Today, a stream of regular and engaging content can get people talking about any organization.
While this is definitely good news for start-ups, the reality is that they often don’t have the time, resources or know-how to turn their organization into a lean, mean content marketing machine. Just like that, developing content often gets relegated to the bottom of the team’s to-do list, or simply isn’t a priority at all. However, the cost of missing out on the content marketing game is high: start-ups are essentially forgoing an opportunity to attract customers. In fact, The Content Marketing Institute says “the idea of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content.”
Here are three reasons how content marketing can help your emerging organization succeed:
Announce your existence and develop brand recognition
A successful, responsive and targeted content marketing strategy can help an emerging organization capture a prospect’s attention even when the market is crowded with bigger and more established names. Valuable and unique content – and this could be anything from a white paper to a video – is always appreciated in the form of shares, likes, retweets and/or comments. You can even repurpose long-form content into social media content for Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. This goes a long way in establishing your organization’s presence online.
Encourage and enable product usage
A key objective for many start-ups today is to of course attract more customers, but also get existing users to actually use the product. After all, if a user sees value in the product then there’s a higher chance they’ll talk about online and in turn influence more people to try the product out. Quality content that’s sent out on a regular basis can help users make optimum use of the product’s features and improve their overall experience. As an agile start-up, consider creating Vine videos on your mobile devices — you can capture great testimonials and product reviews. You can also record conversations and monologues, if you’d rather not write all the time.
Understand market requirements and act as a funnel for ideas
Response to your organization’s content can give you a clear idea of what your target audience feels about relevant issues, the industry they operate in and their wish-list for the future. While actually eliciting a response may take some time, the end goal is worth it: you’ve got an active “idea catcher” for future product enhancement and new product ideas! Consider creating LinkedIn forums about topics that are related to your start-up, and engage in conversations with your target audience
It’s essential that start-ups focus on getting the right content marketing strategy into place, and this involves understanding your target customer, the right content “tone of voice” and more. If you’d like to understand how emerging organizations like yours can leverage a successful content marketing strategy to drive brand awareness, click here to download this free eBook titled “How to propel start-up growth with content” by Yorke Communications.