Content Marketing Strategies for Start-Ups
In this edition of Startup Snacks, Nathan Snow, Content Marketing Lead at Raken, discusses what it takes to find your “voice” in content marketing. In this video interview, he’ll introduce the idea of creating a voice, what it means, and why it’s important to your startup.
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I’ve been working in content marketing for startups for about six years now. Essentially, content marketing is what you make — all different kinds of media. It’s how your customers find you, it’s a blog, it’s a video, it’s social media, it’s a banner advertisement on a website, it’s a print advertisement in the newspaper, all of these things are content marketing if your company is that any of them, then you’ve already started. And more than just what your company makes, it’s also how your company becomes what’s called a thought leader. The more good, high quality content you produce, the more value your customer is going to find in it. The more value they find in your blogs and videos, the more they’re going to want to come to you with their problems, and the more they come to with their problems, the more trusted you become. So when you become a thought leader, people go to your website or wherever it is in order to get more information.
Something that a lot of startups overlook when they are first starting off with their content marketing is they want to focus on just making as much as possible. That’s not really the best strategy that I have found. What I found is you want to focus first on finding your voice. A voice is a personality. Think about somebody you know — when you sit and talk to someone, everybody has slightly unique ways of talking. Even myself right now — I use my hands at certain times, I smile at certain times, my voice goes up and down. A company, they have a voice in the content they produce. Again videos, blog’s, whatever it is, all of these different forms of content have a voice. It’s seen on a macro scale in the sorts of huge messages that you give across every piece of content — you know, what’s your reason for existing, but it’s also found in the smaller pieces of content as well, it’s found in a mannerism, it’s found in whether you use slang or not, whether you use contractions or not, are you formal or informal? These sorts of aspects are what is going to give your content a consistent voice and consistency is really the most important part about a voice. If the way you produce content changes across pieces, people aren’t going to know whether they’re talking to you or not. So if your voice is consistent in this blog and in this video pretty soon you’re going to find that customers will be able to tell your content from other content even without a logo and that’s really the sweet spot that you want to find because that’s how people will become aware of who you are as a brand and that’s one of the huge goals of content marketing and you can’t get there without a consistent voice.
I’ve found that a lot of startups struggle with voice because they’re young. Young companies, like a lot of young people, they don’t quite know who they are yet so they bounce between this voice and that voice and at the beginning that’s okay, you’re not supposed to have a consistent voice yet, but it’s something that you need to really think about and really focus on right of the beginning of your company, right before you start producing a lot of content because, it’s not how much content you produce it’s how you produce it — it’s the voice you produce it in. So for a start up finding that resonant voice should be a priority really early on because the faster you find it the faster you’re going to be able to have a consistent brand across your media and that’s going to make your company a lot more recognized.
A voice isn’t really a question of good or bad, it’s a question of resonant or not. When we say resonant what we really mean is when a customer reads your content or watches your content — how do they feel? You want your content to strike an emotional chord in your audience, you want them to read it or watch it and think “this person gets me. This person knows what I’m going through. They understand my problem” because once a customer identifies with you as a speaker and as a company, you’re going to find that they’re going to be a lot more willing to listen to your solution to their problem so that’s why finding that resonant voice right in the beginning is important is because it’s going to get your customers on your side a lot faster. If you don’t find a resonant voice, then you’re going to find your customers ignoring your content. They’re going to ignore it because it’s not going to be what they want to hear, they’re not going to feel like you understand them. Why would you go to somebody for help when they don’t understand what your problem is? The better your voice, the more they will want to listen.
So how do you go about finding a voice? It’s actually a lot of fun, but you have to do it in order. The first thing that you have to do is you have to find out where your product fits in the market. For a lot of startups, that’s its own problem, but it’s something that you need to tackle before you …
