Content Marketing for Startups

Pratik Poddar
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Many entrepreneurs I work with know that I am super bullish on content marketing as a strategy for some startups and spaces.

Word of caution: Its one of those buzzwords which everyone uses without really understanding it. The intent of the post is to help entrepreneurs navigate the maze of content marketing.

Background: I earlier ran a content marketing startup 3 years back called Spiral Content Solutions where I worked with brands like Club Mahindra, Gionee, ICICI Lombard, Religare, Maruti and Horlicks to help them in their content strategy. I saw first hand how CMOs of large financial institutions, health products companies and travel companies use content marketing in their strategy. Interesting coincidence that I continue to work with fin-tech, health-tech and travel companies in Nexus VP, and I see the difference between the content marketing approaches of large companies and tech startups.

Joe Pulizzi defines Content Marketing in “Epic Content Marketing” as:

  • Marketing and business process for creating and distributing valuable and compelling content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action
  • When you are doing content marketing, you are “Owning media” as opposed to “renting it”
  • When marketing using content, you are communicating with customers and prospects without selling — non-interruption marketing

Lots of people believe than content marketing is social media. They could not be more wrong. Content Marketing heavily involves social media & social media marketers use a lot of content — there is a lot of overlap — but content marketing and social media marketing have different focal points, goals and processes.

Goals of content marketing:

  • Becoming a “thought leader” in your industry — a) your content gets you on the radar of larger publications, who link to you naturally, b) you are the first company I think of when I face a problem in your sector
  • Lead generation through SEO
  • Lead generation through social media virality
  • Permission to deliver content to potential consumer over an extended period of time

There are myriad formats of content for marketing and each content format would have different distribution platforms associated with them. Types of Content could vary across Infographics, Memes, Opinion posts, Videos, Rants, Product reviews, Interviews, Gifs, Comics, Listicles, Embedded tweets, Slideshare presentations, Quora posts, Blog posts, Photo blogs, How to posts, Market survey, Internal Original Data, Interactive Visualisations, Snapchat story, Live streaming, etc. For every type of content, there are many distribution platforms. Each distribution platform had different value and depending on your goal, distribution platform and consecutively content format needs to be chosen. Tomasz Tunguz articulates the relative strength and weaknesses of distribution platforms in his blog well as follows:

Some tips for content marketing which I think would help a lot of entrepreneurs:

  1. Think vernacular first: Do not copy from what successful players in the west have done. Indian consumers are different, and depending on your use case, vernacular content might be better.
  2. Think whatsapp: Think the content format to be sharable on whatsapp. For healthcare startups serving old people, its imperative that content of the type “Jodo ke dard ke liye gharelu nuskhe” has a whatsapp shareable image with your brand’s logo.
  3. Think distribution first: Most entrepreneurs I talk to talk about what to create first, and then after content creation, think about distribution platform. Distribution strategy cannot be an after thought. It is part of content. It is part of product. Embed content and marketing in your product.
  4. Think customer first: Think about what are the problems customer faces in your vertical. Can you help him solve that problem? Genuinely try and help him. Write down all questions that more than 5% of your customers have. That is your content for your customer.
  5. Think long term: Don’t expect any metrics improvement in a couple of months. You are developing trust with your content. It takes time. Listen to your customers and iterate and experiment. But do not quit soon. Be consistent and don’t expect quick returns.

If you are an entrepreneur thinking about content strategy and think I can help, please feel free to reach out. Hope the post was helpful.

Additional Reading:

Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my personal reflections and not indicative of the views of my current or previous employers. No part of this post maybe reproduced or quoted without explicit permission.

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Pratik Poddar

Written by

VC @ NexusVP, Ex-Entrepreneur, Ex-Blackstone Private Equity, Ex-Morgan Stanley Quant, B.Tech IIT Bombay

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