Content Marketing is sooner or later going to become a Key function in any startup’s marketing budget to drive revenue.
For those of you associated with building a startup, you know it’s a lot of hard work! It takes incredible work to fine tune your business model, months or perhaps years in developing a fantastic value proposition and building a viable business. Ok, so you’re finally at a stage when your startup is ready to be launched, what do you do next?
Well, the next logical step would be to spread the word about your startup. People need to know that you exist and understand how your startup can help them solve their problems, address their challenges and add value to their growth.
A great place to start is by using Content Marketing. Content Marketing involves a lot of hard work. In fact, if you’re someone working in the industry or perhaps someone who is building a startup, chances are that you already have well written, awesome looking great content. But awesome, high-quality content by itself is of no use if it’s never read. So, if you have published content, you need to make sure that it gets read. And if “being read” needs to make any business sense to you, your content needs to target the various stages in a customer’s journey, up until the stage when the customer is ready to buy. That’s when you add your conversion points in the form of valuable eBook downloads, conversion guides, or any other lead magnet that makes sense to your target audience, followed by an email sequence that would map the decision-making stage of the customer, to ultimately convert a customer for your business. As a startup, that means, your work just doubled.
In order to create really engaging content, you need to start from understanding what people are looking for, what their pain points are, and what problems they are trying to solve. Most of the time, we create content that’s based on our point of view, based on how we think the world should be. We don’t really think about the person on the other end, and what they are searching for. Honestly, if you really think about it, no one really searches for your content, but they are searching for something that can help them solve a problem. They are searching for answers or solutions.
It becomes all the more important, that in our rush to meet deadlines, we don’t push our content. We really need to take some time to step into the shoes of people, understand their needs, wants, desires and pain points. You need to think from their perspective and focus on what they are searching. By doing this, you can create content that really matters to those who are looking and get people drawn towards your content. All it really involves is a little research before you sit down to create your content. You can do this by using many of the tools available like Google trends, Buzz Sumo, Google Keyword planner, KWFinder and so on. This way you would have more clarity on what people want to read and hence you would be able to create content that helps to create connections with people and would put you in a better position to further engage people and hopefully convert for your business in the future.
Another aspect that you may want to consider is the time that people have. Let’s take ourselves for example. In a given day, we all are busy. Busy meeting deadlines, busy with work, busy checking emails, busy on our phones and so on. There are only 24 hours in a day, and that goes for everyone. Adding to this schedule, there is no denying the fact that there is so much content available to people these days, and their attention span may be as short as 3 mins. It’s in this 3 mins, that your content has to capture the attention of the person browsing. So it’s prudent to think that your content needs to be creative yet catchy and fit in easily into someone’s busy day.
As a start up, you could also create a community around the technology you use, or it could be centered around the pain points that your product caters to, but not on your product. This way, you could generate a lot of user interactions and goodwill. This can also be a powerful content strategy.
So in short, it’s all about how you devise your content strategy. If you research your target audience, analyse what problems they want to solve, and then create awesome content that caters to their needs, taking care to map every stage in the customer journey, with relevant conversion points that are useful and add value, you can develop strong relationships with your audience, that could ultimately convert them into new customers for your business.
