Content Marketing for Startups: The 6 Steps to Getting it Right
It can be tough to give yourself a break after you’ve launched a startup. Who’s now going to drive leads?
If you play your cards right, it could be your content marketing material that has your back. Creating, publishing, and distributing your own marketing material can be an affordable and effective way to drive sales, according to my good friend Amanda Sibley, global marketing director at HubSpot. She found that after dedicating the time and effort to develop a solid content marketing strategy, 75 to 95% of the company’s sales leads came from content they’d created.
“That means if we all went on vacation for a month, we would still supply sales with 75% of what they needed,” she said. “Every single time you’re creating content, you’re getting closer and closer to being on vacation forever.”
Vacation forever? Even metaphorically, that sounds really nice. Follow these buildable steps so you can start packing your bags — even if that means you’re only going to vacay in your other bedroom since we’re all still quarantining.
And, BTW — if you’d like to watch the step-by-step guide on Content Marketing for Startups from Amanda @ HubSpot, watch here: https://bit.ly/3jsejeD
1. Figure out your content marketing topics
The first building block of a successful long-term content marketing strategy is determining which topics you’re going to focus on.
Don’t pigeonhole yourself into any one area — you’ll want to leave room for the evolution of your company and to adapt as you learn what kind of posts do well for you. But take the time to research the topics that your customers will want to learn about through every part of their buyer journey, as well as a brand voice and persona that you can clearly articulate for any outside creators you may hire.
To do so, think about your target customer and their entire journey to get to your product. Ask them what questions they need answered, or ask your support team what queries they see again and again.
You can think broad for these topics. For instance, if you’re selling tax software to Millennials, you could launch a series of blog posts about any questions they might have, from buying their first house to what to look for in a preschool. With the right SEO keywords, those posts can rank high on Google and get eyeballs to your site. Once viewers are there, the posts can contain calls to action to purchase your software — after all, they want the best tax refunds for their new house and kid.
Once you’ve come up with topics that you think will draw customers, narrow the list down by using tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, SEMrush, and Atomic AI to figure out which ones could generate the most traffic potential and customer engagement. Make sure you’re not choosing topics that already have high-performing posts by competitors who will rank higher in Google than you.
Then, when you’re down to about 10 topics that you feel you can manageably cover from a unique angle, brainstorm the different ways you can build material from those ideas.
2. Choose your formats and platforms
Now that you know what you’re posting about, figure out where those posts will live. This doesn’t mean bombarding your message across every platform that exists. Instead, think about where your potential customers or sales leads hang out, and work to build an organic, engaged audience in those spaces.
Maybe you’re selling sustainable sneakers to Gen Zers. You could establish a Medium page with blog posts about green news aimed at establishing partnerships within your industry, as well as a TikTok presence that encourages people to try your shoes. Head of an augmented reality (AR) startup? You might develop a podcast about the future of AR, plus a video series on your site showcasing some of your latest work.
3. Think about how you’ll repurpose your content
No topic should be a one-and-done. Since you’ve spent time coming up with the best topics for your company, always think about the ways you can repurpose those ideas.
Let’s say your sales manager wants to write a LinkedIn post about her favorite B2C selling techniques. That’s great, but don’t let her stop there. She could expand on those techniques for a lengthier ebook, create a PowerPoint based off the post for an informative webinar, or take over your Instagram stories for a day for some lighthearted videos of those techniques in action.
That repurposing cuts back on the amount of time you spend brainstorming, and turns you into the authority on your chosen topics across all the platforms right for you.
4. Get everyone involved in creating content
Don’t let a lean budget be your excuse for not launching a full-on content marketing strategy. You can hire interns or freelancers as creators more affordably than hiring an ad team. It’s also easier than you might think to get your whole team involved, which also eliminates ad spend.
We know the last thing your tech team might want to hear is that they’re now an integral part of the company’s content marketing program. But when you’re creating content designed to answer customer questions or offer industry solutions, your employees know what’s up. “They’re the ones that are actually going to be able to answer these questions better for you,” says Sibley during her step-by-step walkthrough.
Start small to encourage the employees who don’t yet know they have what it takes to be part of your content marketing strategy. They can post about things that come naturally to them, like a technical FAQ based on the support ticket questions they get over and over. Tools like Grammarly, Acrolinx, and Quill Engage can help to correct errors and adapt their writing to your company voice.
Dedicate a team happy hour to brainstorming or collectively editing posts, take an afternoon “off” to film a fun video about life at the office, or offer rewards for employees whose posts get the most views. Remind your team that this is another way of widening their professional skill set, and ask them what they need from you to foster that skill.
In the long run, you might even make it part of a job description. That way, you may attract employees who might have both a left-brained approach to the technical side of their job but also some creative right-brained muscles they’d love the chance to flex.
5. Actively promote your post
So you’ve found the best topics to write about and rallied your team to create the world’s most brilliant piece of content marketing. Congratulations! But don’t assume that its brilliance will magically attract views — it takes an active effort to draw both short- and long-term engagement.
“The first few days are really important to get as many eyeballs on it as possible so you can rank for months and years to come. In that first launch, you make it live on a Tuesday. Make sure Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, a lot of people are looking at it,” says Sibley during her step-by-step walkthrough.
Start by leveraging the power of your team, even if it’s a small one. For instance, five employees who each have 2,000 Twitter followers can instantly put your post in front of 10,000 people. When you encourage your employees to share, you can also give them talking points they can use to generate online conversations about the post.
Next, turn to your other channels, like an email database, social networks, and your own website, where you can create calls to action that keep viewers lingering on your page.
When you’ve promoted across the platforms you have control over, start thinking about strategic partnerships that will expose your posts to entirely new audiences. Maybe you reach out to influencers to share your content, or you trade guest blog posts with another CEO in your industry.
You’ll learn as you go what kind of promotion works best for a post. But no matter what it is, remember that you can never just “set it and forget it.”
6. Figure out your ROI
Remember how a brilliant post means nothing if no one sees it? Well, it’s also not worth anything if you can’t figure out the return on your investment.
Luckily, there are several tools available to measure the impact and conversion rates of your content marketing — including Amazon analytic tools for Digital Marketing. Your content management system should also be able to give you data about your biggest sources of traffic, as well as how many people follow through with any calls for action you include in your post. Tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar can give you heat mapping data to tell you where people lost interest and left the page.
At the end of the day, using the right analytic tools, I can look and say, ‘Hey, that ebook I worked on about topic X was 10% better than topic Y. Let’s go make more topic X content.
6. Stick to it!
Developing a sustainable, long-term content marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight, and it can seem like an overwhelming amount of work when you already have a to-do list a mile long. But once you’ve come up with your plan, don’t overthink the creation part.
Done right, the work you put in now on that content could be the work that drives your sales for years to come.
Don’t forget — be sure to watch the step-by-step guide on Content Marketing for Startups from Amanda @ HubSpot here: https://bit.ly/3jsejeD
