Content marketing, for startups especially, can be a bit of a Rorschach Test.
For some, the term is synonymous with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and influencer types like Neil Patel — who promise hockey-stick growth if you just follow these awesome new hacks!
But for those who have been in the content marketing trenches for the last decade, like myself, content marketing is the heart and soul of modern, digital marketing.
Content marketers are often some of the most skilled and adaptable markets within a team and have to be able to handle copywriting, branding, strategy, process, measurement, and execution. They need to be able to work by themselves and cross functionally with subject matter experts both within and outside of the marketing department.
For startups, content marketing is about building long-term, sustainable, organic growth for your brand that leads to higher-converting prospects down funnel, while also playing a supporting role for sales and paid channels.
If that sounds like a lot, it is, which is why strategy is so important.
Research shows that companies that document and write down their content strategy are nearly 30% more successful than those that don’t.
Before you can document your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to choose a path to start on. To help, let’s review some of the most common (and most successful) content marketing strategies every startup should consider today.
Content marketing strategies for startups
The typical startup marketing evolution goes something like this:
We need an online presences → Builds a website
Our website needs traffic → Starts posting on social channels
Our website needs more traffic → Starts a blog
What do we put on our blog?
The first press release and product updates are easy enough to identify as fodder for your blog, but once the low hanging fruit has been picked, where do you go?
Good content marketers know that there needs to be reason and intent behind every piece of content they create, be it blogs, social posts, or gated assets. A good content marketing strategy should be the place where your team turns to when they ask themselves, “Why am I writing this?”.
With that in mind, there are a few basic things every content marketing strategy needs to include. Rather than reiterate these for each strategy, keep in mind that these basics apply to all strategies. Those are:
Buyer personas: The buyer persona answers the question, “Who am I speaking to?”. A good buyer persona should include typical titles, motivations, frustrations, needs and work challenges. It should also include relevant information such as how technical the person is, where they live in the buying cycle/committee, and how they’d like to be marketed to.
Goals: Every content creation process should begin with the action you want the reader to take. Goals will heavily depend on where the piece of content you create lives in the marketing funnel. For example, the goal of top of funnel content is typically awareness, middle of funnel content aims to drive engagement with the brand/product, while bottom of funnel content should initiate the sales cycle.
Distribution channels: A good strategy will tell you when and why you should create content, but a complete strategy will also include where and how that content gets distributed. The majority of your content will be published on your blog and posted to social media, but how do you get eyeballs to your content beyond that. Every strategy should include third-party distribution systems and, if paid channels are a part of the strategy, a budget for placing content outside of owned properties.
Given this context, let’s look at three common content marketing strategies you should consider deploying as a startup.
SEO-driven content marketing
For some, SEO and content marketing are inseparable — so much so that many still run their entire content strategies based on the data they get from their SEO tools.
The idea behind SEO content marketing is simple: Your buyers already know the content they want and need to consume, and there are tools available that can give us insight into exactly what keywords and questions they’re searching.
These tools, like SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs, can tell you roughly how often a keyword is searched each month, whether that traffic is looking to buy or research a topic, and how difficult it will be to write new content that ranks for that keyword.
New AI capabilities, like those deployed by SEMRush, can take the data a step further and show you how content and ideas are clustered together into larger content pillars.
In an SEO-driven content strategy, the first step is building a keyword list. Startups with intimate knowledge of their buyers might have a good idea of what some of those keywords are, and SEO tools can help you build that list out by exposing you to related keywords, for example.
If you’re not sure where to start with your research, a good place to start is with a competitor gap analysis. SEO tools not only provide information on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), they also provide information on what keywords are helping a particular site earn traffic. By analyzing your competitors, you can easily identify common keywords that you’ll want to compete on, as well as gaps where opportunities exist for you to gain a competitive advantage.
A content marketer can then take a keyword list and ideate topics to satisfy said keywords, making it relatively easy to build out a content calendar.
SEO-driven strategies are great because they give us data to work off of. Why should we prioritize writing Topic A over Topic B? Well, Topic A gets 500 more searches per month, and has a keyword difficulty of 20/100 vs Topic B’s keyword difficulty of 80/100.
SEO-drive content marketing also gives you an idea of where your path will lead. If your strategy includes targeting keywords with a combined search traffic of 1,000 searches/month, you can expect it to outperform a strategy whose keywords only capture a combined 500 searches per month.
That said, it’s important to note the real risks that come with running an SEO-only strategy in 2024 and beyond.
First and foremost, search is experiencing its most dramatic shift in over a decade with the advent of AI. Even those outside of SEO have seen recent headlines of the mess AI has made out of Google search results — telling searchers to add glue to their pizza if the sauce is runny and how many rocks they should be eating each day.
Beyond AI-generated results, Google’s SERPs have been unreliable for months, with algorithm updates having unintended consequences that have dealt serious damage to sites that prioritize the kind of content that Google says it wants to promote.
For years, Google has said it will prioritize what it calls EEAT content or content that follows the guidelines of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Some websites, like HouseFresh, offer EEAT content in the form of rigorous, scientifically backed product reviews. Unfortunately, in recent years, product reviews and their affiliate links have exposed a major hole in the EEAT algorithm.
By leveraging AI, formerly trustworthy sources like CNET, are milking the product review/affiliate link cash cow and destroying Google search results for retail products in the process. Google, in trying to fix this bug in the system, issued an algorithm update that ultimately tanked quality websites like HouseFresh.
AI has only accelerated Google's tinkering with its search results, making an all-in approach to SEO one of the riskiest strategies a content marketer can deploy today, especially for a startup.
Sales-driven content marketing
If you’re not too keen on putting all of your eggs in the SEO basket, one of the next best places you can turn to as a content marketer is your sales team.
Content marketing, and marketing in general, is always more successful when it works hand-in-hand with sales — a reminder to always build strong relationships with your sales org.
In a sales-driven content marketing strategy, your No. 1 goal is to reduce friction in the sales funnel.
Doing so requires that we as content marketers get closer to our buyers, and the best way to do that is through conversations with sales.
Since sales speaks with our customers everyday, they’re the closest thing the marketing org has to ground truth.
With that in mind, the sales-driven strategy begins with what I call quarterly content check-ins. A quarterly content check-in is a 1:1 conversation where the content marketer can interview the sales associate about the interactions they’ve had with customers over the last quarter.
During these check-ins content marketers should ask questions like:
What was the easiest sale you had last quarter and what made it so easy?
What was your most difficult sale you had last quarter and what made it most challenging?
Tell me about a sale you lost where you feel things could have gone better if the customer was better informed …
What piece of content do you use most frequently during the sales process?
What’s a piece of content that you wish you had?
What’s a piece of information that would make a sale easier if the prospect knew it beforehand?
What’s the most difficult concept you have to explain to customers?
Who is the easiest person to sell to?
Who is the hardest person to sell to?
What’s something prospects are typically confused about/don’t understand about our brand before a call?
While there’s more you can add here, these questions should provide a great starting point to a conversation that should help you better understand the sorts of questions and knowledge gaps that are creating friction in your sales funnel.
(NOTE: Make these meetings more impactful by providing these questions in a Google Form beforehand. This ensures everyone will be ready and on the same page for the meeting and gives you even more room to cover follow up questions, without expanding beyond a 30-min check-in!)
For the best results, content marketers should schedule these meetings with as many individuals in sales that’s feasible. In a small startup, that might only be three or four individuals, but in larger orgs, that number could quickly balloon into the teens and 20s. If you find yourself at a larger org, it’s important to schedule check-ins with each level of your sales org: i.e. the head of sales, at least one manager, at least one associate, at least one business developer, at least one Sales Development Representative (SDR), etc. This will ensure you get a good idea of how sales is interacting with customers at every level of the funnel.
From here you can compare responses and identify common needs among the sales org, making it easier to ideate content and prioritize topics.
Strategies like these are great because they help content marketers get at the topics and ideas that are closest to the dollar. These types of strategies also help foster communication and collaboration between sales and marketing, making for a stronger go-to-market org.
Challenger content marketing
What if you’re not keen on going all in on SEO but you’re also the only marketer at a startup and the sale’s org is similarly a team of one? In this scenario, a sales-based content marketing strategy likely won’t bear fruit.
The challenger approach to marketing/sales is a B2B concept, but one that can easily be adapted to B2C for content marketing. Given its origins, I’ll explain the concept through its B2B roots before getting to its B2C adaptability.
B2B challenger content marketing
In B2B sales and marketing, the challenger approach is easy to understand: In business, individuals don’t buy technology, committees do. The challenger approach is about identifying the individuals in this committee, as well as the upwards of 60% of the information they’ll consume on their own before ever entering a sales call. With this information, a sales and marketing org can then set about dominating that 60% of information their buyers are seeking, making for a more efficient sales cycle.
While the challenger approach is similar to a sales-driven content marketing strategy in that it requires the close cooperation of sales, it can also involve greater cross-departmental collaboration because it’s about optimizing the buyer journey instead of the sales journey.
In a B2B buying committee, there are at least three buyers you’ll need to optimize for:
The talker: These are members of the buying committee that can be most helpful in that they will readily offer up information to help you sell them. Unfortunately, since the talker is often only interested in themselves, you’ll need to tailor your content to their needs. If the talker is an individual contributor — someone who will be directly using your product, hands on keyboard — this should be as easy as reiterating value props. The real challenge comes from when the talker is only tangentially involved with the day-to-day use of the product.
The blocker: Self-explanatory enough, the blocker is resistant to change. This can be especially painful for a go-to-market org when the blocker is the user of a technology you’re trying to replace. When we think of the challenge of the blocker, we have to think about presenting the status quo as unacceptable. As a former CMO once told me, our goal is to show that “the pain of the same is greater than the pain of change.”
The mover: Also known as the mobilizer, the mover is someone who, despite a healthy skepticism, can identify the greater good and get people on board internally. The mover is the only member of the committee that can (and will try to) change the opinions on others. If you’ve already lost a talker or blocker, you’re dead in the water without a mover on board.
Each of these buyers has their own journey; They’ll each become aware of your company through different means, want to learn different things about what you offer and where you provide value, and will have different triggers throughout the sales funnel. In B2B challenger content marketing, your goal is to create content that satisfies all three phases, for all three types of buyer.
B2C challenger content marketing
While a B2B concept, the challenger approach can also be adapted to B2C marketing and sales.
The difference here is, rather than selling to a committee, you’re selling to an individual.
The principal that remains is information consumption before a sale. Think about the last time you bought anything for the first time — chances are you did a bit of Googling beforehand and likely read a number of reviews.
B2C buyers, just like their business counterparts, want to feel informed about what they’re buying. While the amount of info they consume before a sale is likely higher than 60% (considering how common it is to buy without ever talking to a sales person, or even walking into a salesroom/floor) the challenge of dominating that information is still the same.
By mapping out your typical buying journey(s) you can match content to each stage of the journey.
Learn more about content marketing strategy
If there’s one thing I’ve learned working as a content marketer for startups over the last ten years, it’s that adaptability is key.
Just because you have a documented strategy with buy-in today, doesn’t mean that same strategy will fit your organization come next quarter.
One of the exciting things about working in the startup space is “building the rocket ship while you’re flying it.” These organizations move fast and are able to generate a ton of data, and that typically leads to pivots and changes in strategies when appropriate.
Having three, reliable strategies in your back pocket will help you set yourself up for success today, and when things inevitably change in the future.
If you’d like to learn more about content marketing strategy, or talk about your startups options, message me today.
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