Startups Content Marketing Tips To Boost Startup Success

Content marketing is becoming popular these days because of its power to bring great visibility to any brand. In fact, around 89% of the startups use content marketing and 70% of startups are quite satisfied with their efforts.

Content is certainly a strong medium to express an idea and influence the target audience. When you are persuasive with your content, it has a profounding impact on every marketing channel. Undoubtedly, content marketing has been producing some great results across the globe. But that doesn’t mean that all startups are equally successful in harnessing the power of this growth factor. To get maximum ROI you must have a proper strategy. In today’s post, I am going to discuss some important tips that you should follow to boost startup success through content marketing. Let’s dive into the discussion:

Know Your Customers

Knowing your customers is the first step towards drafting an effective content marketing strategy. Without any knowledge who your customers are you will not be able to market yourself properly and eventually, your content marketing efforts will not yield optimum results. To understand your customers well you need to get inside their minds and understanding what they actually need. Now, how do you get into the minds of your customers? Follow these steps:

• Use the Customer Empathy Map

The Customer Empathy Map is a great tool to understand the mind of your ideal customers. It draws the image of a customer, focusing on what they see, hear, think, feel, say, and do. It also takes into notices the pain points of the customers and their primary goals. Based on that, a customer sketch is created.

• Employ Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to know where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are typing to search you, and what amount of time they spend on your website. It can help you understand the demographics of your audience, the reason why they land up on your website, and how much interested they are in the present content on your website.

• Learn From Your Different Teams

To understand your customers, you not only need insights from your marketing team but from every single unit in your organization. Be it customer service, sales or research and development, every department that interacts with the customers should be allowed to share their experiences and thoughts on how to understand the customers better.

• Opt for Social Media

Social media helps in growing the connection between a business and its customers. When you have an idea about what your customers are talking online, it becomes easier for you to understand how your product can add value to their lives.

• Talk to Your Audience

Checking your audience on social media is not enough; take a step ahead and have a conversation with them. Take surveys and interviews of your audience, this will give you critical customer insights.

Fix Content Marketing Goals

If your focus is to engage the audience, generate leads, improve branding through content, then you must fix content marketing goals for your startup. Here are 9 key content marketing goals that you can align to achieve with your piece of content:

1. Brand Loyalty- When you constantly publish useful content, your readers develop a taste of it. Through your content, you let your customers know who you are and develop a liking for you.
2. Brand Awareness- This is one of the primary goals of content marketing. The people, who buy from you or engage with you, must know who you are and what you do.
3. Customer Education- It’s important to address the pain points of the customers at every stage of the sales funnel by educating and nurturing them in every way possible.
4. Customer Engagement- Engaging with your customers is one of the major objectives of content marketing. It is about keeping the conversation going via their comments and responses, once the content is published.
5. Relationship Building- Creating content that addresses the issues of your customers is a great way to build a rapport with them. Engaging with them on a regular basis strengthens the relationship further.
   
6. Getting Strategic Partners- Your content can help you grow your business by attracting strategic partners that align with your goals or see the same vision as you.
7. Better Ranking on Search Engines- Unique content is vital to achieving better search engine ranking. And the key techniques to gain high ranking in search engine result page should be strategized around content marketing.
8. Better Social Media Presence- Creating a better social media presence through fueling social media wheel with awesome content can be one of your content marketing goals.
9. Explaining Your Product and Services- Letting people know what your product or service is all about and how it can add value to their lives should be one of your essential content marketing goals.

Create Content

Content is the center point of the whole content marketing strategy. The biggest challenge a startup marketer often faces is to create fresh content at regular intervals. Here are 8 sure-fire ways to create useful, interesting content for your audience:

1. Ask Your Audience- Conduct a survey and ask your audience what they want to read next from you.
2. Encourage Guest Posting- Ask influencers, budding writers, and experts in your niche to guest write on your blog.
3. Take an Interview- Call an expert in your niche and schedule an interview with him. Convert that interview into different content forms.
4. Brainstorm- Brainstorm content creation ideas with your team, ask your friends, fellow bloggers, and online communities for useful topic ideas.
5. Recycle Your Old Content- Recycle your highly performing posts into different forms of content. For example, make a video from the content of a high performing blog post.
6. Get More Personal- Tell personal stories about your brand to the audience. An article or a video on how you came up with the idea of launching your product in the market can be interesting to your audience. Also, you should share your success story through your content, such a stelling your audience about how you came this far and your takeaways from this incredible journey. And you should let people know your failures as well, such as how you fell down and overcame it in your startup journey
7. Stay Updated- Always stay updated in your niche. The top trends in your niche can give you better ideas to create content around them.
8. Read More Books- Read books in your niche that can help you get a lot of ideas to create content from it.

Promote Your Content

What is the use of creating a great piece of content if there is no reader for it? For the content to reach a large audience, you need to promote it on different online channels. Here are 11 proven tips to do so:

1. Mention Your Sources- Every time you publish a content piece, make sure to mention all the sources of information and references in the post. You can mail your content to the references and sources you have mentioned to get a better reach.
2. Turn Your Blog Posts into Videos- Turn your blog posts into videos and publish them on different social media channels. You will gain exposure from a larger audience.
3. Submit Your Content to Different Communities- There are several websites that allow content submission to give their audience a great experience. So, if your content is excellent and of their taste, surely they will accept it and share it within their community. Also, you can promote your content on sites like Reddit and Hacker News, which have great marketing potential and help you fuel your brand engagement.
4. Try Paid Promotions- Go for sponsored ads on Facebook, promote your tweets, and boost your posts on Instagram. Invest in all those channels that give you a better ROI.
5. Publish a Press Release- Publishing a press release can help you make people aware of your new content and promotional offers.
6. Republish Your Content- You can republish the posts you published on your website across various platforms like LinkedIn and Medium and link those to the original sources.
7. Share Your Content in Online Groups- Be it Facebook or LinkedIn or Reddit, most online platforms have groups of like-minded people. Share your content in those groups to get better mileage.
8. Have Different Snippets for the Same Content-  Do not always use the same snippet every time you share your content online. As suggested by Neil Patel, “A piece of content should produce 20+ snippets that you can share on social media.”
9. Ask Influencers to Share Their Views- Share your content with some influencers in your niche. Ask them to share their views on the same when you publish your content. After publishing the content, you can message them on LinkedIn and ask to comment and share the piece.
10. Connect with Like-minded People- Get in touch with people who shared similar content like you and have an online discussion. Participate in such discussions and improve your visibility.
11. Convert Your Content into Different Forms- Make your content available in different forms, it can be in the form of pdf or slides, or ebooks. Doing so will help in getting a wider reach across the Internet.

Measure Content Marketing Success

Peter Drucker rightly said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” How do you know the content you created and promoted so ardently is doing its job? Are you aware that the investment you made in your content marketing is giving you proper ROI? If you are feeling clueless after facing these questions here are six ways that you must go through to ensure success for your startup content marketing efforts.

1. Website Traffic- Website traffic is one of the significant factors in determining the ROI of content marketing. Employ Google Analytics to measure it against a certain time frame.
2. Subscriber Growth- Check how many subscribers you have added till now and how many unsubscribed you in the last quarter.
3. Search Rankings- Where do you stand in Google search now? Check it out using tools like Moz, SEMrush to monitor your rankings.
4. Social Media Followers- Has the ratio of your social media followers improved recently? If it has, then it means the content you share on social media is being liked by your audience.
5. Lead Generation- Lead generation is an important KPI to measure the success of your content. There is a high demand from users for high-value content for lead generation. If you are getting new subscribers, free trials, ebook downloads from your online content, then you are on the right track of getting good leads for your brand.

The tips shared above if implemented properly can surely take you a long way and help you make your startup a brand that commands loyalty from its customers.

Do you want to share any other tip to ensure success for startup content marketing efforts? Feel free to share in the comment section. I’d love to know about it. Check out this comprehensive SEMrush review on Woblogger shows you the ways you can use the SEMrush to increase traffic, organic rankings & crush your competitors step-by-step.