One of the biggest common problems you face as a startup founder early on is trying to accomplish too much with too few resources. The general principle of solving this problem is to concentrate your efforts as much as possible – forgo the scope to achieve greater depth.
This also applies to your marketing efforts – there would be dozens of them startup marketing strategies worth deploying for your project, but you just wouldn’t have the capacity to implement them all effectively. The key is to choose which one is most impactful for your project.
“Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things. You have to choose carefully.” – Steve Jobs
This is of course easier said than done. To help you out, we’ll list a few reasons below why content marketing might be worth choosing.
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1. Can be done on a budget
Content marketing can be very expensive if you are making high-quality video productions. It can also be extremely cheap if you decide to write content for your blog or social media profiles. In this case, the only direct cost is your time.
This is great for an obvious reason – you don’t have a lot of capital at your disposal in the early startup stages. What you have is founder time, and investing in a well-thought-out content marketing strategy can pay dividends in the long run.
Conveniently, you can increase the resources you invest in content marketing as you grow. In the beginning, you can do it as slim as possible. Ultimately, once your project enters the growth phase and you’ve determined it’s worth the investment, you can significantly increase your content marketing budget to increase your growth rate.
2. Can be used to validate your ideas
Content is one of the fastest ways to validate ideas in the very early stages of your project. You can assess the intensity of a customer problem by writing about it and distributing your content where your target market is likely to hang out. The interest in your piece of content and the discussion your posts would generate can give you valuable insights into your market.
In addition, your content can generate your first leads, which you can use for customer interviews and of course – for selling your product or service.
3. Can scale exponentially
Last but certainly not least, the most important feature of content marketing is that it has a very high growth potential.
First, it can grow steadily if you add value to the people who use your content, as they are likely to recommend it to their peers. Alternatively, the algorithms of the platform you are publishing to can also help you increase your audience if your content provides the algorithm with good engagement metrics.
Second, almost any content on the web has the potential to go viral. While virality is extremely difficult to develop, it’s not uncommon to get disproportionate attention to specific pieces of content (this is valuable information when it comes to validating your target market’s interest). As a startup, you can push the boundaries of what you can do with your content beyond established companies, giving you a competitive advantage in this regard.
Third, some forms of content have a very long lifespan. In general, unless you combine it with PPC campaigns, content marketing won’t have a big impact in the short term. The reason is that it takes a long time to build an audience (or rank in Google through SEO). That said, evergreen content can continue to draw attention to your project long after you’ve stopped actively investing in it.
In conclusion, content marketing can give you extremely good bang for your buck if done intelligently. While it may not be the best choice for your project, it is probably one of the strongest candidates for the marketing strategy of choice for the average tech startup.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.