Whether you are a small startup or a mid-sized business, you shouldn’t neglect the power of content marketing strategy in today’s digital world. Developing relevant, engaging, and meaningful content for online audiences results in bigger brand awareness and increased sales.
Killer Content Marketing Strategy
However, most of the time, startups and mid-sized companies alike face budgetary limits while working on their content marketing. Startup marketing isn’t easy, but a well-prepared content marketing strategy can work wonders, even on a tight budget. If you’re working on a limited budget but still want to create a killer content marketing strategy, here are a couple of tips to follow.
Understand your goals and your audience
You won’t be able to reach your customers without understanding their wants and needs. Moreover, unless you define concrete and achievable goals, your content marketing strategy will fail in converting your audience. The goals you choose will define your content marketing strategy and put you in the right direction. They can range from driving web traffic and pushing the number of email subscribers to increasing brand awareness.
Understanding your customers starts with creating a customer profile sheet. The point is to try to think like your prospects and look at the world from their perspective. Some of the criteria to consider include:
The quality of your writers has a strong correlation with the quality of the crafted content. Your content needs to be engaging, relevant, and search engine optimized. You can hire a full-time in-house writer who has knowledge about your niche if you need someone who can meet your yearly content requirements. On the other hand, if you aren’t planning to produce large amounts of content, you can hire freelance writers who have a standard per-word rate or go with a content marketing agency.
Leverage various financial and content marketing solutions
When you operate on a tight budget, the best advice is to use different financial (which can increase or improve a strict budget) and marketing solutions (which can maximize the effectiveness of content marketing). Marketing tools are perfect when you also want to maintain a strong social media presence and are primarily used to automate, curate, and distribute various kinds of content on a regular basis. You will also need to use SEO and email marketing solutions alongside content marketing tools in order to increase reach and sales, and generate leads.
If you need to extend your budget, you can always go with financial solutions such as traditional bank loans and credit cards. However, it can be challenging to find a traditional loan from a bank unless you have business assets for collateral, which is where flexible unsecured business loans can come in handy. Ultimately, budgeting tools like PlanGuru enable you to set realistic separate budgets and stick to them
Look into influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that involves partnering with different influencers to develop and share branded content. The reason this works well in marketing is that you get to tap into the follower base of the influencers in the industry in question.
You do this by building relationships with influential individuals in the content marketing space via different initiatives, including long- and short-form written content, speaking engagements and webinars. When you partner with other leaders in your niche through content projects like these you will be able to engage and reach more audiences.
Don’t forget affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing definitely includes some cost but it also provides higher ROI. Businesses leverage affiliate marketing for years now, under which an individual refers to an online product or service to another individual and receives a commission for it. Depending on what is your product or service, the commission you offer can vary between $1 and $1,000.Of course, you will need to approach affiliates, who are often publishers that work with affiliate links to promote a service/product and increase sales.
Brand and business organizations that go with affiliate marketing tend to receive various benefits, but the most common one is free promotion. Coupons or discount links are typical examples of affiliate links that can push prospects towards product purchases. This is especially important when you work on a string budget.
In conclusion, basic marketing rules aside, being consistent is key to generating a content marketing strategy while on a tight budget. Keep optimizing the process as it goes and AB testing your campaigns regarding how your audience reacts to them till it is optimized to the fullest. In addition, remember to keep it about your customers, audience, and your community.
Author:
I’m Willy Beamen, contributor for Bizzmarkblog with 15 years of experience from Sydney, Australia. My work is mostly focused on helping small business owners and local startups to get off the ground and expand.
