marketing platforms out there. Having an observable presence on each of these social platforms and sharing new marketing content is an excellent opportunity for your startup to enter the global market.
Tip: Publishing posts, boosting engagement, monitoring audiences—social media management can easily become an overwhelming aspect of your job. However, there are many social media management tools out there that can help you reach the right audience at the right time with the right type of content.
- Get in touch with influencers
Have you heard of social media influencer marketing? If you haven’t, then you need to do some research. According to a recent survey by Nielsen—only 33% of consumers trust advertisements, while over 90% of consumers put their faith in peer recommendations. And that’s exactly what makes influencer marketing so important today. Collaborate with entrepreneurs and local influencers and having them talk about your brand or product is “very influential”. Frankly, social-media marketing and content marketing often go hand-in-hand with influencer marketing.
Tip: The social influencer landscape is bigger than you can imagine. Make sure that you choose the influence that best fits your brand, channel, and industry. For help, consider using dedicated influencer marketing tools like BuzzSumo, Upfluence, BuzzStream, FameBit, Pitchbox, etc.
Conclusion
Content marketing is trending and it doesn’t seem to go away anytime soon. If you are looking for ways to improve your startup’s reputation, you should focus on improving your startup blog and other social media profiles. Create and promote content that appeals to the right audience. Content marketing is a great way to grow your startup. Put these simple tips into consideration while you put your startup’s online marketing strategy together. And if you’ve got a few tips or tactics of your own, share them in the comments below!