How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Startup?
Are you a startup organization? Looking to develop a content strategy, but concerned about the time and budget? Don’t worry! Here is some insight into building an effective content strategy for your startup in a cost-effective manner.
Where do you start when developing a Content Strategy?
Content strategy helps in laying down the dedicated goals that you want to achieve out of your site’s content. It is also about analyzing the best type of content for your startup and how you aim at creating, distributing, and measuring the overall content performance.
When you define the content marketing strategy for your start-up company, it helps in bringing focus and purpose to the efforts. A content strategy that is well-defined provides a strong foundation to make strategic decisions. Your content marketing strategy is a major business investment. When you are clear about your goals and the KPIs, your actions will accurately and precisely take you towards meeting and exceeding those targets.
Saving on Your Content Marketing Strategy as a Startup
A typical startup is strapped for cash in most cases. In addition to this, a startup organization might be limited in terms of overall resources as well. Chances are you might not have access to the right team to analyze, plan and execute your content strategy.
Here are some effective methods that can help you get started with building an effective content strategy for your startup:
#Define Your Content Marketing Goals
An impactful content strategy begins with defining the targets you want to achieve for your organization. As a startup, look into what your brand stands for, the respective marketing objectives, and the specific requirements of your business. Some of the common goals of a well-defined content marketing strategy can include:
· Supporting customers
· Growing awareness about your products and services
· Encouraging signups for free trials
· Attracting as well as retaining employees
· Changing the perspective of the target audience
· Building loyal customers
· Nurturing leads into relevant conversions
As your startup organization will begin expanding, it is natural for your content goals to change over time. Plan to revisit your content strategy regularly (every quarter) so that they are aligned with your corporate goals.
#Understand Your Target Audience
To ensure the overall success of your startup’s content strategy, it is imperative to know & understand the target audience. Here are some questions that can help you out:
· What are they concerned about? Think about the specific problem that your business is capable of solving, the pain points of your prospects, or the related aspects that your audience might spend time on.
· Who is the target audience? If you are involved in the B2B scenario, the target audience can include multiple groups –right from the end-users to buyers, business owners, experts, and so more.
· How do they prefer to consume their information? Is the target audience fond of spending time on social media? When do they turn online for accessing information?
As you obtain relevant answers to the given set of questions, you can get an insight into meaningful information about designing your content marketing strategy. Right from the type of media you should use to topics your content should address to the delivery channels you should choose –you can get all relevant information.
#Analyse the Competition
Analyze what your competition is doing. You can make use of relevant tools like Site Overview by Alexa to observe competitor data. Some information you can obtain out of the tool includes the source of website traffic, organic & paid keywords, the interest of the target audience, backlink profile, and so more.
#Analyse the Content Types
The next stage is to determine the type of content you wish to develop for the target audience. You should know that content marketing is not just about writing blog posts. The content marketing team should come up with a list of options for designing your content strategy.
For instance, content like videos, newsletters, print content (including flyers, brochures, magazines, and others), social media content, white papers, ebooks, visual content, research papers, and so more are common types you can consider. Select the particular type of content that will best suit the preferences of your target audience while allowing you to achieve your startup goals.
For instance, if your target audience is fond of spending time on social media, create content on channels that they might commonly use –including Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook. In case they enjoy reading, listening or watching, you can opt for ebook content, audio and video podcasts.
#Decide on the Promotion Channels
You are developing great content for your startup. However, it only remains good as the number of subscribers, viewers, readers, and listeners. This is why you need to look for relevant promotional channels for the content of your startup. Here are some ideas you can consider:
· Email Newsletters: Emails turn out to be one of the best content promotional channels in case you publish a wide range of content. You can consider feeding portions of the content to the target audience while boosting chances of conversions.
· Organic content: It is the one that is going to rank on the search engines. It is visible in the respective search results for a specific set of keywords.
· Social media: It will include both inorganic as well as organic content marketing strategies.
· Third-party Distribution: As a startup, you can always consider using influencers or third-party distributors to post your content.
#Create Top-quality Content
Now that you have set up your brand standards, the next step in your content strategy is to determine the creation of content. To start with, develop a dedicated content creation process for the content creators. Here are some basic steps to follow:
· Decide on a particular topic
· Choose the date of publishing
· Research relevant keywords
· Come forth with a proper outline
· Prepare a draft
· Forward the content to the editor
Conclusion
You can set aside time for yourself and your team to build a strategic content plan or you could leverage our content management domain expertise to develop and manage your content strategy.