Choosing a marketing strategy for your new business requires taking some serious considerations. You have to choose between traditional market channels or online marketing channels. Over the past few years, people have become immune to traditional marketing as they are targeted by thousands of promotional messages every day and have to block such messages for them to engage in other important functions.

Recently, Adblockers have become very popular which shows that people are willing to go as far as pay not to see your adverts.

To avoid such a challenge, it is important that a startup decides on a marketing strategy that will grasp the interest of the customers and end up promoting the products or services without prompting the recipients to skip the Ad or to block it altogether. Content marketing is the best marketing strategy for achieving this;

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that entails creating and sharing essential and relevant information with a defined audience. The aim is to attract and maintain the customers without explicitly promoting the products or services.

However, stimulating their interest in the products and services is expected. In a context of content marketing content is anything posted online which can be text, graphics, video, or social media posts, however, for content to promote products or services, it most offers the viewers a context and understanding.

For your startup to run an effective content marketing campaign you should identify various approaches on how to target your potential customers.

Here are the most effective techniques for content marketing that a startup should adopt and avoid making these mistakes:

1. Increased web presence/blogging

Any business can benefit from an increased Web presence, to ensure this, your startup must own a business website.

While you can reach your customers by sending newsletters and informative posts through social media platforms, the main aim of the marketing team is to ensure that their targeted audience can follow links to their websites where they can make subscriptions and consequently engage in purchases.

Your business should ensure that it has a well-structured and content-oriented website that offers the startup a chance to attract customers thereby enabling it to compete with other well-established businesses.

If your startup wishes to increase web traffic, it is wise for the business to run a blog. With a huge consensus, marketers view blogs as the most effective method of distributing content.

For your blogging attempts to be effective, you must ensure that your blog is instantaneously attracting potential customers through the use of infographics, well put charts, and pictures.

Additionally, you must ensure that your blogs can easily be read, well-crafted, accurate, and regularly updated in order to keep the audience coming for more reliable information.

2. Social Media

The best avenue for promoting your content is through social media. Above 3 billion people are active social media users making the social online space an important marketing demographic.

Subsequently, content marketing must work hand in hand with the social media platform for the technique to be as effective as possible.

Social media is very crucial to businesses. A research by the Content Marketing Institute found that 96% of business to customer marketers prefer to use social media to regularly engage with customers.

For a startup, people will not be reading your blog regularly because they don’t know you yet, thus it’s important to promote your content on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Businesses also¬† link their blog with social media, enabling the their marketers post content in the social platforms & attract more potential customers. They can then be redirected to the business blogs where they can get more detailed informative, educational or entertaining content.

For a startup to run an effective social media content marketing plan, it must be strategic in executing decisions that will help the business move forward.

Deciding the most efficient social media channel is essential, for instance, if a startup is targeting young people below the age of 30 years, Instagram and Facebook will be the most efficient channels for reaching that specific demographic. In case the target audience is professionals then LinkedIn will offer the business a better coverage.

When promoting your content on social media, you must ensure that there are regular content updates to keep the audience engaged and to continually increase the targeted audience.

Startups can also easily boost their post visibility through paid promotions which can help the business posts reach many audiences who are similar to the business targeted audience.

Paid promotions are also effective in stimulating the interest of desirable customers, ensuring that the get the sponsored post in their newsfeed regularly.

3. Research industry hot topics

Starting out a content campaign is not easy and startups are not certain on the type of content to create and share with their targeted audience. As a safety net, a startup should adopt the content creation techniques used by similar successful businesses.

Various tools such as BuzzSumo are available to startups for finding the trending and popular topics in the industry. BuzzSumo helps find the most shared articles and articles that are currently trending.

This tool has features that make it possible to filter the searched results which are structured according to a timeline and the type of the content and you actually identify popular articles that are posted by a specific domain. After gaining ideas on the article shared by other business, you are left with sufficient ideas which you can implement into the startup’s content marketing strategy. 

However, it’s advisable that a startup create completely fresh content from the results of the various article reviewed. Ensure that the article created after going through the popular article is more appealing and more useful than the article to which the ideas were derived. This can be done by combining the text ideas with pictures, step-to-step illustrations, and informative videos.

4. Market segmentation and knowing your audience

The success of a marketing campaign depends on its ability to reach its target audience. Therefore, before you create any content you must make some attempt to know your audience well.

A keyboard search is the most effective way of determining what your target customers are looking for. Through keyboard search, you can identify the existing demand for what you want to convey on the content using the Google Trends. This is done simply by typing the keywords in the Google trend search box and the results are available which you can use to identify how popular the topic is within a stipulated time.

After you have identified your ideal customers, the next important phase is market segmentation. Segmentation helps to avoid conveying marketing content to the audience that is less likely to be interested. It’s pertinent that you identify the demographic that you want to directly target, this is market segmentation. In addition, you can segment your audiences due to different needs that make the same content ineffective when directed to all customers. segmentation is particularly important owing to the fact that not all people who read your blog are buyers. 

Also, among the buyers and potential buyers, they are different phases of the buying cycle which makes it important that different content is directed to different audiences within the buying cycle. This will eliminate content aimed at creating awareness having a loyal customer’s audience which is a waste in your marketing resources.

It’s difficult to do market segmentation on websites and blogs because there are no currently available features for directly targeting people with various features. 

However, Email autoresponders offer you a good tool for segmenting your markets and sending customised content. Email segmentation is so effective that 39% of marketers that segment their markets had better open rates according to E-marketer while 28% reports better deliverability and improved revenue. Thus your startup should target its marketing content to the segmented audience in order to bear better Return to Investment.

5. Bet on Quality

It does not matter the content marketing method you adopt for the business, if the quality of the content is not your foundation, your marketing campaign will fail. While people will certainly visit your site if you don’t ensure that the content is interesting, factual, and engaging it will be hard to maintain the audience as people will unsubscribe from the newsletter, unfollow you from social platforms, and ignore your future content.

Quality content is the best tool of ensuring that people return to view your content time after time and hence it’s worth putting time and effort in making sure that the content is of good quality as possible. Startup businesses may fail to have enough resources to invest in ensuring that the content is of high quality, this leaves the startup with the option of outsourcing the content creation functions from specialists.

Equally important is the timing of sharing the content. The target customers are unlikely to be online all day long and there are times of the day when they are most active. It’s important to ensure that you identify the time when your audience is most active and share content then to ensure maximum impact as the content is received on time.