Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Purchasing a product through one of these links generates a commission for us at no additional expense to you.
Content marketing can help you connect with your audience, increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and boost sales.
In fact, 72% of marketers state that content marketing increases audience engagement, which further highlights the value of this approach for your entire marketing strategy.
However, just like how you would set goals, identify the best approaches for selling online, and follow reliable tips to launch your new startup business, you’ll also need the right strategies for content marketing success.
That is why we laid out these four actionable content marketing tips for your startup online business.
1. Set content marketing goals
Whether you’re running marketing campaigns to sell IG accounts, generate social media engagements, or eCommerce products, you’d be setting yourself up for failure if you didn’t have clear marketing goals.
Identify your objectives to help shape your content marketing strategies. This also allows you to determine key metrics to measure the performance and success of your efforts.
Consider these tips to help you set your content marketing goals.
- Explore your prospects’ pain points. Understand your audiences’ pain points to help you present your content and message as the solution.
Run surveys, check online reviews of your products, and even check how your direct competitors use pain points in their content.
This helps you learn your prospects’ problems and how to help them, then build your content around that.
- Build rapport and trust with your audience. Create interesting and valuable content that helps you showcase your brand’s personality and industry expertise.
Doing so displays your credibility, helping you build meaningful connections and trust with your audience.
- Overcome potential objections. Use your content to address the reasons why your potential customers won’t buy.
For instance, if the price is a pain point, create content showing how your solution saves your customers money long term.
Another example is if you’re selling online courses, but customers object to long lessons that are challenging to complete.
You can use the best online course platforms that let you break down your content into bite-sized sessions and highlight this in your messaging.
Learn the potential objections that keep your audience from buying, then resolve them in your content, ideally before they get to the sales page.
Know what you want to achieve with your content. This helps you formulate the right approach and establish the metrics to track and measure your performance.
Tip: Grammar mistakes can kill the professionalism of your content. We recommend you try one of these grammar-checking apps to write even better articles.
2. Diversify your content
Reach wider audiences and boost your engagement by diversifying your content.
The type of content you publish depends on your goals, capacities, and approach, but consider starting with the most popular ones that your audience easily recognizes.
- Blog posts. Publish easily digestible content such as listicles, How-to articles, slideshows, and more.
Doing so helps you attract customers to your products and brand and share valuable content while establishing your industry expertise.
To ensure the images or screenshots you add to your blog posts are high quality, use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) image upscaler. That way, you won’t turn your readers off from consuming your content because of your poor-quality images.
And speaking of AI, you may want to try out an AI writer like Article Forge to speed up your content creation process.
- Videos. Create videos such as product demos, tutorials, or just entertaining content to engage your audience.
This content medium can help you educate your audience and engage them.
Plus, they’re highly shareable across social media platforms, which can widen your reach and increase your brand awareness.
- Infographics. This type of content allows you to organize and visualize relevant data in more compelling ways than words alone.
Share a lot of data without overwhelming your audience by creating visually appealing and easy-to-understand infographics.
Use tools such as Visme, which provides highly customizable templates and intuitive editing features to build your infographics.
Infographics are perfect formats to repurpose your old but relevant content, letting you make the most of your previously published blog posts, articles, and more.
Additionally, ensure your content and web pages are optimized for mobile-first indexing. Doing so can help increase your content and site’s visibility on the web, improve your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) ranking, and reach more audiences, especially mobile users.
3. Create a content calendar
Content marketing requires time and commitment before you see excellent returns.
Achieve your desired content marketing ROI by consistently delivering memorable and valuable content experiences.
Create a content calendar to help you schedule your posts and stay on top of your content marketing activities.
It will also help streamline your content marketing tasks since a calendar allows your team members to follow the progress of your pieces of content.
When creating a calendar, it helps a lot to have the right content marketing planning tool.
Use a WordPress plugin like Strive Content Calendar to help you organize your content, publish revisions of outdated content, and track your progress.
Posts are automatically colored based on their status, which you can change from the post editor or the Quick Edit menu in the calendar. In addition, you can drag-and-drop posts into new dates to swiftly reschedule them.
Strive also includes custom post checklists that you can create to manage your editorial workflow. The checklist shows up in the editor sidebar, so you can check off items as you go.
This streamlines your content creation process and makes it easier to routinely publish high-quality content.
4. Map your content to the customer conversion funnel
A conversion funnel connects your marketing efforts to your actual sales.
It offers a visual representation of how your content marketing campaigns convert your prospect into paying customers.
Move your potential customers along your funnel to ultimately get them to convert and buy your products using the Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) model.
Follow these tips on how to do that.
- Attract attention. Create content to draw your audience’s attention. For example, publish highly-targeted messages, themed newsletters, designated landing pages, etc.
Let’s say you’re offering certification programs for becoming a life coach.
Run ads inviting viewers to sign up for your training program and highly shareable content through social media to help promote awareness.
Create catchy headlines as well using tools such as Sharethrough Headline Analyzer.
- Keep audience interest. Publish content that shows the unique value of your products and helps maintain your audience’s attention in your offer.
Publish blog posts, How-to guides, case studies, webinars, and more that allow them to learn more about your products.
- Create desire. Convince your prospects that they need your products through relevant content.
Post infomercials across social media include relatable and compelling calls-to-action in your articles and blog posts and others.
- Compel your audience to take action. Use content with strong conversion elements and a sense of urgency to entice your audience into acting on your offer.
Convert prospects into buyers with product demos, free trials, incentives, and sales (among other things). Even if you’re running a content marketing strategy for your local store, you are bound to see an uptick in your sales and run your computerized cash registers tirelessly with the spike of walk-in customers your store can get.
If you map your customer conversion funnels carefully, not only will you get loads of audience engagement and foot traffic, but you’ll get better conversion rates as well.
Create the right content for each stage of your conversion funnel to help drive engagement and sales and optimize your marketing spend.
Final thoughts
Developing a content marketing strategy that generates off-the-charts ROI takes time, organization, and creativity.
It can even include out-of-the-box tactics. You can learn how to buy IG accounts as part of your social media content marketing strategy, run guerrilla marketing strategies, etc.
While there isn’t a single perfect formula to guarantee content marketing success, the tips in this guide can serve as your framework to establish your approach.
