How to figure out the right content marketing strategy for young startups

If you thought searching on Google would help, let me stop you right there and tell you that the most of the resources or blogs out there are written out for companies who are established or are way ahead in their journey from being an early stage startup. This means that either those companies have the resources to put out a lot of content everyday or they have the funds to incorporate a wide marketing mix. 

Now, all of these observations stem from my own personal experience. I, too, am a part of a young startup and we are probably at a similar stage to you. So whatever tips or suggestions that I have to share with you are all based on our own experiments on social media and how we were able to get that first bit of traction, all organically.

You are here, reading this article because you want to figure out ways to get your brand’s name out there and get some good organic traction, all with the limited time and resources that you have. I am sure you are constantly looking at similar companies such as yours or your competitors to figure out what worked for them and if you could incorporate the same strategy in your own marketing mix. 

Now you wouldn’t want to go out there and start blindly copying the strategy that other companies are using, but you would want to understand the basic principles of that particular strategy used by that particular company. Perhaps one question ringing in your mind is ‘What are those basic principles?’. 

Well now I would like to suggest to you to take a bit of help from Google. But here’s a little twist to that, you want to search for the ‘top tips for creating organic content’ rather than searching for ‘organic content tips solely for early stage startups’. 

Why? Because the basic principles to create effective organic content strategy are the same for any company, no matter how big or small the company is. It doesn’t matter if you are a publicly listed company or a company just starting out with a beta product. Your users are all the same – pragmatic social beings sitting behind their mobile/laptops with small attention spans and looking for ways to get the best value at the lowest possible price. Every company out there is competing to get a chunk of attention from these users, but not all of them really understand their users or what they want. 

You, on the other hand, have an upper hand(pun intended) because you are starting fresh and you have nothing much to lose, just to gain. You are so young in your journey that you can learn every day without wasting too much money or effort.  The goal should always be to create value for your users –  pragmatic social beings sitting behind their devices scrolling through shit ton of content every minute.

If you are still with me, the next question in your mind would be – “that’s fine, but could you come to the point and tell us how we really create value for our users?” And my reply to that question is patience. Not because I want you to be patient (maybe I do) but because that is part of the solution. Organic marketing efforts require patience, unlike paid marketing where you can start expecting to see results within the first 1-2 days. When you are creating organic content, you should not be thinking about the results of that campaign, in fact that should be the last thing on your mind. The idea is to have content out there that your users can extract value from – educate them and inspire them. Make them feel welcomed with your content and don’t force the content down their throats. The users should feel that the content is personally curated for them and provides value. Keep your sales spirit at home or locked in a trunk (if you are working from home) when you are sitting down to create organic content. It will take a bit of effort from all of your team, because communication has to be clear within your company before going out and putting it in front of strangers. Talk to your colleagues and your bosses, discuss your ideas before you implement them. Chat to customers where possible. Having a small team as a young startup makes these discussions easier for you. Having a second opinion on your idea (maybe Mark from the tech team could give you a product utility tip that you didn’t think about) can really help you look beyond your imagination horizons and help you to put true value in front of your users.

I am going to go ahead and list some suggestions for what kind of content pieces you can create. These suggestions stem from what we did on our social media and what worked for us. (Again, you don’t have to copy these, but understand the basic principle behind it.)

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