Startups are built with only one thing in mind—solving a real-world problem. However, despite having great products and demand, 90% of them fail in their first year.
As with any business, a number of reasons contribute to their demise. One of which is marketing. The lack of appropriate marketing channels proves to be fatal to most startups that need leads to stabilize their business.
For startups, most marketing channels like social media and press releases are inaccessible due to their lack of customers and testimonials. Even if you’re able to secure huge funding, the absence of interest in your brand limits your presence around these channels.
However, you can still be able to build your brand around content marketing without relying on public relations and endorsements. In this article, we’ll discuss the efficient ways content marketing can be used for startups.
1. Guest Posts
Guest posts are the single best content marketing resource that in addition to building backlinks, increases your SEO exposure, domain authority, and organic traffic. Although you may need to make significant investments to make guest posting work for your startup, they’re worth every dollar.
However, it’s also important to remember that guest posting can be destructive if done incorrectly. For example, if your guest post contents are low-quality, you may get penalized by Google to lose your domain authority and SERP rank. Therefore, ensure that your content marketing agency is working on your behalf and isn’t only driven by their commission.
For guest posting to be highly effective, you need to find high-DR sites and generate content as per their guidelines. For instance, if you’re a startup that offers online psychological help, you need to guest post to websites like the Mighty or the Mind.
2. Blog Posts
Most sales start with a simple search. A search with the intent to solve an issue that the user is having and you’re solving. The search engine result pages (SERPs) show the user the top results that are similar to their query. The top 3 results (mostly the top) get the majority of the organic traffic raised by the search. This is where SEO-centric blog posts come in.
With the right keyword research and blog posts, your startup can rank on the SERPs to secure the maximum volume of organic traffic generated by the search engines. However, despite being the most stable, this strategy can take weeks or even months to start bearing any fruit.
The most effective strategy around blog posts is to build a pillar or a cluster model relevant to your industry and business. For example, if you’re in the mountain biking industry, consider developing blog posts about mountain bikes, places, safety tips, and biking gear.
In this strategy, long-form blog posts of over 2000-3000 words are generated on small-tail keywords. You’re required to expand on that and generate smaller blogs with long-tail keywords that can be linked to the pillar post. This strategy ensures that your audience doesn't bounce back and has all the necessary information to make a decision.
3. Case Studies
Case studies are real-world content that involves existing customers and proof of benefits. With 13% of marketers vouching for it, the case studies are a representation of how a particular customer discovered the brand, used it, and got the intended usability out of it.
Case studies act as social proofs to inform the prospects how they can take a similar approach to leverage your product or service to their benefit.
Typically, case studies are long-form content with visuals and numbers representing the success of customers through the product. It mostly is used in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. Case studies are highly effective in influencing the customers that your product is superior and is capable of fulfilling their requirements better than the competitors.
Most businesses put case studies on a dedicated page on their website. However, a few of them also include sneak peeks on their homepage and social media profiles to engage the audience more into making the decision and leaving their contact details.
You also can write blog posts about your case study to increase your reachability. Make sure to frame the titles and heading as per SEO best practices to derive the best results. But, refrain from writing the blog post around your business and focus more on the customer as an individual and the process of problem-solving with the product.
4. Infographics
Infographics are visually appealing content that highlights the important elements of a blog post, case study, or whitepaper to entice audiences into getting more info about the same. Mostly preferred for social media and PR strategies, infographics are a part of content marketing that helps startups improve brand awareness and lead-generation campaigns.
Infographics work mainly on the theory that humans psychologically feel more attached to visuals than words. Although you need blog posts and other content to dive into details about the industry and the issues, infographics help you hook your audience into reading them.
As a part of content marketing, infographics mainly complement the content in a visually appealing way. But infographics as a stand-alone marketing strategy do a lot more than being pretty and looking good. Infographics help generate both internal and external backlinks and provide value to the readers who just skim through the content.
Furthermore, you can use infographics to fuel social media content marketing by
- Breaking them into pieces and presenting them as Instagram or Facebook carousels.
- Promoting events, press releases, and webinars.
- Designing them for step-by-step and how-to guides.
To inspire you, here is a blog post from ChairOffice that has all the necessary elements that an infographic should have. This particular infographic has worked wonders for the company and its social media profile.
5. Social Media Posts
Social media is great for reaching new prospects and getting faster results. But, they often are overlooked by startups due to the efforts that need to go into building a brand presence.
Although the ROI from social media is limited, it’s a great content marketing resource to increase brand loyalty and awareness. With 4.55 billion active social media users, it’s nothing but tragic to neglect such a great marketing resource.
In general, social media is used to build a brand’s personality. Engaging with the users and letting them interact with your brand increases brand loyalty and trustability. You also can easily promote your blog posts on social media to increase reachability. However, as a startup, you must find the most appropriate platform before you can devote your resources to it.
Infographics, short blog posts, photos, and videos are the most effective content on social media. However, depending on your brand and industry, you may choose to share anything that you see fit. Social media is a popular resource for marketers due to its ease of sharing and visual aspects. Don’t forget to share customer testimonials on your social media profiles.
6. Email Marketing
As a startup, you should strive on building email lists before you can start promoting your products to recurring customers. Email marketing, essentially, is promoting your offers, new products, or content to your customer or prospect list. Although it may seem ineffective as most of us neglect promotional emails, it can effectively generate up to 4200% ROI if done correctly.
However, emails being extremely personal, are quite fragile. You must consider certain elements for email marketing to be effective. As:
Spam
Most customers ignore promotional emails due to their spammy nature. Whatever emails skip through the spam filters and end up in your inbox get deleted once their nature is exposed through the subject line or the name. Make sure that your emails are perceived as valuable to your prospects. Consider leaving spammy words like dollar, free, and money, out of your subject line or the whole email if possible.
Email Size
Longer email contents are useless in terms of marketing. Focus on keeping the contents of the email clear and concise. Make sure that you include enough information to make them click on the links, but leave enough out to intrigue them.
Design
Email designs also contribute to clickthrough rates (CTR). Today, emails can be accessed through a number of devices including mobiles, desktops, and tablets. As it’s impossible to know which recipient will open the email on which device, it’s better to design emails that work on the majority of devices. Refrain from using emojis and odd visuals as much as possible to avoid missing lines and visuals on some operating systems.
Call-to-Action
Always include call-to-actions in your emails in bold, bright text or visuals. Failing to include call-to-actions will make the recipients do what you tell them to do with your email—nothing. Even if a customer is interested in your product, they won’t be contacting you without a call-to-action by going through the trouble of finding you through search engines again.
The Bottom Line
Startups often lack the necessary resources to get into extensive digital marketing channels like PR and social media. But to build your presence, you can fall back on content marketing without being intimidated by the competitors.
Blog posts and guest posts are the two most fundamental content marketing strategies for startups, followed by infographics, email marketing, and social media posts. Consider analyzing your past marketing approaches to determine what can work for you and can drive more organic traffic.
