Content Marketing Best Practices Every Start-up Business Should Know
Possession of a great idea or availability of funds is not enough for your start-up to be successful. For this to happen, you need to generate sales by acquiring more customers to make a profit. One of the most effective ways to do this is marketing for start-up businesses over the internet. This article will enlighten you on ways to make this a reality and make your start-up profitable.
What is Content Marketing?
This is a strategic marketing method that focuses on the creation and distribution of valuable, appropriate, and reliable content to pull and keep a specific audience with the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer activity. The emphasis here is ‘valuable’ as it makes the difference in whether the content will result in sales conversion.
How Can This Benefit Start-ups?
This type of marketing for start-up businesses creates brand awareness, increases website traffic, builds trust and if it’s compelling enough, converts visitors to customers. It also saves on marketing costs as you don’t have to engage many people in the process. Also, using this marketing strategy will give you customer loyalty.
8 Content Marketing Tips for Start-ups
There are several ways you can use this form of marketing for your start-up. However, not all methods translate into traffic and sales. The following eight content marketing tips will help your start-up generate more traffic which will lead to conversions to help you make more sales.
1. Know your target audience (buyer persona)
When developing your marketing strategy, you should know your audience well. The essential data you need to have include, age bracket, job, average income, the problem you want to solve, social media channels preferred, among others.
2. Assemble a marketing team
It would help if you had a team with the sole responsibility for ensuring that the process is a success. A marketing strategist will plan content to be used while content writers will produce the content. Content editors ensure that the content developed is accurate and that it’s free of grammatical mistakes. After the development of the content, you will need promoters to distribute and market the content in your preferred channels.
3. Apply Search Engine Optimization
Proper use of SEO in your content brings relevant visitors who convert to customers. Start by performing keyword research to obtain terms that relate to your target audience. Start-ups are better off starting with long-tail keywords, at least three. There are online tools that can help in generating keywords.
4. Update your blog regularly
Keep your blog updated to fit the current condition of your product. For example, your product may have undergone an upgrade, but this information does not appear in your blog. This alone will deny you visitors and sales as it may not be what the potential customer is looking for. Also, updating the blog helps in ranking for SEO.
5. Have an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar will help you in updating the blog. It will have the topic to be written, who to write it, when to write and when to post the article. Before posting the items, they need to be reviewed, which can be done weekly or monthly depending on the amount of content available.
6. Hire a virtual assistant
A VA is an independent contractor who provides administrative services to your clients while working outside your office; they work remotely. Their duties are not restricted to office clerical work but can also market your products. A virtual assistant can perform content marketing for startups by regularly updating your blog and maintaining marketing momentum.
7. Create Videos
Video content marketing like YouTube videos and podcasts have an impact on your target audience. Enlist the services of a video production company to produce high-quality videos that are clear with excellent audio quality. Make the videos short and to the point as the visitor probably wants to go through several videos before they make their decision and can only spare a few minutes for each video.
8. Track results
While doing content marketing for start-ups, you need to track the results of the marketing activity. Compare the results against your marketing objectives; brand awareness, customer acquisitions, product promotion, or making sales. Measure the results in the various social media channels used as some are more successful than others. For example, you might be more visible on Instagram and only get a few responses in email marketing. Therefore, you will put more resources on the channel with more positive results and stop wasting time and resources on the unfruitful one.
Author’s Bio:
Sean Begg Flint
Sean Begg Flint is the founder at Position Digital, a digital marketing agency for ambitious startups and growing brands. He is passionate about purpose-driven content marketing and using outreach for good.
