But what is content marketing? Content marketing is a technique that combines the creation and sharing of valuable, relevant, and consistent content with specific goals. It can be used to generate new leads and sales, improve brand awareness and engagement, or support other digital marketing activities.
Successful content marketing requires planning, creativity, consistency, and collaboration. There are many different types of content that can be used in this strategy: blog posts, e-books, social media posts; videos; infographics; whitepapers; etc.
Content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable digital content in a strategic and consistent way. This includes all digital marketing collaterals, from social media posts to videos, podcasts, emails, newsletters, website content and design, and more.
Content marketing aims to attract, engage, and retain the audience and convert them to customers. Content marketing is designed to deliver a coherent message that aligns with the company’s brand. It aims to build the company’s reputation and presence, especially online.
For many businesses, especially startups and SMEs, a strong digital marketing strategy with a solid content marketing plan is an ideal and relatively cost-efficient marketing investment. This is given that there are about five billion internet users globally as of July 2022.
Reaching even just a percentage of this market will definitely make an impact and help them gain a foothold in their industry. But, content marketing also has its pitfalls, especially when it is done without the right research and strategy. It can cost you your customers, as well as your brand and reputation.
Best Content Marketing Tips
Table of Contents
Here are five practical content marketing tips for startups who are just establishing their online presence.
Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to digital marketing and content marketing, it is easy to think that you just need to publish anything everywhere to gain presence. But this is not how it really goes. Content marketing is basically a strategized way to share your brand – your mission and your story – with your target customers.
It’s always quality over quantity. Share something valuable with your audience that they might also share with other people, rather than bombard them with unnecessary information that they might not pay attention to or even avoid.
Content marketing also requires a balance between optimizing content for algorithms and for the real people who will read or see them. All brands and companies are fighting their way to rank on the search engine results page (SERP).
But the ranks must be compensated with engaging and relevant content so that audiences can see your brand as relevant and your company as a thought leader. Timing and accessibility are also important when publishing content.
See what’s new in your sector, look at what competitors are publishing, study trends and generate timely content worth viewing and/or sharing. Take a look at the best practices for competitor analysis and well-timed content using Ahrefs Tool Guide: Using Content Explorer for E-Commerce to see how you can find topics, search competitors and develop a high-quality content marketing plan and strategy.
Identify Your Target Audience
In order to create strategic and relevant content, you have to know the receivers at the other end of the line — the readers, viewers, followers, and everyone on and offline. Not doing so is just you shouting at a void and wasting money and time, no matter how significant your thoughts could have been.
Know your audience, who they are, where they are from, what they prefer or need to find, and how you can help them. Create a content map based on the customer journey. This way, you can generate more purposeful content that they can relate to and engage with.
Humans are social beings and are always finding connections, hence giving them content that they can resonate with allows you to attract the proper audience. The more targeted your content is, the better you can measure its efficacy and results.
Use Social Media To Amplify Your Content’s Reach
Social media greatly revolutionized the world in a lot of ways. It has paved the way for brands to reach more people; hence it has also become a vital part of digital marketing. About 59 percent of people have social media accounts and spend an average of almost two and a half hours online.
These people can turn an idea into a trend, making them a great instrument to amplify your reach. Using social media to communicate with your target audience gives it somewhat of a more personal approach. The platform can help you get to know your potential customers better, see what they are up to, find out what’s interesting to them and create a connection with them. It gives you the power of “word of mouth,” but online.
You build trust through online testimonies posted or shared by people, especially when they are really pleased with your service or product. This is good publicity that’s also cost-efficient. A simple, targeted social media post can help capture the attention of consumers and increase conversions.
Repurpose Old Content Into New Formats
The internet is now almost overly crowded with information, some of which are actually just saying the same thing but in different formats and styles. Try not to contribute any more to this noise and keep your content up to a minimum – just everything you need to convey what you’re currently trying to say.
Take help of tools like ChatGPT alternatives and Include repurposing of old content within your content marketing strategy. This way, you do not have to archive media materials at the back of your database, consuming space which could have been allotted to more purposeful data.
Repurposing content also saves you time from generating new ideas all the time. It is definitely more than okay to reuse old materials and modify them into a new format to fit current trends and consumer needs. The best thing you can do to use your old content to its full potential, is to implement SEO strategies to make it stand out. The easiest and most effective way is the usage of SEO content generator tools.
Another great alternative is Scribe. Scribe is your AI-powered process documentation platform that automatically creates SOPs, help center docs, user guides and process overviews for any business workflow. Scribe builds how-to guides with instructions and annotated screenshots — in seconds. Scribe AI takes care of the most dreaded part of your job: explaining how to do things. Document any process 50x faster to save time, boost productivity and build a stronger team than ever. If you can do it, Scribe AI can document it!
Measure Results And Adjust Your Strategy
In addition to bringing information to people, measuring your content marketing approach’s results is important. Determine its reach and conversion rate to see its effectiveness and know if it should be sustained, followed through or adjusted. Monitor your content in order to maintain its relevance and get an idea of what to publish next.
Effective content marketing tools give you access to statistics and analytics. This can help you better understand all your campaigns and content’s performance across the channels. Leverage new technology to generate effective and high-quality content, and develop and optimize your long-term content marketing strategy that will generate the best results and ROI. Also, take advantage of the benefits of account-based marketing to win and grow.
Boost Your Business Through Content Marketing
The competition to establish a dominant presence online is tighter than ever; hence the internet has become a battlefield of content. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for many businesses, especially startups. The key is to use content marketing to establish valuable relationships to boost your business further.
Deliver relevant information in a way that is fresh, creative, and engaging, as well as timely. Develop a customer and human-centric content strategy. Because even after ranking all search engines and algorithms, it will still be your customers who can give you the final verdict. It will reflect across various aspects of our business, from your revenue to your reputation.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.