Startups have little awareness, especially at the beginning, and are therefore more difficult to reach potential customers. Appropriate marketing and advertising are therefore essential. Content marketing is an important component of marketing and above all a driver for reach.
But especially when you are just starting to create content, you may not know how and with what you should start and how you can make the process meaningful. Content marketing is an extensive area within the marketing mix and takes time. Especially in startups it is a valuable asset. We stumbled across an interesting article about this, which shows 7 effective content marketing tips for start-ups.
Specifically, it’s about these 7 tips, which should make it easier for you to get started in content marketing:
- Generating ideas with the help of popular content
- Write guest contributions
- Create visual content
- Publish content regularly
- Involving Influencers
- Promoting content via social media
- Select the appropriate date for publication
1. Generate ideas using popular content
Before you create content, you should think about what you want to write about. Therefore it is helpful to find out what interests and moves potential customers. Tools like BuzzSumo, Google Trends or Twitter can help you to identify current trends. These so called Trending Topics should of course fit to your website as well. Once you’ve found a topic that might be interesting, you can search for more information. You can use tools like the Google Keyword Planner or AnswerThePublic to get deeper into the topic. These tools show frequently searched phrases and questions about the chosen topic. Ideally, you should incorporate them into your own text to provide answers to frequently asked questions. It is especially important that you write your content for your target group.
2. Write guest contributions
Especially start-ups have a difficult start to convince new users to read their own content. Since the company is still unknown and therefore has not yet built up a reputation, the readers do not yet know whether they can trust you and your company. Therefore it is especially helpful in the beginning if you get a little more publicity with the help of guest contributions. If you reach readers on other platforms, you can refer them there to your own offer or link directly to it. Such guest contributions are a good way to generate traffic, especially at the beginning. So integrate them into your content marketing strategy. Please note, however, that the platforms fit thematically to your company.
3. Create visual content
Not every user is interested in struggling through text deserts. Therefore you should definitely think about producing visual content. These can be photos, infographics, gifs or videos. They help the reader to make the content tasty and to convey information in a concise way. These elements can also be used as teaser images for social networks. Especially in the social media you should focus more on pictures and videos, because they have a higher eyecatcher potential. However, successful content marketing combines the different content formats and finds a balanced mix.
4. Publish content regularly
You should publish good content on a regular basis. But that doesn’t mean that you have to write a new article every day. Basically, you should produce high-quality content. They should offer your customers added value and be relevant to them. Simply publish to keep a certain frequency without a particular relevance often harms more than it uses.
By focusing on current topics and events in your content creation, you build trust with your readers and create a reputation for yourself. To ensure that you always have an overview of the published and planned topics, you should create an editorial plan. Here you collect your topics and ideas and assign the publication date to them later. You can also add deadlines and production capacities to this so-called content hub.
5. Involving Influencers
Influencers are a good way to draw attention to your company and your content on the web and thus make you more known. If you share content with influencers, link them to relevant content or even create shared content (interviews, photos,…), they can distribute the content on their own channels. Thus you directly reach a larger target group. If readers trust a certain influencer and he then shares the content of your website, this trust is transferred to you and your company. Make sure, however, that the influencer is suitable for you and your target group.
6. Promoting content via social media
It is not enough if you publish and maintain your content only on your own blog or website. You also have to bring it closer to your target group and make them aware of it. Besides guest posts and influencers, sharing your content on social media platforms would be another possibility. On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn you can publish your content directly and make it accessible to your followers. It makes sense to create special graphics for the individual social media channels so that the content becomes an eye-catcher there and attracts attention in the respective feed. If you also have the possibility to take some budget into account, you can advertise the corresponding posts and thus achieve an even greater reach.
Tip: Record all your social media activities in your marketing strategy.
7. Select the appropriate date for publication
Last but not least, you should think about when you publish your content. On the website this may not make much difference, because readers can see all your content permanently. On social media platforms, however, the time of publication is essential. Because you only have a short moment here to get the attention of your followers. Otherwise your posts will get lost in the newsfeed. Every social network offers analysis options that indicate when users interact with your posts. This helps you to find the right time to publish your postings and to appear directly in the newsfeed of your customers when they are online.
If you consider these 7 tips in your content strategy, you should succeed in starting your content marketing. Integrate your content marketing activities into your marketing mix so that you can plan long-term and strategically. Because good content marketing does not bring success overnight. Rather, it is an ongoing process that becomes more and more successful over time and thus brings you new customers in the long term.