Creating a solid content strategy that will help you generate leads and sales for your startup isn’t easy.

The amount of information out there makes it difficult to identify the best practices you should be using for content marketing in your tech startup.

Besides, you don’t have all the time to do what everyone suggests, right?  

So, how do you use content to promote your startup by implementing a content marketing strategy that guarantees results? And how do you make sure that you sustain these results over time?

By relying on proven frameworks to document and implement your content marketing strategy.

This post will provide you with a breakdown of these frameworks to help you get unstuck by knowing what you need to do to succeed with content marketing. Let’s get started:

Step #1. Identify Your Business Objectives

Like any other customer acquisition channel you’re going to use (such as word of mouth or advertising) you need to clearly understand how content helps you acquire customers.

Content marketing helps you create brand awareness, improve engagement, generate leads and sales and retain your customers, you can create a plan for content marketing with a clear objective and can hire marketing freelancers or any agency to implement it. That, in other words, is the business impact (or result) that you expect from the content you create. And this goes hand in hand with your business objectives.

Business objectives help you deliver the results you’re looking for (leads and sales). For example, Wordable helps you save time when uploading blog posts from Google Docs to WordPress.

The business impact of their content is getting more content managers and blog editors to sign up and start using their tool when publishing content to their blogs.

From this, you can deduce the objective that will help us achieve our business impact. For example:

Publishing content to boost our inbound marketing efforts through increasing brand awareness for our tool. 

And the content they’ve been creating is in line with that objective.

See What I Mean?

All objectives are equally important because you need to create content that is relevant to readers depending on their buying stage.

During awareness, for instance, your content should help you establish thought leadership and improve brand awareness.

During the evaluation and decision stage, your content needs to help you generate leads and nurture them before converting them into customers.

And once you acquire customers, the content you create should help augment your customer service efforts.

So when thinking about your business objectives, here are a few pointers to guide the content you create to help you generate leads and sales:

• Thought leadership – Use content to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche to create brand awareness
• Content to generate leads – Use content to generate leads and boost conversions
• PR and building a community – Use content to create a community around your brand and improve brand engagement
• Customer support – Use content to improve the efficiency of your customer support team to retain customers

Step #2. Segment Your Potential Customers

Ever read a blog post, sales page, or email and felt like the author was reading your mind by saying exactly what you wanted to hear?

Chances are, you either subscribed to that blog, clicked on a link in that email, or bought a product from the sales page, right?

That’s the power of segmenting your customers. You already have buyer personas.

But they’re not enough, so you want to take this a step further and segment your potential buyers.

As you do this, you’ll discover that each segment has different challenges, fears, needs, and goals. The result? You’ll start creating good content that resonates with each segment.

In fact, 87% of B2B buyers use a search engine to discover the content they want to read. As a result, search engines have become smarter at recognizing content that matches a searcher’s intent and context.

They then allow such content to take up the top three slots which earns it a higher click-through rate and, consequently, more organic traffic.

Segmenting your audience requires you to add more details to the buyer persona you already have. Doing this will help you identify distinct characteristics that separate one buyer from another. These characteristics could be such as:

• The industry they’re in
• Their stage of business growth
• Their market position
• The number of employees they have
• Their gross annual revenue

If you already have customers, look at the information they’ve provided you in your interactions to find more details about your target customers. Alternatively,  conduct a survey to learn more about their needs which will help you segment them.

Step #3. Study Your Competitors

Knowing what your competitors are doing helps you know how to differentiate yourself and what’s working and what isn’t.

Besides, you’re already armed with information about your potential customer segments. So you are in a better position to know whether your competitors are creating relevant content that potential buyers are looking for.

For example, if a competitor is publishing original research and opinion pieces, then you will know that their business objective is using content to establish themselves as a thought leader.

If you have a similar business objective, then you want to identify different ways through which you will outdo them. It could be through publishing similar content, but more often. Got the idea?

Here’s a checklist you need to use when studying your competitors:

Do They Publish:

• Visual content (Infographics and videos)?
• Written content (blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers)?
• Audio content (podcasts)?
• All of the above?  

How Often do They Publish Each Type of Content?

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly

What Topics Does This Content Cover?

• Are the topics relevant to what your potential buyers are looking for?

What Is the Average Length of Their Content?

• Is the content comprehensive?

What Social Media Channels Are They Using to Promote Their Content?

• Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram?
• Do they have followers who engage with their content on these channels?
• Do they have a private community for their audience and customers?

By the end of this exercise you will have identified gaps in your content that you can work towards filling in. And that’s what will set you apart from everyone else. It could be:

• Creating comprehensive content and publishing it often
• Introducing a new perspective to common topics e.g humor to boring topics
• promoting content in online communities such as Reddit and Quora to boost your social media marketing efforts

Step #4. Systemize Your Content Workflow

According to Orbit Media, it takes a minimum of 3 hours and 57 minutes to write a blog post. And 38% of publishers who spend more than six hours per post get better results from their content marketing efforts.

That’s one part of the story. The other part?

Keyword research. Creating an editorial calendar. Assigning work to writers. Editing and publishing great content. All these activities take time.

Lots of it.

Given that content creation is a marathon, you’ll need to create high quality content and while still maintaining a consistent publishing schedule. And that’s where systemizing your content creation workflows comes in.

While there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to this, you still need to have  a standard operating procedure for your startup. It should outline what everyone in the content creation team needs to do in every stage of your content creation process, right from keyword research to publishing your content on your blog.

For instance, who is in charge of keyword research and what tools does your startup use? Who creates the content calendar? Do you have internal subject matter experts to create content, or will you hire freelancers or leverage an AI writing tool for content writing?

What criteria do you use when hiring a freelance writer? Do you have a style guide that every writer should follow when writing a blog post and creating visual content for your startup?

What tone and style do you use for your startup? Who is in charge of editing and publishing content to your blog? What about content promotion? Who tracks how content is performing?

These questions should help you think of how you want to organize things to avoid chaos and make sure that everyone is doing their job.

One more thing: your content workflow won’t be set on stone. It will evolve over time as your content needs grow. Start with a basic document that will help you get things done right now then be open to improving it as you grow. All things considered, remember that it’s equally important to back up articles, photos, and other visual assets you create along with your post. Make sure to know what the different online backup services are and which ones might work best for you.

Step #5. Promote Your Content

Creating and publishing high quality content isn’t enough. Given the amount of content that’s going live every day, promoting your content helps improve its reach so that even those who aren’t part of your audience reads it.

Take this HVAC Salary guide from Jobber as an example. If you were promoting a similar resource on your social media channels, you could share data from the guide, screenshots of the graphs or the interactive map, or even the original photography used throughout. The more engaging your content is and the more it follows content marketing best practices, the more opportunity you’ll have to repurpose it.

To ensure that this happens with each piece of content you publish, you’ll need to rely on social media channels, and partnering with influencers.

Social Media:

Social media channels are a huge part of your potential buyer’s lives. Users spend close to 74 minutes everyday on their favorite channels. In addition to their personal interactions on these channels, 78% of them find new products and services through Facebook ads and social media posts.

In addition to sharing a social media posts with a link pointing back to your site, remember to continuously vary your approach when posting through methods such as:

• Asking a question concerning the topic you wrote about then subtly point readers back to your post
• Sharing a quote or statistic that you shared in your post
• Sharing a video with a short commentary and a link back to your blog post

Make your work easier by using a social media scheduler like Buffer.

Influencer Marketing:

Given the trust they have built with their audience, reaching out to influencers in your niche to help you promote your content

However, you need to be selective about the type of influencer you choose to work with so that you get the results you’re looking for.

Here are five different types of influencers:

When starting out, you want to reach out to nano influencers, micro influencers and professionals to help you promote your content. These partnerships could be through guest blogging on their site, paid promotion or content curation, mainly focused on the content they publish.

Step #6. Measure Your Results

This circles back to the objectives you set earlier on and whether they’re helping you achieve the business impact you want.

And the only way to know how well you’re doing is to keep tracking your performance and identifying areas where you need to improve your content strategy. However, you need to be aware of the metrics you’re tracking to make sure that you’re not obsessed with vanity metrics.

For brand awareness, track metrics such as:

• Amount of traffic to your blog
• Number of new visitors vs number of unique visitors
• Number of branded searches
• Number of inbound links

For level of engagement track metrics such as:

• Number of social media followers you acquire from your social media posts.
• Amount of traffic by source (social media channels, email marketing, or inbound links, or direct search)
• Number of leads you generate

For conversions, you need to track:

• Number of sales
• Time to conversion
• Size of your retargeting list (if you’re running paid ads)
• Marketing channels that are responsible for your conversions (lead generation and sales)

For customer retention, you need to track:

• Customer lifetime value
• Churn rate
• Number of repeat purchases

Step #7. Execute and Automate Your Content

However, carefully monitor the number of pages on your site so that there are no pages with errors, blank pages, etc. In order to control this, we can recommend page counter by Sitechecker.

This tool will help you find all pages on a website and will let you know if you have a lot of duplicate pages, which negatively affects the ranking of your site in the network. It’s important to know which pages may have errors, so you can detect them and fix them.

Conclusion

Content marketing for startups isn’t as hard as it seems. Sure, it takes time and effort to get the results you’re looking for. But that doesn’t mean you need a huge team and lots of funding to pull it off.

Know what your business objectives are. Segment your potential buyers. Study your competitors to differentiate yourself. Then systemize your content creation workflow and promote your content.  

Don’t forget to pay attention to metrics that matter so you’re able to take action and improve on them to get the results you’re looking for.

Shadrack Wanjohi

Shadrack is a marketing SaaS writer for B2B brands.