If you’ve set up a start-up, you’ve probably faced several challenges.
Some of these might be raising capital, hiring the right people, garnering long-term clients, promoting your business, and so on. However, one of the things you may not have thought about initially, is how to use content marketing for the success of your start-up.
Content marketing is both an art and a science. It has been defined by the Content Marketing Institute as: “A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Sounds like a mouthful? Well, it’s actually quite simple and in this article we’ll talk about some of the ways in which you can use content marketing to ensure the success of your start-up. Here goes…
- Define and choose your audience : Use the market research you have conducted when setting up your start-up to clearly define and choose your audience. Create buyer personas so you can target effective content to them. These personas can help you create content that is as engaging and effective as possible.
- Come up with a clear strategy : Do not proceed without a clear strategy. You should define what you’ll publish, how often, where, what types of content, and who will be creating this content. You should write your strategy document clearly and then use it to come up with answers to these questions.
- Find reliable writers and content creators : You may not have tons of money to spend on content. However, you should allocate some of your marketing budget for content creation. You can also allocate someone on your team to create content, or then, you can tap into crowd sourcing sites to find reliable and inexpensive writers.
- Brainstorm and select the right topics : You should come up with a huge list of topics. If this seems difficult, do visit sites like Reddit and Quora to see what is trending when it comes to your particular niche or industry. You can select topics for both short and in-depth pieces. Both tend to do quite well.
- Choose a clear social media strategy and platform: Use your market research to find out which social media platform your customers and potential customers spend most time on. Do use analytics to see which platforms work better than others. Once you have a clearer picture, you can narrow down your social media strategy to specific channels and platforms.
- Promote your content: You shouldn’t just write and publish content, but you should actively promote it as well. You don’t have to promote only brand new content. You can republish and promote old content for maximum mileage. A well-crafted piece of content goes a long way. You can also use analytics to find out what works and what doesn’t.
- Stand out from the competition: You should try to be deliberately different. One of the ways you can do this is to make your content interactive. Another tactic is to publish content that will benefit your audience. A third tactic is to publish content that is unconventional. However, be very careful when you use out-of-the-box strategies such as these, as you don’t want to go overboard and risk offending or alienating parts of your audience.
So, now you know some content marketing tips for your start-up. Do use these to craft out a clear and comprehensive content marketing strategy that will lead to start-up success. Here’s to effective content marketing for your start-up…
For more information on how you can effectively use and leverage content marketing for your start-up, contact Intellasphere at 425-283-9772 or at contact@intellasphere.com.
by Bruce Worrall, Oct-19-2016