Operating a startup company may be one of the biggest challenges of your life. Although you suffer from no shortage of great ideas, there’s a massive difference between coming up with a sound business model and convincing the world that it deserves backing. From securing startup funding to attracting the customers and fans that keep your business dream alive, written content is your essential link to the world at large.
How can you make waves when every social media post, blog and paid advertisement has to compete with millions of other digital attention-grabbers? Content marketing that works must be sustainable, so it’s not enough just to occasionally outshine your closest competitors. Instead, you need to institute a plan that you can keep going strong even in the face of financial hard times or your evolving brand guidelines.
Does creating a strategy that bears staying power seem impossible? Fortunately, you don’t have to start stabbing in the dark to succeed with content. Just follow these smart small business tips to ensure that your written words enjoy the longevity they deserve.
What Makes a Good Content Marketing Strategy
Every business is different, and your goals as a CEO, blogger, social media influencer, SEO agency or marketer are just as unique. When it comes to effective content marketing, there’s no catch-all solution, but you may have an easier time identifying a strategy that works if you begin by thinking about your specific needs.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, companies should use content marketing strategies to define why they create content and how doing so benefits them. Of course, these topics are fairly broad.
Gain some clarity by asking yourself the following questions:
Putting Things in Concrete Terms
Many content marketing strategies take the form of basic outlines and other sharable, organized documents. Although it’s up to you to decide how to structure such a plan, you may want to include these 4 essential sections:
A business case:
List the risks, motivations and ideal outcomes of a content marketing system.
A business plan:
Determine the specific goals and KPIs that you want to achieve.
An audience assessment:
Include descriptions of who your content needs to reach and content maps that reveal feasible ways to deliver it to these distinct personas.
A channel plan:
Discuss how you’ll use different channels, such as social media sites, blogs, e-commerce platforms and search engine results pages, to connect with audiences using the specific goals and processes associated with each channel.
The Importance of Constructing an Engaging Narrative
After addressing these issues, it’s wise to come up with a brand story. One of the most important benefits of startup content marketing is its ability to make your business seem like a thriving, confidence-worthy enterprise. Although you may not have the performance statistics to support such a portrayal, you can use cohesive storytelling to captivate and inspire people as they interact with your brand across different channels.
Your brand story should reflect the core principles and value propositions that define your firm and make it distinct from others. By tying your startup content marketing strategy and branding together, your story can give your company’s online presence the authoritative voice it needs to succeed. Smart storytelling can also help you devise firm branding guidelines that inform all of your subsequent marketing activities.
Putting It All Into Practice With the Right Writing
Your content marketing plan is the framework that lets you engage with online audiences in a professional, profitable manner. As a startup, your livelihood depends on your ability to create positive buzz, and content marketing empowers you to give the conversation gentle nudges that guide it toward lucrative destinations.
Remember that content marketing strategies evolve with time
In fact, flexibility is vital to sustainable outreach because it helps your brand adapt and retain relevancy. For such forward progress to occur, however, you need to begin with a solid blueprint that refines the big ideas that drove you to become a startup entrepreneur in the first place.
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Startup Marketing Styles and Strategies: Outreach That Complements Your Company Culture
You’ve determined why you want to use content marketing to catapult your startup to success, and you’ve read plenty of startup blogs that cover how to get started. Unfortunately, the web is full of conflicting ideas about which marketing style is the best, and you don’t have time to wade through them all.
You need to decide which tone to strike.
Fortunately, finding your voice isn’t quite as tricky as it seems.
If you’ve read our small business tips about devising a content marketing strategy, then you know the basics of identifying your business goals, channels, audiences and constraints. From there, it’s easy to pick a specific tone or attitude.
What comes next? You just have to ensure that your many distinct startup marketing practices adhere to the overarching branding guidelines and company values that you’ve established so far. Use these examples to start moving in the right direction.
Is Your Style Compatible With Your Corporate Culture?
Marketing content thrives on the written word. From voiceovers to social media ads and blog posts, your use of language and vocabulary determines how people perceive your company: Are you trying to create a friendly, approachable stance or a formal, authoritative brand portrayal? Do you want to funnel people toward specific social media channels or create a more uniform sense of personality that makes every engagement journey more predictable?
Good writing helps you answer these critical outreach questions. For instance, in a social media post, you may want to address readers directly by using the second-person voice with words such as “you” and “your.” An “About Us” page that shares your corporate values and branding, on the other hand, might lean more toward first-person communication, such as “we,” “us” and “our.”
Although grammatical precision is critical to making a good impression, the stylistic rules of writing are by no means set in stone. The important thing is picking a manner that suits your corporate culture and being as consistent as humanly possible. Consider whether these three common styles might resonate with your audiences:
Entertaining
Not all content needs to be mind-blowing or life-changing. Sometimes, brands use entertaining writing to attract attention and foster goodwill among diverse audiences.
Consider web marketing giants like the ever-popular BuzzFeed. This company is known for consistently posting lightweight entertainment, fluff pieces and videos that use casual language, humor and overt appeals to the millennial generation. Although BuzzFeed does share and produce journalistic news items, it got its start by focusing on the content that went viral.
Should your content be entertaining?
You don’t have to be a startup that specializes in the entertainment industry to take advantage of this kind of self-representation. If your branding guidelines permit the use of relaxed language, then there’s nothing wrong with presenting yourself in a friendly, open manner.
Naturally, you’ll want to pay attention to nuances like subject matter to avoid coming off as too casual when you’re discussing serious topics, such as mistakes your company made, serious news items or potentially sensitive topics. Nonetheless, you can use this style to great effect when trying to attract attention and cultivate a more approachable corporate presence.
Informative or Educational
Effective content makes its mark by providing consumers with valuable experiences that they enjoy and want to sustain. Brands use educational content to attract readers in search of solutions and promote sharing.
Informative content comes in countless forms, and according to Inc., it can help you reposition your organization as a leader in your field. How-to blogs, social media posts that discuss your products’ core technology and behind-the-scenes explanations of your business processes are all great examples of how you can get people interested merely by appealing to their curiosity. Although this strategy works best when it targets readers who are already searching for something, it also has the potential to attract casual digital passersby and those who were still on the fence about your products, services or field.
Could your content benefit from sharing more information?
Readers automatically associate certain types of digital media with informative content. For instance, blogs and website landing pages typically share something worth knowing even if it’s just information about special sales or upcoming promotions. While things like Tweets often fulfill entertainment and functional engagement purposes due to their brevity, you can also leverage them to guide users toward more informative items like blog posts.
Interactive
Lots of interactive written content blurs the lines between informative and entertaining materials. Startup marketing that uses interactive content helps companies establish more cohesive branding.
Personalized attention is key when you answer customer complaints or business inquiries. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t benefit from a bit of boilerplate preparation. For instance, think back to every time you called your cable company or internet provider and actually got to speak with a live person. Did you notice anything familiar? Most customer service representatives follow rote scripts that let them:
When should you use interactive content strategies?
Naturally, you don’t want to sound like a robot, but creating certain types of interactive content in advance might give your startup a more professional air that audiences will appreciate. Many Textbroker clients use interactive written content strategies to help them explore:
Interactive writing works best when you’d like to prompt a response or respond to something that one of your users does. Even though you’ll often benefit by combining such material with situational reactions from human decision makers, creating templates is an excellent way to start defining the engagement experiences that you want to provide for your audience.
Remember that these three styles aren’t the end-all of written marketing content. For instance, you may benefit from publishing technical documents, press releases, white papers and other materials. Always choose a blend that feels natural for your corporate mission, the target digital channel and the situation at hand.
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Putting Your Startup Content Marketing Strategy Into Practice
You’ve decided how you want to use content to promote rewarding online engagement. So, how can you stick to your guns while remaining adaptable in the face of new challenges?
Your success depends entirely on your ability to maintain a marketing framework. For instance, most companies that publish blogs, website pages, social media posts and other items depend on content management system, or CMS, software tools, such as WordPress or Drupal.
What many marketers overlook is that publishing content is a full-time occupation. From helping writers stick to the tone guidelines that you’ve set to posting topical writing while it’s still relevant, a lot of work goes into ensuring that your content hits the scene when it bears the biggest impact.
A robust CMS system isn’t always going to be enough, and in-house writers often fall short at startups where everyone is already wearing multiple hats. Talk to Textbroker about scheduling your next content order and making the creation, editing and publication processes as smooth as possible.
How to Use Startup Blogs to Get the Word Out
Do people know about your startup company, or are you languishing in relative obscurity? While it’s understandable that you might still be accumulating the momentum required to make a huge splash, you shouldn’t get too comfortable. No matter how good your business ideas are, you need to spread them to achieve sustainable profitability.
Could blog-based content marketing be your ace in the hole? Here’s how you can follow in the footsteps of startup blogging’s biggest innovators.
Establishing Your Purpose
As we’ve mentioned before, you need to understand your motivations for content marketing before trying to put a strategy into practice. This also applies to distinct channels like blogs.
Long-term Goals vs. Per-post Objectives
When deciding why you want to post blogs, you ought to think about more than just the general business goals, such as boosting your e-commerce ROI or page visit stats. Each blog post ought to perform a unique function within these broader contexts, such as:
Your long-term and immediate blogging goals
don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Choosing a Platform
Keeping your blogs well-organized contributes to easier readability and improved reception. Many marketers depend on CMSs to ensure that their content stays as digestible and regular as possible. For instance, you may use a system that publishes your blog posts along with accompanying social media blurbs to promote the content on Facebook or Twitter. Or, you might load the system with a bunch of content for automated publication according to a predefined schedule.
Different blogging platforms offer a range of distinctive features. Some apps force you to adjust your marketing workflows and expenditures to accommodate the software, but others are hackable or free of charge. Start by identifying the features that you’ll require, such as the ability to publish business posts from your smartphone or have multiple team members collaborate on a blog, and then pick the platform options that match.
Making Your Blog Work
You’ll need more than just the right publishing tools to get your blog up and running. It’s equally important that your creative writing backend also runs like clockwork. If you can’t generate the content that makes your blog worth reading, visitors will be few and far between.
As part of a startup or small business, you need to remember that efficiency is essential when you’re trying to grow your brand presence. Tools like the Textbroker API make it possible to order professional content on a regular basis and have it seamlessly delivered to your favorite CMS or blog system, and the Managed Service team can ensure that your projects hit the key points and topics that you want to discuss.
Mastering blog management is a crucial step for companies that want to grow beyond their operational limits. Why fall behind when it’s so simple to get started by placing an order?
Why Social Media Marketing Is Your Gateway to Startup Brand Presence
From small business owners and bloggers to SEO agencies and marketing experts, those who want to cultivate organic interactions rely on social networks. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to master the nuances of how different platforms operate. When people engage with your company, do they get to enjoy natural interactions, or does everything feel stilted and awkward?
Adopting a comprehensive social media marketing plan before plunging into the depths is usually your best bet. Keep these small business tips in mind along the way.
Maintain Your Brand’s Voice on Social Media
Social media has a widely recognized tendency to reward informality. Firing off a message or post is so easy that individual users and brands alike relax and use casual language.
Should your brand give in to this kind of behavior? Informality can be a powerful weapon, but it cuts both ways. Your failure to key in on how your audience speaks might label you as a target for ridicule or make you seem disingenuous.
If you’re unsure of what the slang or trending hashtag that you’re about to use means, then come up with content that more closely aligns with your company values. Social media is the ideal place to be expressive, but this doesn’t mean that you should abandon your branding guidelines altogether or start writing like you’re sending a text message to a friend.
Use Social Media to Reinforce Your Brand’s Story
Social media is an awesome storytelling tool, and posts can help you get people interested in your background. Use well-written, attention-grabbing phrasing to raise inbound traffic to your other content, such as blog posts, e-commerce listings or press releases.
If you’re sticking to an informative content marketing style, then pulling juicy facts from your longer startup blogs is a smart way to come up with enticing, shareable blurbs that you can use to draw more people into the story on social sites. Since these platforms cater to the shortest of attention spans, such brevity and repetition can help you keep the narrative going strong.
Although some marketers claim that copied content won’t hurt your SEO rankings, it probably doesn’t help them rise. Except for basic brand elements, such as taglines, always rewrite ideas that you want to use in multiple places around the web.
Reinforcing your brand’s story is one way to be put on the map, but performing keyword planning is something that could actually boost your SEO rankings. Knowing which keywords to use in your content will help to optimize for SEO and will make it easier for people to find it. After all, you don’t want your content to get buried under all the rest.
Go further in your content marketing strategy with this keyword planning tool!
Leverage Influencers to Make Waves
Social media may be a marketing juggernaut, but its success remains grounded in user trust. People prefer interacting with media presences that they view as authorities, not companies that tell them what to think.
Influencer marketing can be a huge benefit when you’re trying to make a name for your startup online, and written content is a great tool for forging lasting business connections. For instance, although some bloggers love reviewing products and writing about their reactions, others prefer when brands provide them with explicit marketing copy. Such materials can include social media posts and campaigns that make it simpler for influencers to share choice details about your products and services.
Never underestimate the humble guest post. If you want to gain prestige by working with a well-recognized authority source, such as a digital trade magazine or industry publication, then providing a guest post that links back to your brand presence is usually a smart option. Since you’re doing a lot of the creative groundwork for the influencer, it’s much easier for them to simply hit publish and let you take advantage of the extra publicity.
Understand How to Write for Social Media
Social media writing styles may differ from startup blogs and business landing pages, but it’s still important to maintain firm editorial oversight. Working with authors and project managers who you can count on to produce grammatically flawless writing is a much better way to engender trust than trying to hop on a random hashtag bandwagon or played-out trend.
Make your social media content marketing strategy more impactful with content that provides value no matter how short or informal it is. Whether you decide to teach, share interesting concepts or address important current topics, people will be more receptive to what you have to say if you make it worthwhile to subscribe or follow you.
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