Content Marketing: A Guide for Startups

When you think of content marketing, what springs to mind? Chances are, you’ve seen enough blog posts, LinkedIn posts, TikTok videos and landing pages to have a basic idea of what content marketing is.

But it’s easy to get cold feet when it’s time to execute.

So where do you begin?

Start with your brand fundamentals

Seth Godin said it best:

If Nike opened a hotel, I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like. If Hyatt came out with sneakers, we’d have no clue. Because Hyatt doesn’t have a brand – they have a logo.

To be fair, companies selling sneakers have it a little bit easier than SaaS companies. When people know exactly what they’re buying, you can build a brand around a “feel” alone. For SaaS companies, branding can be tricky because you’ll have to blend brand messaging with practical information about what your platform does.

Ideally, your brand should be driven by a few different things:

• Your differentiator: What aspect of your product is fundamentally different from your competitors? That should be a core part of your brand identity.
• Buyer personas: Who are your buyers and what do they want? Your brand should speak to the benefits your product delivers for them.
• Your company values: What is your company about? The look and feel of your marketing should speak to a set of core values that gives your company its own personality.

Brand consistency creates trust, so a consistent brand presence can help signal that your product is reliable. Your visual identity, tone of voice, and content should be similar across your marketing channels.

Decide on content pillars

Content pillars are key themes in your content that align with your value proposition. For SaaS companies, these themes often revolve around the industries they target and the features of their product. Every content pillar should have different content pieces for each stage of the funnel:

• Top of funnel content is content that someone might encounter before they even know what your product does. It’s usually something like a blog post, video, or infographic that speaks to a problem your product (or a specific feature of your product) solves.
• Middle of the funnel content might be blog posts, whitepapers, or videos that offer more product information. It’s the content that gets your audience interested in the specifics of how you can solve their problem.
• Bottom of the funnel content is for an audience in the decision-making stage. This might be a competitor comparison, case studies, or testimonials that offer proof that your product is worth buying.

Keep in mind that how much of each type of content you need may also vary depending on your audience. For example, if you’re targeting larger B2B buyers, your content needs to speak to decision-makers who place a higher value on proof and comparisons. For B2C, top of funnel content might perform better.

Build brand awareness

Once you have a brand and content strategy, you’ll need a distribution model. You’ll have to decide what channels to use and what KPIs will determine whether or not you’re successful. Use the PESO (Paid, Earned, Owned, Shared) model to help you come up with a content distribution strategy that makes sense for you:

• Paid media is any media you pay for. Consider things like like boosted posts on LinkedIn, Google PPC ads, or affiliate marketing on industry blogs.
• Earned media is all the content that other people create about you. For SaaS companies, this is often things like G2 reviews and third-party news articles.
• Shared media is all the media you put on social platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok. In SaaS, this often includes your G2 and Capterra Listings, Product Hunt, and industry forums.
• Owned media is content on platforms you own – usually the content on your website, from landing pages to blog posts.

If you’re just starting out, start with owned media. Your website is your brand’s home base; once you’ve hit your stride with content development on your site, you can repurpose that content for paid, earned, and shared strategies.

Make it manageable

Above all else, you’ll want to make sure that your strategy aligns with the resources you have. If you’re a five-person startup looking to build your brand, you might not have the resources to produce content regularly on all the channels you want.

Start with what you know you can manage, and then scale content up from there. Need a hand? Get in touch with the team at ShoutEx today for a quick chat.