Are you a startup or planning to launch your new business? Starting a business is an exciting and life-changing but also a tough job as well. In this digital age, content marketing can be helpful to grow your new business.
In Bill Gates words, “Content Is King.”
Content is everywhere – website pages, Social media posts, blog posts, email newsletters, tweets, graphics, stories, videos – you just name it.
Wondering, what actually it is?
According to Copyblogger, content marketing is defined as:
“CONTENT MARKETING means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.”
Content marketing is really just the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell to them.
Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates more than three times as many leads.
93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (CMI)
60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. (eMarketer)
53% of marketers stated that 91% to 100% of the content they published in 2016 contained visuals. (IMPACT) (Digiblogic)
Brand awareness continues to be the top organizational goal for B2B content marketing. (CMI)
Here, I come up with 9 powerful content marketing tips directly from thought leaders that can help you in creating your content marketing strategy for your new startup. Have a look:
Tip #1: Work Hard to Understand Your Target Audience:
“Work hard on getting to know your audience, studying your competition, and formulating a strategy around what would resonate before you ever took to the content creation itself.
Every audience and every platform are different. Rather than depending on how unique the new audience you should go after was from your current audience (of most marketers and tech folks), it might take you some serious time to get good at finding a sweet spot.” (Source)
-Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org
Tip #2: Spend Time Creating an Attractive Content to Grab Reader’s Attention:
“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but 2 out of 10 will read the rest. So spend more time creating and attracting headlines. A great headline mixed with a lame opening is like inviting someone into your house, only to slam the door in their face as they approach. The third most important part of your blog post is closing. A great way to close is to tie back into your opening.”
– Brian Clark, Founder, and CEO of Rainmaker Digital
Tip #3: Create Content that Market Itself:
“Let me share with you my simple rule for creating content that markets itself. When people ask me how I decide what I write about on this blog, my answer is that prior to launching this blog I’d decided a simple rule for myself. Only post content that is 1. incredible 2. of value to the audience and 3. sans pimping.
I’ve worked very hard to follow this rule every single time I post something.”
– Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google
Tip #4: You Need the Quantity to Find the Quality of Your Content:
“While most of the content marketers out there are saying “it’s quality over quantity,” I stick to my contrarian belief that you can’t just order up to two quality pieces of content.
“Quality” is determined by your audience, not by your biased opinion of your own work. Did your piece achieve unusually remarkable results in terms of whatever objective you had for it: views, engagement rates, social shares, SEO rankings, conversion rate (etc.)?
In reality, only 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20 of my posts do remarkably well in one or more of these objectives. So you actually need the quantity to find the quality.” (Source)
– Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream
Tip #5: Content Curation Can Help People!
“The core of inbound marketing is creating value for your audience — before you to try to extract value from them. Given the increasing volumes of content that are out there, there’s value to really good curation, helping people find the content that will help them.
Search engines are great for finding things you’re looking for, but not great at discovering things that you should be looking for, but aren’t. That’s where curation can help.” (Source)
– Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot
Tip #6: Make Your Story Compelling and Memorable:
“People who used to spend all their time spinning products when they’re released? They need to spend their time in the beginning. They need to be saying, “What should we make? How do we make it in such a way that the story of our product is true?
People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic. Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.”
– Seth Godin, Blogger, Marketing Guru, and Best-seller Author
Tip #7: Make Your Content HelpfulL
“Great content solves a problem. Think about one of the best-selling books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. That book solves a huge problem for people: making friends. And it presents the information in a way you can use right away.
It includes word-for-word conversation scripts and action steps for you to follow, which makes the content immediately helpful to you. Great content is about more than just the information. It’s about getting your audience the results they want.” (Source)
– Ramit Sethi, New York Times bestselling author, and founder and CEO of GrowthLab and I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Tip #8: Add Humanity and Empathy to Your Story:
“It’s about humanizing your brand, humanizing your people. Sharing details about what makes you tick outside of work isn’t irrelevant. It’s magnetic. It creates connective tissues between people that carry over into business contexts. Old-school sellers called this relationship-building.
Today it’s that plus a critical competitive differentiator that puts something unique and irreplaceable between you and your buyer.” (Source)
– Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing Inc
Tip #9: Action is the Most Important Metric of Your Content Marketing:
“You need both contents that create influence marketing that asks the prospect to take the next step. Sadly, the reason why most businesses get such crappy results from content marketing is they have neither. The content they publish doesn’t build any influence with their readers whatsoever, and they never make it clear to the reader exactly what the next step is.”
– Jon Morrow, Founder, and CEO of Smart Blogger