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Creating the right type of content will take your startup to the next level

One of the best marketing techniques that startups must use is content marketing. It costs 60 per cent less than outbound marketing but generates three times more leads. Not just leads, but content marketing has the potential to increase conversion rates by up to six times.

Unfortunately, most startups, like other businesses, do not have a content marketing strategy. Content marketing is cheap, and it converts better than other marketing techniques. Why not use it to jumpstart your startup?

Creating the right type of content will take your startup to the next level.

Here is how to do it:

1. Create buyer personas

The first logical step is to understand your target audience. And there isn’t any better technique than creating buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a specific buyer who is interested in your product or brand. This will show you who exactly are your customers, what they do, how they spend a regular day, etc.

A perfect buyer persona should have at least nine components:

1. Daily routine: How a buyer spends his day
2. What are the specific objectives of the buyer?
3. The main problems faced
4. The biggest obstacles a buyer faces
5. Orientation towards the job
6. Burning questions that buyers have
7. Content preferences
8. Most common keywords that buyer uses to find the content
9. How buyer engages with the brand and content

The end result will be a buyer persona that will show you who a potential reader is, how they spend the day, what their biggest challenges are, etc. This will help you in crafting appropriate content.

2. Select content type

A report by Econsultancy shows the varied types of content businesses use for content marketing. The challenge is finding the right type of content that will appeal to your target audience.

Not everyone likes reading long blog posts. Not everyone likes watching videos. The simple rule is to start experimenting and analysing what type of content a specific buyer persona prefers.

Cox Media used workbooks, checklists, videos, eBooks, and infographics to increase engagement. The content was promoted with blog posts and social ads. This increased customer inquiries by 60 per cent.

Also Read: Building a lean content strategy

While you are experimenting with the right type of content for your target audience, it is important to monitor the performance of other content characteristics such as:

• Blog post type (lists, how-to articles, guides, etc.)
• Article length (short vs long)
• Video submission (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Best time to publish new content

PestWiki switched from short (less than 1,000 words) blog posts to long blog posts that are well over 3,000 words. This resulted in an increase in whopping 36 per cent increase in organic traffic. The bounce rate decreased by 24 per cent.

A single blog post can be, and should be, converted to a podcast, video, presentation, email series, e-book, and other types of content. Publish it and promote it on all possible channels.

Publishing different types of content seems to be a whole lot of work, right?

No, it is not.

1. Convert your blog posts into videos and submit on your YouTube channel.
2. Convert blog posts into eBooks and distribute them on book sharing sites.
3. Create a presentation of every new post. Publish it on SlideShare.
4. Convert articles into podcasts and share them.
5. Use existing blog posts on the similar topics to create a guide or a course.

A single blog post submitted on multiple platforms in different forms will continue to send traffic and leads your way for years to come.

3. Monitor performance

Tracking is the name of the game.

Some 86 per cent of effective businesses have a content strategy in charge. This is the person responsible for content creation, monitoring, tracking, and measuring ROI.

If you are not tracking the performance of all the different types of content that you are generating, you will never be able to figure which one of them performs better. Track performance and ROI of each content type.

The starting point is defining KPIs and performance metrics. The most common content performance metric is conversion. A newer metric is engagement.

Also Read: Definitive steps to a content marketing strategy your customers will love

Conversion is easy-to-measure as compared to customer engagement. This is one reason why most of the small businesses and startups stick to conversion as their primary performance metric.

Let’s start monitoring conversions individually and see what your target audience loves to read and responds to.

Here is a list of eight conversion tracking tools to help you get started.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy. The piece of content that you post today will start delivering after a few months and will continue to do so for years to come provided it is evergreen.

Needless to say, viral content starts generating results immediately but nobody has the formula for producing viral content, so let’s keep that out of the equation and focus on producing content that is evergreen and converts at an exceptional rate.

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