Interview. Content Marketing for a Startup: Attracting First Customers and Optimizing Costs
According to statistics , after five years of existence, only half of startups survive. To stay afloat you need to think not only about the quality product, but also about its promotion.
We are talking today with a professional marketer, Alexander Lashkov, who has worked hard to promote young projects in Russia and the United States, about how to attract the attention of the audience with modest start-up resources using content marketing.
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How to attract the first customers, if resources are limited, and there is a lot of money for advertising?
In this case, a startup does not have such a large selection of promotion tools. Often a good option in terms of price and possible return becomes content marketing. This approach assumes that the business becomes more open and tries to create content that is useful to its audience. Thus, you can even gain the trust of potential customers without direct advertising.
As an example, here you can bring the company “Dodo Pizza” - the project’s founder, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, launched the blog “The Power of the Mind”, in which he spoke about his project and what he does for business development. At the beginning of the Dodo story, it was the blog that became one of the channels to attract the first users. Today, the pizzeria was able to become one of the market leaders and open several pizzerias abroad, including in the USA - the team is still documenting all its successes on the blog.
In any case, any costs, even in the case of a corporate blog, will be what you need to be ready for?
It all depends on the tasks. If for the success of the project it is important to quickly attract the attention of the general public, here the path of the systematic development of the blog is not suitable, since it will take a lot of time. In this case, it is worth thinking about working with online media, for example, very many publications are happy to publish expert columns on topics of interest to readers.
Creation of such content is a rather difficult job, which requires resources and time, including top management, but this can be justified.
How to start work on content marketing and build a competent strategy?
It’s worth starting a promotion with a moral setting yourself. If earlier you worked in a narrow circle of people, within which all the news and ideas were spinning, then now you will have to feel free to tell a lot about yourself. Even if the project does not contain changing world innovations, do not be afraid to talk about it. This is the basis of content promotion, without which it is unlikely that something will turn out.
The next step is training. As in any business, if you have not previously engaged in content marketing, you can hardly immediately become a champion in this discipline. Even if you hire a strong specialist or agency, you still need to "grinding" and debugging all processes. To minimize the consequences of possible mistakes, you should first start the same blog - right on the site or some other site, or at least on Facebook.
The audience of these sites will initially not be very large, so if any material turns out to be unsuccessful - not a big deal. But everyone involved in creating content will have the opportunity to get a hand and see what the audience, albeit small, like more. This is very useful later when working with more outreach sites or when creating paid promotional content, where the cost of error increases. Also, you will learn planning - in content marketing it is very important.
How can this work in practice?
I'll tell you by my own example. Before launching our new project - content agencies for promoting domestic projects in foreign markets - we wrote several articles to the blog, including material squeezing tips on creating high-quality content from the new book by journalist Nikolai Kononov “Author, scissors, paper” (by the way , recommend).
Then we shared a link to the publication in social networks, and also made a repost on Spark.ru - a platform for communication between entrepreneurs, start-ups and investors. There, our publication received a good response, so it became clear that this kind of content is in demand by the target audience. Thus, we realized that such content is interesting to our target audience and we decided on what topics to write in the future.
Are there any mistakes that you definitely do not need to make?
There are a number of mistakes that beginner projects make in their content marketing. First of all, the team of a young company is difficult to resist the desire to praise yourself too much. It is not always easy for the founders who are burning their own business to understand that most of the Internet’s audience is not interested in a project, they don’t want to hear about how good you are.
There is no benefit for the client in this, so when a company spends resources on writing useless news about a trip to an exhibition, even to Saransk, even to San Francisco, this is unlikely to be interesting to anyone. But if the material told about the reasons for the trip, advice on how to get to the exhibition in San Francisco, a report from the scene, along with some analytics of what was seen and heard, this would be much more useful.
Another mistake, on the contrary, is excessive modesty. I call this the problem of "this has already been written." Very often, some topic for an interesting article, video or photo review is rejected, because once before someone somewhere wrote about it or some member of the team saw similar material. But it is impossible to constantly write texts on topics not previously covered by topics unique to anyone. If you follow this policy, then you will have very little content, and it will sink in information noise. Regularity is very important in content marketing.
Another common mistake - to give work on content promotion is not in the hands of professionals, but by residual. “PR Masha is a good girl, let her keep a blog” - this is not how it works. It is clear that the founders and experts of the company are busy people, but it is they who know the business and subject matter issues best of all. If the content is prepared by a person who does not feel the topic so well, then first of all it will not interest anyone, and secondly, it carries risks - the audience may react negatively to errors in the blog post that are ridiculous from the point of view of a professional. A possible solution is one thing - whoever in your company is engaged in content, he will need help from experts and top management, otherwise the results of the work will be disappointing.
What is the best way to act to increase the effectiveness of content promotion work?
As I said, it is important to move gradually. From simple to complex - first hone the processes on your own “free” resources, create a publishing strategy based on feedback, understand your ability to generate content, etc. And then buy native advertising, prepare expert columns and use paid channels like paid blogs (for example, on Habrahabr).
In addition, before spending money on paid channels, you should explore their alternatives. For example, many publications publish native advertising - articles similar to editorials. They are expensive (from tens to hundreds of thousands of rubles for one placement), but in them products are often advertised "head on", which the readers do not like. Also, the "repayment" of such articles is often not very clearly allocated by the editors - as a result, the company receives a negative for its money. At the same time, the same online media often publish “free” expert columns - in such texts, of course, you will need not to promote, but to reveal important problems, but the returns are higher - successful material will improve the company's perception, and it will not cost anything ( less the cost of preparing the content).
In conclusion, is it possible to give an example of a content strategy with all the points from plans to implementation?
It can be illustrated by the example of the currently popular topic - the promotion of blockchain startups and their ICO. In this area, PR and content marketing are very important, and there are clear steps that any project needs to go through.
First you need to place information about the project on the websites of special ICO calendars - there are quite a lot of them (Coinschedule.com, CoinGecko.com, ICO-List.com, etc.). Often, it is on the basis of such calendars that bloggers and the media compile a selection of “interesting ICOs” and notice projects that fit their topics.
It is important not only to move forward on external sites, but also to have good content on our own resources. In the sphere of blockchain and cryptocurrency, this is especially important, because for a successful ICO, any project needs a good White paper, that is, a document with a detailed description of the project, its market prospects, the technologies used, etc.
Since ICO is crowdfunding, when users invest in ideas, they want to see the active work of the project team. The easiest way to talk about your accomplishments is through a blog, so you’ll need it.
In addition, since the sale of tokens cannot last forever, it is important for the team to attract attention in a short period of time - publications in the media are suitable for this. Work with large publications with a large coverage of high-quality audiences on a paid basis will be expensive. At one of our customers, the editors demanded $ 15,000 for publishing one “native” article. Therefore, most likely you will have to do work with the involvement of editors on a free basis. About how this can be done, I told, for example, in this habrastitie .
In parallel with the publications in the media, you need to work with the relevant communities. It is worth posting the announcement and links on thematic subddits on Reddit, in Facebook groups, Quora discussions, professional groups on LinkedIn and on profile forums. Moreover, the communities do not necessarily have to be connected with the ICO, it is quite possible to stay at the sites where people interested in the subject of the project are sitting.
In short, this is the way startups go in this area; in other industries, everything happens about as well, except for the not so high level of the surrounding HYIP and pressure due to tight deadlines. Content marketing is not easy, but it is a tool that suits startups as well as large companies, and if you do not make obvious mistakes, the chances of a positive result will be high even without significant investments.
Useful content marketing articles for startups:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/348796/
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