The Perfect Lead-Generating Content Marketing Strategy For Your Start-up

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Getting yourself on the virtual map (search engines) is one of the first few things you MUST do, as a start-up. Your tech-savvy prospective customers will find you via these search engines. According to iMPACT, the first five results receive 67.60% of clicks. And showing up on the first page of the SERPs requires a concrete SEO strategy. A significant part of implementing an SEO strategy is creating, reviewing, and implementing a flawless and well-planned Content Marketing Strategy. Be it for well-established businesses or Start-ups — the right content marketing strategy holds power to drive in exponential traffic. To create a content marketing strategy for your start-up, you need to understand and adhere to the following steps.

1) Analyse and Create A Buyers Persona For Your Product Or Service

Whenever you launch a product into the market, you’re pinning some hopes on selling it to a pre-determined group of people called the niche. The process of determining the various attributes of your buyers, such as;

• Demographics: Age, gender, ethnicity, income level, location etc.
• Psychographic factors: Interests, hobbies, beliefs, etc.
• Content preference: Reading material, audio, or video
• Challenges/Problems: what kind of product or service do they need to solve the current problem?

There are many other attributes that we must consider while creating a buyers persona. The idea of creating an imaginary person and filling it in with the trait that suits the sales of your product or service is called a buyer persona. When creating a content strategy, you must keep in mind that your customer travels through the buyers funnel gradually.

And this means that you’ll need content for each stage of the funnel. Beginning from Awareness to consideration, to decision, and finally, to make a purchase, each step requires a persuasive content.

For example; If your startup were food-related, you’d want to create content for each stage of your prospective buyers’ journey based on the buyers’ persona you’ve created. This way, you can ensure that your potential buyer chooses you.

2) Determine Your Content Goals

Determining your content goal will including identifying the kind of content you want your audience you read. Each piece of material acts as a catalyst in speeding up the buyers’ journey of your prospective customer. Be it blogs, podcasts, social media content, user-generated content, whitepapers, or other variations of content creation — you need the right mix of content to rope in buyers.

You may have heard about setting SMART goals for your content marketing goals. It is an acronym that defines content creation methods, content auditing techniques, and content marketing expectations.

S stands for Specific: Every content that you plan, for different levels of the buyers’ journey, must have some specific goals. Beginning from its purpose, for which level of buyers’ journey does it belong, to the defining what the content wants to convey, everything must be specified.

M stands for Measurable: There is always a purpose behind creating a piece of content. You must have proper measurement metrics in place to identify and measure the results of your content.

Astands for Attainable: Aiming for the Moon is a good habit, but not settling for the stars (after giving it your best shot), will drain you mentally and physically. Always set your content goals to a limit that you know you’ll be able to achieve. There is still plenty of content to go around!

Rstands for Relevant: Any content that you curate, must be relevant to your business goals and product/services. Writing out of context just to invite traffic may show you increasing results at a point in time, but it is only momentary.

Tstands for Timely: Attaching a time limit to every piece of content that you write, is the right way to go! Be it writing a blog or creating a script for a video, attaching a due-date to your content piece ensures better quality. Organisation tools such as Trello come in handy while trying to maintain a flow.

Your content goals must be in-sync with the buyers’ persona you created in step 1.

3) The Process Of Content Creation

After you have set the content goals for your business, you go all the way to the content city! So, when you place your content goals, you’re laying down a foundation for your content creation process. It allows you to set a target for your content marketing needs and curate relevant content.

For curating the most relevant piece of content, you must create a check-list for the content and ensure that you stick to it for every information that you curate. Here is a general checklist for your content which will become a framework for all your future content;

• Decide a keyword: Be it SEO content or just content, writing a piece of content based on a keyword is the aptest way to go! It is always beneficial to narrow down the relevant keywords rather than beginning with the topic directly.
• Topic: After you have narrowed down the keywords, you can then decide the issues. Tools like Hubspot, BuzzSumo and others help in fetching topics.
• Prepare An Outline: Preparing an outline of content involves writing a purpose and scope of the topic, and then what you’ll be covering. Here is a small screenshot for your reference;
• Revise the Draft: Remember how teachers repeatedly asked to revise the answers before submitting the answer copy? That’s what you’ll need to do here! Go, old school! Revise your first draft to ensure that your text is error-free and clean!
• Submit: After you’ve revised the draft, you submit it for publishing! (or to the editor)

Every step mentioned above must have a due-date attached. Be it fishing for keywords, topics, or beginning to prepare the first draft, attaching a deadline to ensure the efficient completion of tasks on or before time.

4) Content Promotion Channels

Before you begin your content marketing journey, you must understand that it is a full circle. It includes everything from content planning to content strategising and marketing in the end. So, once your list of content is ready, you’re next step is to ensure that your niche comes in contact with the content. For this, you must create a content promotion strategy. It can be spread across various channels — here are the most commonly used ways of content promotion.

Social Media: Over the past couple of years, social media has gained a lot of prominence due to the large mass of people that it can reach. It has both organic and paid options to reach your targetted niches. Given that EVERYBODY is on social media, it is a potent method to get in touch with your niches to get to know their preferences.

E-Newsletters: Turning the dial-up to technology, E-Newsletters are the perfect way of getting in touch with your prospective customers personally.

Organic Searches: Organic searches are a result of performing SEO for your content. You must follow best SEO practices such as carrying out on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and other necessary steps. It will allow you to show on the SERPs whenever a user enters a relevant search query.

Third-Party: Publishing content on a third-party website is a great way of indirectly marketing your content and bringing in traffic on your website. You can begin with reaching out to multiple guest posts websites and pitching your content and business activities indirectly.

These are the basic and foremost promotions channels that you must follow before going on to the more advance options.

5) Establish Your KPIs and Measure Your Results

KPIs are key performance indicators that tell you the key attributes that you must consider or focus on while marketing your content. KPIs are a mixture of various characteristics that can define the goals of your content marketing. Metrics like number of people you want to reach, number of blogs you want to write for your website, blogs what you want to write for your third party website, etc.

After you’ve set your KPIs and begun the process of content creation, you also want to employ regular checks to measure your results and match it with a standard result. Continually checking your results allows you to better yourself at creating, organising, and marketing content.

Wrapping Up

Content Marketing is a strong arm of digital marketing is allows you to enhance the traffic on your website by applying SEO best practices. Through the blog, we talked about the steps to create a perfect content marketing strategy for your start-up. You must also keep in mind that these steps are for start-ups, once you’ve got the hang of marketing your content, you’ll want to upgrade it further.