Today’s business world, is one of instant gratification where things ‘go viral’ faster than it takes your morning coffee to kick in.
A viral blog post, YouTube video or tweet can gain huge exposure to your audience.
In a recent article, we focussed on how content marketing in the form of blogs can help grow your audience, but this is not the only content marketing strategy you could decide to adopt.
Blogging
Whether you write blogs yourself, or employ Freelancer’s to do it for you, having useful and engaging content available for your customers can be hugely beneficial. It’s a great way of gaining interest from potential customers as well as providing tutorials or tips on how best to utilise your product.
Chris Hexton discussed this in great detail at a recent StartCon event. It is important to know your customer, engage with them, and then convert them to paying customers.
Social Media
To grow your brand, social media is one of the most effective ways to appeal to your future clients. It’s also an effective way of staying engaged, getting feedback, and understanding your customer.
Keep your social media funny, inspiring, interesting, or thought provoking. It your audience react badly to certain posts, or the engagement is low, try new strategies, it won’t be long before an old post is at the bottom of your feed.
“We often use social media to listen to our customers, but make sure someone is checking email inboxes too — every time you send out a mass-email, be sure someone is ready to respond to any customers writing back. A little attention goes a long way.”
— Niti Shah, Senior Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific at Hubspot
Online video content
Nick Robinson, CMO at Quest Nutrition, used technology to project the brand to the second highest growing company in North America.
Using healthy food vloggers and their staff they built up a huge amount of online content on YouTube. By using your own employees, the message remains consistent.
Although video content may appear expensive, with advances in smartphone technology you can build some basic video content easily without breaking the bank.
Youtube has over 1 billion users, representing 1/3 of the internet, so it is definitely an advertising channel that should be explored.
Although some videos will go viral, some won’t- so be patient. By gradually building up content, interested customers will keep coming back and watching you online. By remaining consistent you will create long lasting engagements with your customers!
E-books
It may sound strange but writing an ebook, or asking an influential partner to write one for you is a great way of marketing through content.
Think about what your customers engage with or what problems they face on a day to day basis, and write about it. Promote it on your page and ask for basic details such as name and email at the point of reading or download.
Not only are you providing carefully researched, long form information, but you are also gaining valuable contact details.
Convert your loyal and engaged fans to customers
Having a sign up form or asking for basic information for more in depth content is one way of gaining valuable contact details of people engaging with you online. Email marketing would therefore be the next step in converting these customers.
Another potential strategy is offering free products such as ebooks or a freemium trail of your product.
A ‘freemium’ package offers the most basic level of service for free but for a charge you can have access to their premium service. By keeping these potential customers engaged with your trial you increase the likelihood of their conversion to paying customers.
Ultimately, there is no secret sauce for creating engaging content for your customers. Every customer base is different. Startups have the freedom to experiment while their reach is smaller. It’s therefore the perfect time to experiment and see what gets the perfect formula of engagements to conversions. Once something starts working, use it more, and watch your startup grow.
