Content marketing tips for startups

Are you planning a content marketing campaign, but don’t know where, and how to start? It takes too much dedication, time, energy, and loads of ideas to begin with. But like most things, the beginning is always the crucial part of marketing.

At SYNC, we understand this too well, so we’ve put together some tips to help you understand more about content marketing, how to start a content marketing campaign, and what you should do for the campaign to be effective and lasting.

Read also: Content marketing for startups

Focus on your target audience

Often, we try to focus on too broad a category of people. If your content is too broad, you’ll find that you’ll generate visitors who don’t convert into customers. It’s better to have a much smaller targeted audience that converts to read paying customers.

For example, if you’re targeting PMEBs in Singapore, then focus your content on issues that matter to them and is relevant to your business. Do your research to identify who and what they really care about.

Become your audience

We often get too close to our service or product, so we forget that we are not the customer. Find out who is your reader? What keeps them up at night? What stories would help them?

When you empathize in this way, you set yourself on the track to creating content that will be meaningful and impactful. If you can’t understand them, then you can’t connect with them.

However, this takes time, so keep on putting out content, but listen and track any feedback, so you can consistently improve the quality.

Learn as much about digital marketing as possible

Invest in education for your team or yourself. Honestly, education is the one thing that will stay and remain valuable to you, even if you change your career path. In fact, if you focus on educating yourself, it will only help you grow and improve over time.

Want to learn about content marketing, drop us a message @ [email protected] and we can set up a completely free content marketing discussion and deep-dive with your brand.

Identify your goals from the start

We think knowing why you are doing content marketing, and what you want to accomplish, is the most important thing. As in:

• Why do you want to produce content?
• What are your goals?
• Are you looking to increase exposure, brand affinity, gain more customers, improve your search engine (SEO) rankings, etc?

You need to set the right goals. When we work with our clients, we ask them right from the beginning, what do they see as success.

We also stress, always ask for feedback. You need to know when your content isn’t working, and if you do something as simple as adding a “drop us your feedback” call to action on your content, or ask on social media “What is your favourite piece of content” you might get some invaluable feedback.

For startups in Singapore and Malaysia, we often look at consumer education and inbound lead generation, so draft content that helps with SEO and educates potential customers about the industry or product. There is no use writing great SEO content if people don’t understand the great value or impact of your service.

Identify your business outcome

It’s never a good idea to create content for the sake of creating content. You need to understand what business outcome is your main criteria. These include:

• Do you need to raise awareness for your brand?
• Do you need to convert your audience into paying customers?
• Do you need to build your email list?
• Do you need to up-sell/ cross-sell?
• Do you need to convert customers to evangelists?

Everyone who is involved in the content marketing process needs to be aware of what the goal(s) are, and you need to constantly assess how your content is helping them.

Conclusion

To summarise this for everyone, the first step is to always know and analyze who your readers are. This makes content marketing more personalised and special. This is so different from link building because you need to think more about your audience rather than what your rankings will be in search engines.

If you would like to find out more about content marketing read our blog here or drop us a message to speak to a SYNC consultant. Email us at [email protected].

Last updated 5 June 2020.