How to Create Digital Content Strategy For Your Startup in 8 Steps
Launching a startup isn’t a walk in the park.
From figuring out the right business idea and fundraising to establishing an effective marketing strategy, you’ll need to put in a lot of work.
Most importantly, you must pay attention to digital content marketing if you’re looking to launch an online brand.
Generally, startups face many marketing-related challenges like competition, multiple digital marketing options, limited marketing resources, competing priorities, and the confusion of not having a digital content strategy.
However, a solid digital content strategy can be cost-effective and efficient in achieving the primary marketing goals of your digital content marketing.
You can always adopt or switch to content strategies that work, whether you’re just starting out or still figuring out what’s best for your startup.
This article explains the easy and simple steps to get your digital content strategy up and running. Let’s dive in.
Why You Need a Digital Content Strategy For Your Startup
A well-prepared content marketing strategy enables startups to achieve essential goals like:
- Attracting traffic to a new website
- Generating productive leads
- Creating engagement for new leads
- Creating a unique niche within the target market
- Building a unique brand among existing competitors
8 Steps To Creating a Digital Content Strategy For Your Startup
Digital marketing is an ongoing process, and developing a digital marketing content strategy is critical for your startup. Your digital content strategy can have an impact on your company’s success.
Plus, 70% of marketers are energetic about investing in their content marketing, so you must develop a good content strategy to compete in your industry. Here’s how you can start;
1. Outline your mission and your goals
This is primary in creating a digital content strategy. It’s crucial to outline what your business is about and what its goals are. This outline makes it easier to focus on achieving the company’s goals without interfering with irrelevant factors to ensure your digital marketing strategy is effective and on track.
It’s also important to note that you can have different goals per time.
At first, you may want to increase your lead conversion rate by 15%, and at the same time, you also want to increase your visibility and drive product and service traffic.
2. Evaluate your existing digital marketing presence
After you’ve concluded what you want to achieve, it’s time to evaluate how your already existing digital content strategy is working. If you are an entirely new business, you can skip this step.
Observe the performance of your main marketing channels. These include your social media pages, email marketing, website, and SEO. Find out what’s working, what improvements, and what you should change. This helps you define where your focus is needed the most.
If you’re unsure of the channels to adopt, check out what your competitors are doing. That would get your business in front of your target audience.
3. Choose nurture channels for your digital content strategy
How do you intend to nurture your audience till they become customers? Your nurture channels are the channels or platforms you’re having a conversation with your audience and getting to become potential customers.
Nurture channels include social media, blogs, podcasts, email newsletters, videos (long and short), and so on. Create a specific digital content strategy for each channel you choose and stay consistent.
You might not get this right every time. You may find that your chosen channel doesn’t resonate with your customers. Nonetheless, keep trying and doing experiments till you find what works.
4. Build buyer personas
The next step is to create buyer personas—an imaginative figure of who your customer is. Imagine your customer’s age, preferences, values, and more. This will help you understand your audience and how you can reach them.
Establishing a buyer persona is beyond identifying a target market. Your buyer personas should be specific, just like the goals discussed earlier.
5. Determine the type of content that fits your approach
Once you’ve put everything together and created a digital content strategy for each channel, determine what types of content can help you achieve your goals.
For example, if you want to increase your visibility on your social media pages, you might need to ask your audience for their concerns and needs to help you actively create and publish content that suits their needs. Such content can include short video clips or written content. Or, if you’re looking to gain more engagements on your website, you’ll want to ensure you have well-written blog posts on relevant topics.
Desygner’s guest user feature allows flexibility in creating branded content for your brand. The prices are reasonable for startups, and you can use templates to easily create content and involve your team.
6. Focus and stay consistent
It’s important to stay consistent across all platforms with the digital content strategy you decide to adopt. Define how you want your brand to be perceived, tone of voice, and other unique features. Ensure that every digital content created truly reflects your brand.
Creating great content consistent with your brand values and up-to-date information and regulating your social media posts to avoid unauthorized posts or materials is crucial and all possible with Desygner.
Focus on your goals and ensure your content is valuable to your audience.
Consistency is vital in helping you connect faster to your audience. To gain the trust of your audience and make them your customers, you must understand them and offer solutions to their problems.
What are they in need of? What questions do they have? What answers are they demanding? How can you help?
7. Keep track of your results
Now that you’ve set your digital content strategy, it’s time to monitor and keep track of its performance. You can always make improvements. Consistently keep track of the performance of your project. Evaluate the best performing strategies and those you can improve, then make changes accordingly.
Establish key metrics that can help you track up-front. Knowing what metrics matter can help you quickly identify and avoid problems.
8. Choose a strategy that suits your limited Marketing Budget and Time
Because you may not have unlimited resources to fund all your marketing plans, you’ll need a cost-efficient strategy.
Desygner’s Business plan offers you a one-stop-shop platform for storing, creating content, and protecting your brand identity.
The Guest-user feature allows you to save on production costs. The pricing model will enable you to pay per use and/or user. This means you can get licenses for users who are constantly creating content for your brand and invite others who will only need to create content a few times.
You can also upgrade or move to the Enterprise Solution when your business grows and has a more significant demand for creating content.
Wrapping Up
As said earlier, content marketing is a continuous process. It’s something that businesses keep building to increase their lead generation, turn leads into customers, and retain existing ones.
It is essential for both small and large brands to put a strategy in place to consistently meet customer needs.
You may not get your content strategy up and running in a day. But consistency is vital, even in digital content strategy.