Several startups have a content marketing budget, and with good reason. In fact, in 2020, 90% of companies reported that content was an asset to their brands. This shows that content marketing is an effective strategy for buillding a user base. Startups and small businesses can excel in content marketing by trying the following strategies:
1. Understanding your audience
The most successful content marketers spend a lot of time researching their audiences. One of the mistakes that startups make is to focus too much on the general keyword in which their business operates. However, the most successful content marketers like Catherine Nikkel go deeper than that.
They are curious about the needs of their visitors. They go the extra mile to understand their needs, patterns of purchase, and problems. Eventually, they build content that is engaging enough to meet the needs of their readers.
In your content creation efforts, do not stick to a general keyword. Find out more about your audience and what they find engaging, the specific issues they face in their industry among others. Build content that resonates with your audience on a personal level.
2. Building connections
Produce content consistently is an admirable goal. However, if you are only creating and publishing content you are underselling yourself. Successful entrepreneurs work on building their connections with other companies as a backlinking strategy.
Most companies do not know that if you guest post, you increase your audience. Successful guest posting is one of the benefits of building connections with other thought leaders. This is a struggle that all startups must contend with. Eventually, it gets easier to land a guest post or approach a large blog but in the early days, you have to grind. As you get known in the industry, so does your startup.
Startups should ensure that for every 3 new pieces of content they publish on their blogs, the 4th one is posted on another company’s blog. By posting on another brand’s site, you can drive traffic to your own site from curious people who follow the links in your guest posts.
3. Diversify your content
It is crucial to keep your readers interested in reading your content. Restricting yourself to producing content within your niche is a surefire way to bore your readers. This will be the beginning of the end of your content marketing strategy.
Startups that build successful content marketing strategies know that you have to spread your wings a bit further than your niche. Investigate and research on similar niches which you can get into. Find out what makes great content in these spaces. Aim to capture the attention of new demographics too.
Diving into a new niche gives you an opportunity to interest your readers with content that they care about, giving them a break from your usual content. Additionally, this strategy helps you to pull in more visitors from niches related to yours.
4. Testing and experimenting
In no time, you will find that your content generates a good return on investment. You will also learn that if you continue to post that quality content consistently, you get a good number of readers.
Good content marketers reach this point and settle. Great content marketers keep experimenting on various delivery strategies, topics, media, etc. While they could have settled with what has proven to work, the best content marketers continue to push further. These experiments in turn generate data that they can use to improve their content even further, thus growing their audiences and improving audience engagement.
Startups should never settle. When you think you have done well, question how better you can get. Experiment with various media, topics, and delivery methods. Infographics could be the difference between 30k monthly visitors and 100k. Delivering your content through video instead of text could be your secret to a million monthly viewers rather than 20k monthly readers. If you want to grow, then you should keep experimenting. As you test and experiment, you can also use online proofing software tools to streamline the content review and approval process for your team.
5. Quality over quantity
For startups that pay for content, it is better to spend $2,500 on 5 top-notch articles spending the same amount on 50 ‘decent’ articles. There is a good chance that the 5 high-quality articles will all rank higher and bring in more visitors than the 50 decent ones.
If you ask content marketing gurus, they will tell you that over 60% of their monthly traffic comes from the evergreen quality content on their website.
Startups should embrace quality. Quality means your content cannot easily be outranked by newer competitors too because it takes a lot of effort to beat a top-notch post in the ranking. Ultimately, it is better to post one article of high quality each week than it is to post many average articles per week.
6. Creatively stretch the dollars
It is important to get maximum value for your money as a startup. Can you get a cheaper but great writer remotely as compared to paying a full-time salary in the office? This could actually help you cut down on your content marketing costs.
Can you bootstrap your writing and encourage people in the office to create content as an addition to their daily responsibilities? If you can do this, then you will save the dollars you would have spent on hiring a writer.
The goal is to get great value at a fraction of the actual cost. Startups that understand this manage to receive a huge ROI for a manageable budget.
7. Solid numbers
Do not judge the success of your content marketing based on subjective factors or generalized data. Extract numbers out of your campaign, analyse these and create reliable performance data and metric reports. This dissecting of numbers from your traffic will open up more insights. The analysis will show you strategies that are working better and which ones have the potential to grow your reader-base.
Startups that create content based on solid data and analysis will most of the time grow faster in terms of readership and customer base because they understand what is at the core of their content creation.
Content marketing might seem tedious at first. Even so, with the guide above, you can create content that keeps bringing people back.
Do you need help creating and distributing quality content for your brand? Partnering with a PR agency like Pressfarm might be just the thing you need. With a team of skilled writers and designers, Pressfarm can create winning press releases, design creative media kits, and craft engaging feature stories, all of which will help make a positive impression for your brand.
In addition to creating this content, Pressfarm’s PR experts can help you develop a strategy to push it out to the right outlets. In addition to building curated media lists that include contacts across niches, Pressfarm also gives every client access to a media database of over 1 million journalists from different industries. Combined with your personalized media lists, this database is designed to help you make the right connections with influential media professionals. With Pressfarm, you can develop a PR strategy that will put your brand in the limelight where it belongs.