Content marketing to promote a startup can be challenging, but rewarding work. The best content marketing covers all types of media that’s used to promote or engage with an audience – articles, blogs, infographics, images and tweets. Whatever your chosen medium is, just remember these five top tips:
Understand Your Audience
First things first, it’s important to know the audience that you are trying to reach. Whether you’re marketing to millennials or to CEOs, know the social media corners that your audience lives – and engage with them there. For instance, knowing that teenagers are no longer using Facebook as their primary social networking site? Or that Pinterest users are predominantly women (87 percent, in fact). Research where your customers are likely to come from and use content which will attract them across the platforms that they use.
Structure
The classic five paragraph essay structure is well established as being a powerful way to construct your written content. It’s accepted by readers of written material as the de-facto standard and that familiarity means that they can read it quickly whilst mining the most amount of information.
Optimizing Your Content
Having a presence on the Internet isn’t enough to guarantee you an audience. The sheer volume of sites now available on the web makes it even more paramount that you ensure that your content is fully optimized. Popular search engines, such as Google, use these rankings to distribute websites amongst search engine results, and is driven by your ability to effectively include relevant keywords. But that’s not all. Your content will also need to be unique and score well in readability, so securing the services of a good writer is important.
The days of stuffing content with keywords without caring about the relevance of your writing are over. Google’s algorithm for calculating how highly you score in rankings uses complex scoring that means content must be of a high quality.
Call to Action
A big mistake that many companies make when it comes to marketing is forgetting to ask their audience to do something. It’s good to attract readers to your site, but what do you want them to do with it? Always end your piece with a call to action.
Ask them to share your blog, sign up for your newsletter, contact your company directly – whatever it is, just push for action.
Brevity
Internet users are often quite time poor, with giving you limited time to engage them. That means prioritizing conveying your message in a clear and quick way. Ensure that your text content is concise, and images are used to enhance the message of the rest of your content.
