A lot of thought goes into putting the word out there about your startup, and its products and services. After all, your potential users will get to know about you and make that first purchase only if you reach them first. And so, being able to choose the best path towards your marketing efforts is a must.
In today's day and age, when there are so many avenues of marketing channels available, content marketing must hold a huge chunk of your attention. Content marketing and social media marketing for startups are crucial on your way to not just being successful, but also to prove your overall authority to audiences, search engines, and potential partners. Let's talk about the best social media marketing strategies for your startup.
Don’t just spend on paid channels to drive growth for your startup
As we mentioned before, marketing your products or services as a startup is a major priority, especially if you're new in the field. In this context, the right content and social media marketing strategy can help you reach the right target audiences while building your brand and saving resources.
While paid marketing cannot be completely discounted, the effects are often short-term and immediate. Content marketing, on the other hand, needs to be looked at as a longer play. The effects won't necessarily be visible immediately, but will definitely pay off in the future.
This comprehensive step-by-step guide, featuring meaningful insights and best practices followed by industry experts, will help you in:
- Mapping out a successful content marketing strategy for your startup business
- Developing an effective content and social media marketing process
- Establishing and reaching specific content marketing goals
Why should startups consider investing in content marketing?
Content marketing serves to be a cost-effective way of developing great brand awareness. Organic content—including guides, blog posts, video, and lead magnets—can have a long-term impact. These content marketing pieces can actually rake in ample traffic to your business over several years!
Indeed, the more effort put into your blog posts and other articles with top-quality content, the better the chances of your organic ranking going up with search engines. If you play it smart, these blog posts won't necessarily just have to be a lucrative way of bringing customers to you, but also be a rich treasure trove of educational pieces meant to enlighten them about various topics related to your service.
Associated paid marketing efforts like social ads and targeted search, on the other hand, are also excellent ways of searching for relevant audiences while having a short-term effect. With effective content marketing, you can look forward to:
- Attracting prospective customers to your website and converting them into leads
- Building trust with your target audience by sharing relevant information
- Making your brand more visible to the target audience with the help of SEO
Important steps to building a powerful content marketing strategy for your startup
The tricky part about leveraging effective content marketing is to strategize well in advance. You simply cannot wake up one day and decide to launch a social media or content marketing campaign. A successful content marketing strategy will depend on well thought-out, well-planned, and effectively-executed strategies. Set up goals, a social media calendar, blog ideas, and forge your path ahead. Here are some useful tips:
Set up a social media presence and goals
Before you begin with the process of content creation, you will need to establish your social media presence in order to amplify your content efforts. Next, you need to think about a social media plan for your startup and its ultimate goal.
You can start by thinking on a broader sense about what your content should accomplish. Is it to bring awareness about your brand? Or, is it to educate the readers about a particular part of your product or service?
Without the presence of well-defined, clear goals, your content will serve no purpose. At the same time, if you don't have goal posts in place, you will never be able to tell if your plan for this particular piece of content was successful or not.
When you effectively understand what your content is trying to achieve, you are able to focus on the process of creating it and defining what success should look like.
Define personas
Your brand’s personas serve as fictional representations of what your ideal customers look like. Personas are helpful in creating a well-defined picture of who you would like to market to and why the target audience should be interested in your brand’s products or services.
When you define these, it becomes possible to narrow down your target audience while creating meaningful content that would speak directly to their wants and needs. Some important elements that you should include in the persona for your startup's products and services are their:
- Pain points
- Topics of interest
- Demographic information -including location, gender, age, and more
- Buying patterns and behaviors
- Professional and personal goals
- Wants and needs
- Level of interest in your company
Research your competitors
You can also base a huge part of your content marketing strategy on what seems to be working for your competitors. Having knowledge about content pieces with which your competition is seeing success is a great second-hand learning experience. It tells you what does and doesn't work with your ideal target audiences, instead of having to go through the whole process and figuring it out by yourself.
Researching your competitors can also help you in saving significant time and money in the long run. How? Well, you won't need to spend time or resources on efforts that won't eventually bring you desired results any more! Armed with competitor knowledge, you can see where your startup stands compared to those who have been operating their businesses for quite a long time, and set benchmarks for where you want to be in the near future.
Conduct keyword and topic research
When you first begin to work on your content marketing and social media ideas, it may seem overwhelming. Having to select the right type of topic idea to focus on for content creation isn't as simple as it sounds. There are countless topics that can be discussed in almost every industry!
If you feel like you're getting intimidated by the process, take a step back. Go through the wide range of possible topics that may interest your target audience And then you can work towards crafting highly specific, targeted ideas, one at a time.
One tool that can help here, immensely, is conducting an in-depth keyword research. This helps you observe specific search terms that are being used by the target audience to search for information related to your brand, products, industry or services.
Keyword and topic research also helps you in narrowing down on the exact search terms you should focus on during content creation, and get the most amount of clicks possible. If you're looking for relevant content marketing ideas and calendars, take a look at Sketchnote's marketing templates!
Review your existing content
Every brand new startup features content. Whether it's product descriptions, website pages, or blog posts—there's existing content for you to examine thoroughly. What were the core values that birthed this startup? How does the About Us page describe the team and the services?
When you review your own existing content and social media strategy, it helps you brainstorm and generate lucrative ideas while looking at specific areas you may have already covered.
This review of existing content also helps in identifying and eliminating any issues related to content quality your brand is expected to address.
Content marketing—in collaboration with effective social media marketing for startups—is a crucial tool towards setting up your new brand, gaining target audiences and growing the presence of your startup brand online.
It's a highly cost-effective, proven method to improve your presence and gain customers online. But don't forget what we mentioned earlier—it's a long game and takes an immense amount of dedication and patience to successfully implement your content marketing strategies. Keep at it now to reap the benefits of your content marketing game in the future. Good luck!
