Creating a content marketing strategy for a startup that’s just getting off the ground is no easy task. After spending the last 6 months developing these strategies for a relatively new startup, I decided to compile my experience with what I thought worked and didn’t work.
The first thing that I would recommend doing is developing a consumer persona. Not sure if you’re already aware of this, so I’ll go ahead and cover how to go about this. Sometimes your product targets multiple types of consumers, so multiple persona types will be needed (shocking). The first step is to identify who these people (Listeners, workshop attendees, buyers, etc.). Once you have this segmented, you can develop the personas through this exercise that you can do with your team:
Persona Exercise
- Divide a sheet of A4 paper into quarters
- In the top left quarter, draw a portrait of where you imagine your target consumer to be using your product
- On sticky notes, identify facts about the consumer (30 yrs old, 100k annual salary, lives in Shanghai, etc.)
- Deviate from the actual exercise by using a group model of everyone sticking what they’ve identified on a board/wall. As a group, you then discuss to choose the top 5 relevant facts to write in the top right quarter of your paper (this can also be done individually and discussion can take place at the end).
- Repeat sticky notes process, this time for consumer behaviors (reads the Wall Street Journal, attends industry events, i.e. what does the consumer actually do).
- Same process as above, write behaviors in bottom left quarter of paper
- Repeat sticky notes process, this time for consumer motivations (wants to make money, wants to learn, i.e. the why, desires, and wants)
- Same process as above, write motivations in bottom right quarter of paper.
After doing this for each consumer type you should have a pretty good picture of who you think your personas are, what websites they visit, what blogs they read, what their interests are, etc. This will really help target your content strategy and paid advertising.
One thing that I would spend time consistently developing is a carefully curated and diverse blog section. This will really help attract potential consumers along any part of the sales channel. This is the content strategy that I use.
How to Distribute Content with Social Media
Use your Facebook page purely as a branding mechanism. Show pictures of the work environment, post interesting developments in your industry, and of course, share original content. Boosting posts of original content can really help drive traffic to your website (If you haven’t already, set up Google Analytics…like right now). You can target audiences with this, so if you have your personas developed you’ll be able to focus your approach versus going scatter shot. I find this method to be a very efficient use of funds, especially if you’re cash strapped.
In my opinion, Twitter is only crucial from a vanity stats perspective. It’s nice to have a Twitter account with thousands of followers and high engagement in the form of favorites and retweets but in my experience, I find that not many people go from twitter (highly mobile) to your website. This leaves twitter as not being a conversion-friendly form of content marketing, but it is necessary to do. What I’m trying to say is, don’t spend too much time on this. Send 4-5 tweets a day that do a combo of showing off company personality (identity), industry news, and original content. I will say that you can hit gold if you nail timing down with original content on Twitter, but the rapidity needed for that is hard to maintain with a small team.
This might be your best friend in terms of social media. Everyone on your team should join groups relevant to your product on LinkedIn (that’s probably where the highest converting customers will be!), to share original content and product updates. You can also run paid advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. It’s way more pricey than FB (like $2-4 a click!), but it’s highly targeted and really drives web traffic.
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