Getting started in content marketing, especially if you’re working at a startup, can seem daunting. It involves more than simply creating stimulating, engaging blog posts, videos, and infographics to drive sales, which is difficult enough as it is, but also you have to be an expert in spreading awareness across the digital world.
Beyond writing enjoyable copy or creating high-quality visuals, you have to integrate the use of content management tools, website data, and social media algorithms to boost your content’s performance. Many hats must be worn if you want your content marketing strategy to be successful.
It also requires a lot of self-scrutiny. How is your content research strategy panning out? Does your content live up to expectations? Can you analyze the reasons why something was a failure while something else was a success? Are sales goals ultimately being met? Those people who are able to understand both sides of content marketing, the creative and analytical, will be the ones to truly harness the power of content creation.
If you can do that, you will be sure to see enormous gains as your company grows. Studies suggest content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet it generates three times as many leads. Large companies can afford to spend money on both old and modern methods of marketing, but startups have to be more innovative. Here are some simple yet crucial content marketing tips for startup companies.
Set Clear Content Marketing Goals
It’s a common mistake among startups, which may not have a clearly defined content marketing strategy. Creating content without defining a goal and losing steam after dumping resources into something that demands to be fed constantly without seeing much results can drive anybody crazy. What you need to do is figure out how to measure success in a meaningful and achievable way. Decide what your key performance indicators will be and go from there. Remember that sales, not website traffic or shares on social media, should be the main goal.
Here are a few simple steps to help you set clear content marketing goals.
Find Your Target
What do you want to achieve with content marketing? Let’s say you want to be a thought leader in your industry in order to boost your reputation as an influencer in your field. Boom! Now you have a goal in mind. Stay focused and do what needs to be done to achieve this status.
Make Goals Measurable
It’s important to make sure your goals can be measured. This gives you an opportunity to find out what things work and what can be improved. It also has a positive psychological effect. If you can see the results of your hard work, it encourages you to continue growing and push even harder. You get to feel a sense of accomplishment.
Goals Must Be Achievable
Always aim high, but try to stay realistic. It would be fantastic if you could make $1 million in your first month, but, honestly, is it within the realm of possibility? If you set goals that are achievable, you can test to see if your strategy is actually working without being deflated. Historical data is a safe way to come up with a realistic strategy.
Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Having a content marketing strategy should be part of the foundation of your entire venture, and documenting your plan for creating digital content is central to your marketing efforts. It gives everything structure and keeps things organized while providing a framework to help you stay consistent. It’s a guiding light that ensures you pump out work with a long-term vision in mind.
Pick a Content Management System
One of the decisions you have to make is which content management system you want to use. Whether you settle on something like WordPress or another professional CMS, be sure to choose an interface and price point that works best for you. If you don’t want to invest too much in a platform, you can even share content on a platform such as Medium. Either way, the CMS you use should be intuitive and be suited to help you achieve your content marketing goals.
Brainstorm Topics
Decide early on the types of content you wish to create and the topics of discussion you will be touching. It helps if you have a session with co-workers from both marketing and sales departments to come up with different ideas. Just throw a few ideas around, and you’ll get people talking in no time. Anything that drums up controversy or leads to intense discussion is the type of issue you will want to address. There’s a reason people can’t help but discuss hot-button topics. Brainstorming can also help generate off-the-wall, thinking-outside-the-box ideas.
Cover the Buyer’s Journey
One way of helping a customer move forward in the sales process is by publishing content relevant to the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Create content that helps guide them through any decision-making that needs to be done. Be sure to include calls to action, which may compel prospects to take the plunge.
Distribute on Social Media
Social media savvy can go a long way when it comes to sharing content and increasing the exposure of your brand. Find out which platforms work best with different types of content and tailor it as necessary. Engage with your target audience and be active within the community. Cover as many social networks as you deem fit.
Create an Editorial Calendar
It may take a lot of effort, but trust us it’s well worth it. Creating an editorial calendar can give you a path to follow for an entire year of digital content production. It can also help you establish a publishing schedule and can help you decide how to spread out different types of content. Also, be sure your strategy produces no gaps.
Top Digital Marketing Tools for 2023
If you’re a digital marketer looking to boost your marketing strategies and ROI, you will want to know about certain tools that can make things easier. With digital marketing tools, you will be able to execute proper strategies in the right manner. These tools are designed to keep things organized, allowing you to make necessary customizations whenever needed.
After facing the challenges in 2022, we have to focus on creating better and more innovative strategies in 2023. In this post, we share the most influential and creative digital marketing tools you should experiment with and try if you want to outshine your marketing campaigns in 2022.
- MailChimp
MailChimp is a social advertising and email marketing tool designed to orchestrate and automate digital marketing campaigns. It is one of the best digital marketing tools you can get to improve your campaigns and track the traffic generated. Moreover, the platform allows multiple integrations with different SaaS companies. The tool is quite efficient for email campaigns, using which you can engage with your audience. MailChimp is a well-renowned name in the world of email marketing.
The features of MailChimp:
- Creates better content with easy-to-use design tools
- Use AI-powered assistant for generating custom designs.
- Create personalized emails and get up to 6 times more orders using marketing automation
- Provides tools for getting insights and analytics in one place
- Also, provide a free plan for small marketers.
MailChimp incorporates pre-built, customizable email automation that makes it easy for you to reach the right audience at the right moment. The best part is that you can keep your brand top of mind and delight your customers with happy birthday messages, welcome automation, and order notifications.
Online retail and e-commerce businesses can significantly benefit from MailChimp, as it can help you drive traffic, increase conversions, and grow sales.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful digital marketing tool that can help you with numerous marketing decisions. You can easily track your e-commerce business as well as goals that can help keep your company on track. Using the innumerable data insights that Google Analytics provides, it is easy for marketers to understand the directions required to take with website modifications and changes. All you have to do is install Google Analytics on your site, and you are ready to go.
The features of Google Analytics:
- Provides you with information about traffic on your website that is divided by devices, products, pages, and more.
- Let you create your metrics, dimensions, and dashboard for easy access to data and information.
- Helps you understand your target audience in a better way. You will get real-time updates about your website’s customers, including the pages they are currently exploring. This can help you make your landing page more engaging by providing the customers with a more intuitive experience.
- Let you uncover insights about how the business is performing.
- Let you share the insights with the help of various reporting tools.
- Let you organize and visualize the data suiting business requirements.
Last but not least, Google Analytics comes with tons of features, functionalities, and the ability to create customized reports and dashboard.
- Google Ads
Google Ads can work for almost any business; it doesn’t matter whether it is small, medium, or large. While many marketers think that Google Ads is too expensive, it is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools that can help your business reach new heights.
The features of Google Ads:
- Drive website visits
- Increase the call calls from customers through a click-to-call button
- Increase footfall in your shops
People need to learn Google Ads first in order to use it effectively; else you will be wasting your money (Learn to create Google ads here). The best part about Google Ads is that return on investment (ROI) is relatively easy to measure. Moreover, new artificial intelligence features make the platform a lot faster and easier to use. The AI features can help you get results faster in Display advertising.
The multiple targeting options allow you to target your customer base based on different factors like age, gender, location, profession, etc. This is something that you will not find in other digital marketing tools.
Most importantly, you can access Google Agency Account Strategist, where you can learn about the latest features that Google provides. Moreover, access to this means access to some beta testing as well.
- Canva Business
If you are in digital marketing, you will understand the need for a quality design tool that can help you create impressive social media posts and other things in marketing. Canva is a prominent design tool that allows you to develop effective marketing campaigns through visual content that can be shared on your blogs, websites, social networks, and other platforms. Visual content is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign. In order to entice the targeted customer base, you need to design compelling posts.
The features of Canva:
- Canva allows you to edit posts and create graphs of any type and kind.
- The tool incorporates numerous templates. It boasts a massive library of stock images, photos, designs, icons, and vectors that you can use to create any type of visual content for your marketing campaign.
- It allows you to choose from a massive collection of designs, such as a postcard, brochure, CD cover, wallpaper, book cover, resume, certificate, magazine cover, letterhead, presentation graphic, blog banner, card, poster, flyer, presentation, logo, and social media.
Its simple drag-and-drop design allows you to create visual pieces according to your campaign. The best part is that you don’t need an experienced designer to create visual content for your digital marketing campaign. It is so simple that anyone with no design background can use it.
- Trello
If you are looking for a content management tool that will help you brainstorm and strategize content for your digital marketing campaign, you can opt for Trello. It is one of the most popular content management tools used by hundreds and thousands of digital marketers worldwide to create, schedule, and organize content online.
The platform keeps the whole team together, making communication a lot easier and more manageable. You can assign multiple members from your team to a single card so that they can work on a project together. This way, you will know who’s in charge of designing, writing, editing, posting, and adding call-to-action offers to a post.
The features of Trello:
- Allows you to create cards and incorporate notes on the card topic while creating deadlines and assigning topics to specific teams.
- Facilitates remote working where your teams can access their tasks and projects from anywhere.
You can use Trello for organizing your digital marketing campaigns and ensure that you never miss out on anything that your team is doing.
- Slack
Digital marketers use Slack every single day. With Slack, you can discuss client work, new articles, new projects, and new support tickets, share useful content, and send messages.
If you have a distinct team of digital marketers, you will need a powerful medium to make effective communication with them. This is where Slack comes into play.
The features of Slack:
- Makes it easier to communicate with team members over the web in real time.
- Let you follow everything related to the projects, teams, and channels.
- Let you do message and video conferencing too.
- Assist the teams in collaborating from anywhere
While it seems like a messaging app, it does a lot more than that. Slack can potentially tighten up your organizational efficiency. It is not a collaboration or a project management tool. It serves as a messaging platform with a rich collection of options and settings. It lets you have group conversations that are searchable and public, including private conversations. You can change the color scheme of the interface and create different groups.
