Content Marketing for Start-Ups

Content marketing is the use of digital media such as videos, blogs, images, and social media posts for endorsing a brand, generating brand awareness, or making a call to action (CTA).

In the past, companies relied entirely on traditional marketing methods, such as billboards, flyers, and newspaper advertisements.

However, in our increasingly digitized world, both the population of online consumers and demand for online content has shot up so much. Nowadays, the traditional template for marketing has all but flown out of the window.

As much as 46% of the globe’s annual advertising spend is based online. The Coronavirus pandemic has certainly played a role in growing online consumption rates, and according to recent studies, Australia’s e-commerce growth was the highest in the world during 2020.

Evidently, there is a significant appetite for high quality online content in Australia as well as the rest of the world. Start-ups are particularly vulnerable to the knocks of a volatile economy. This is why seamless content marketing is so vital for any new business to stand out amongst competitors.

Good content is a powerful tool for engaging with audiences and making them feel like a part of the story your start-up tells. What’s more, good content can be a massive sales generator, and often winds up cheaper than traditional methods if you play your cards right.

The Subtle Efficiency of Good Content Marketing

The wonderful thing about content marketing is that it doesn’t necessarily feel like marketing to consumers. They’re exposed to it in such high quantities every day, that it is now an acceptable and anticipated aspect of using the internet.

Marketing is everywhere, both in the real world and online.

But on the internet, effective marketing tends to be more subtle. It’s often woven into attractive content for the purpose of drawing in new customers and maintaining their attention for as long as possible.

Content marketing is largely about developing a culture, ethos, or lifestyle around your brand that invites consumers to see themselves within it. Good content marketing is much more passive than it is aggressive when it comes to the CTA part of accruing new customers.

The modern consumer wants (and is willing) to be somewhat romanced into the idea of doing business with you. Specialized content is a great way to tap into a consumer’s fantasies about the kind of person they want to be or the kind of life they want to lead.

The internet’s algorithms take a user’s history of interests and activity into account when determining what kind of content to show them. The personalization of content we see on our screens is what drives us to want to engage with it.

For example, if you are somebody with a historical interest in eco-friendly products, online content that includes keywords such as “eco-conscious”, “environmentalism” or “green living”, is far more likely to reach your screen than somebody who doesn’t have a history of engagement with those topics.

This is good news for your start-up. It means that any content you create simply needs to contain the right keywords in order to reach your target audience—the rest is up to SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Your Secret Marketing Weapon

Search Engine Optimization is the process of attracting unpaid traffic onto sites or pages using popularly searched-for keywords. The more often a word or phrase gets searched for online, the more powerful it becomes to SEO content creators.

When writing a blog or article for a website, SEO creators will include keywords that have a history of high search traffic and are relevant to the article itself. That way, the page or site is more likely to come up first when one of the included keywords is searched for.

If you want to capture the attention of Australian consumers, Google is the search engine you need to rank on. With 94% of all searches in Australia happening on Google, focussing your attention on ranking high with this search engine will help you reach your website traffic goals.

Referred to as “organic” traffic, SEO is three times more effective than social media traffic. That’s why it belongs in your arsenal of content marketing strategies for promoting your start-up.

Content Marketing and Social Media

If you can’t invest in an SEO content developer, don’t stress. There are many other ways to strategise content marketing that are very effective if you position yourself correctly.

The most common form of content marketing occurs on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook. Both of these social media platforms are well known for their exceptional quality and quantities of content.

The traffic on both of these platforms is also colossal and ever growing, making it the perfect place to attract new customers and maintain engagement with existing ones. Although Facebook and Instagram are unique to themselves in many ways, there are structural similarities that you can learn to make content dispersal a little easier.

For example, both consist of a platform that allows users to create an account, follow other accounts, upload content and interact with other member’s content. The content itself is what drives users to engage with the platform, which is why the quality of the content you upload needs to be so high.

In 2021, these are some of the most popular forms of content found on social media platforms:

Videos
Images
Contests and giveaways
Live videos
Infographics
Quizzes and polls

Ideally, your brand should aim to incorporate at least half of the content forms on this list, with videos and images being non negotiable. Users love variety in content, and you will need to stay sharp on all fronts if you want to hold their attention long enough to do business with them.

In Australia, Facebook is the most popular social media platform. This means that your start-up will need to put more of your attention there if you want to attract local business.

Tools for Better Content Marketing

There is nothing wrong with admitting you might need some help when it comes to creating and uploading high quality marketing content.

In fact, omitting help in this area could be your downfall.

Getting it right is so crucial, and getting it wrong could mean the end of your start-up.

Fortunately, the fierce demand for online content has meant that a huge variety of content creation, scheduling, SEO and marketing tools have been developed. These tools are perfectly positioned to support you through the process of creating a rock-solid content marketing strategy.

From creating beautiful graphic designs for your Facebook page to setting up a professional SEO marketing division, the following tools are all readily available online. With these tools and a few clicks of your mouse, you can confidently tackle the various different elements of content marketing.

Canva

If you have been struggling to visualize and execute graphic designs to promote your start-up, look no further than Canva. This free graphic design tool provides users with hundreds of templates, images, fonts, colors and themes that allow you to create anything from business cards to Facebook Cover Photos and beyond.

The layout is simple and easy-to-use for beginners, and making truly creative and professional-looking graphics is simple and straightforward. There are some in-app purchases available, but you’ll find everything you need in the free version.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media planning tool that allows users to schedule posts on multiple platforms well in advance of publishing. This functionality is a godsend for start-up team members who are pressed for time and lack vision or foresight when it comes to social media strategising.

With the free version of Hootsuite, you are able to upload up to 30 social media posts across any three platforms of your choosing at a time. This means that once you have completed the scheduling process, you can sit back and relax as all your posts upload themselves throughout the month.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a tool designed to scan over bodies of text and identify any typographical errors or poorly structured sentences. It will not only provide you with essential corrections for spelling mistakes but also gives insight into how you can improve your writing abilities.

Incredibly useful for those who lack consistent grammatical precision, Grammarly is worth investing in. Especially if your business wants to communicate clearly and professionally through all text-related aspects of marketing such as emails, newsletters, captions, etc.

SEMrush

If your start-up team is looking for efficient, reliable SEO, SEMrush is the tool to go for. SEMrush will help your website attract business and traffic via assisting with SEO research, competitive analysis, backlink analytics, and keyword research.

When used correctly and to its full potential, SEMrush will become one of the most powerful tools for optimizing your start-up’s content marketing strategy. The services provided by this online tool are not free, but affordable packages are available and the results are worth their weight in gold.

Conclusion

Content marketing is the backbone of our tech-dominated marketing landscape. Because of our current position and relationship with the digital world, marketing strategies have adjusted and re-shaped to meet consumers where they want to be—online.

As a start-up, your biggest task is going to be attracting audiences and forming long-lasting relationships. Content marketing is the easiest way to accomplish that.

Fortunately, content marketing is a relatively affordable facet of marketing that even the smallest start-ups can implement. Many of the tools required for developing a strategy are free. And even the paid ones are less expensive than the traditional marketing campaigns of yesteryear.

For start-ups in 2021, content marketing executed properly will be the most important channel for company growth. Plant those seeds and watch them grow!