Content marketing drives 10x increase in lead conversion
This Content Marketing Guide brings together specific actions and use cases most from our day-to-day work with Tech Entrepreneurs. It draws also from our own experience building Tech ventures in Energy and Aerospace industries.
If you have more money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.
Guy Kawasaki
We believe that a well-executed Content Marketing strategy is key to success for early tech ventures – in this Content Marketing guide for Entrepreneurs we cover:
- Why Content Marketing is important
- What content works for your startup
- 5 Ground rules to shape your content
- Great Use Cases on content distribution
- Powerful, Easy to use and cheap Tools
- Call To Action to get qualified leads
Why Tech Entrepreneurs should focus on Content marketing
Outbound Marketing & Sales feels great!
You dig through your network e.g. Linkedin & co. to get some target names. You reach out to them, email or chat, for a chance to sell your solution. Probably a necessary step, but this has some flaws:
- You spend most of your time establishing first contacts
- You are interrupting your audience in their day-to-day business
- Missing problems where your solution could be of greater value
- Very low sales conversion rate and huge time spent
In this Content Marketing Guide for Entrepreneurs, we prefer to focus on the definition :
“The marketing and business process for creating and distributing valuable and compelling content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi
Build the right Content Marketing for your startup
In order to maximize impact of any marketing action, it is critical to understand the characters at play.
THE HUNTER a.k.a Entrepreneur
The Tech Entrepreneur should consider key characteristics of one’s early stage Startups, as it affect the Content marketing strategy:
- Mostly unknown to your target market
- Still validating and discovering real market needs
- Time-to-revenues and acquiring new customers is key
- Cannot afford fully fledged digital marketing campaigns
THE TARGET a.k.a Prospective Customer
Be careful! Your Target is NOT the Innovation Manager, who is scouting for Innovative ideas.
Every decision maker you’re trying to engage with spends 90% of their working life in F.E.A.R. They are: Frustrated, Evasive, Apathetic and Risk averse.
Paul Cash, Rooster Punk
Our Target character is one of the Business Managers busy tackling day-to-day operations. He has probably lived many years with the Status Quo. When the Target decides to solve a problem, one wants tangible benefits: increased sales, reduced cost or improved quality.
5 practical rules for effective Content marketing
So now it is time for Tech Entrepreneurs to take this content marketing guide into action!
#1 Make your content relevant to your Target audience
Know-Your-Customer with empathy. Focus on understanding your Target market needs, problem and expectations. Work out various options to address this issue incl. your solution. But keep it low-key on branding and hard selling.
#2 Build credibility and trust
Working in F.E.A.R., the Decision Maker is concerned by the risk of working with you as a new supplier. Testimonials and facts from Pilot, existing customers, research partners or opinion leaders increase your credibility.
#3 Illustrate your content
You should grab attention through relevant picture or visual. License-free pictures and video material can be found on Pexels, Unsplash, Pxhere and many more on a pay-for-license e.g. shutterstock & co.
#4 Your Call To Action
Prepare your Call To Action well before your content marketing release. Keep in mind that your goal is to generate awareness so that your target audience connects with you. You need to have a clear path to bring these new leads into your commercial funnel.
#5 Measure impact and iterate
We are competing for attention with a million other content. While the costs of ‘Distribution’ have dropped to almost Zero, the ‘Production’ time & costs have increased to deliver quality content. Regularly measure impact to fine tune type of content, messages and distribution channels.
Now that you have built your content, let us look at ways it can be distributed to your audience, leveraging specific use cases.
THE DISTRIBUTION – where to publish my ‘content’?
It should be where your Target audience is looking for information. Do you address a large, fragmented market? Or rather a an industry with few big buyers? How much time and money you are prepared to dedicate?
Below are some of the main distribution strategies implemented for tech Startups.
- Social Media
For most Tech businesses, preferred routes will be Linkedin, Medium, Youtube and Industry specific blogs. If your business involves design or visual value creation, consider adding Instagram or Facebook.
- Blog
Startups should favor theme based content, which grabs attention. Add some News as you become a more established businesses. Keep it generic, typically loosely tied to your company and branding. Many blogs follow the ‘Listicle’ format and some more Best Practices here.
- Podcast
Simple audio recording, easy to edit, convenient to consume, inexpensive and quick to produce. 17% of marketers plan to add podcasting to their marketing efforts in the next 12 months. For a step-by-step guide, how to Start a Podcast check this here.
- Meetup & Network events
In 2018, Atomico reports about 15’000 Tech related meetups in each Paris and Berlin, 30’000 in London alone. Meetups can be a very powerful and cheap way to connect with your audience. It allows you to explain your solution and build a community around your brand.
- Live or online Training seminar
Workshop format built around your solution. You might consider also providing some online training as lead generation to your main business. Based on the right content, it can be scalable and promotes you as expert in a field. Consider Udemy, Teachable and more.
- Video
Video is a must have nowadays; combined with landing pages can increase conversion by 86%. Vary your format from short social media teaser, to company overview to ‘How-to-Video’. A nice infographic by Hubspot and more B2B Video examples here.
- Product Configurator
An online product Configurator is great to automate your product features selection. Gartner estimates in 2018, 40% of B2B digital commerce sites to use Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tools.
Your challenge is adoption. Start small using Google Form or a Web Editor before expanding functionalities.
- Open Source & Freemium models
Providing a free(mium) Open Source solution can drive great business traction. It is powerful to ‘Try-before-your-buy’, build a community of users as an asset or generate a larger hardware installed base.
- Industry Trade show
As a startup, forget your expensive own booth. Instead, join the booth of a large established player. Apply for Call For Paper to be on stage, alongside a well-known partner if possible! Take on comfortable shoes to walk the floor and meet prospect customers.
Now that we have decided on the type of content we want to deliver, we need some tools for an efficient content ‘production’.
THE PRODUCTION – Making it happen !
There are many great (free) design tools to help you be efficient. But do not get distracted – the ‘Design’ part of the content is the easy bit.
The hard part is to work, re-work and fine tune your content. It is old fashion but it forces you to think through key items : audience, wording, problem, solution, features, benefits…
Forget the font, color & co for now…
Knowing that you could work on the detailed ‘content’ forever, now you feel good about it. Ready to tackle the ‘design’ !
Below is a list of tools we use every day… powerful & easy to use
- Canva great for quick & professional looking design
- Gimp open source graphics editor for image retouching and editing
- Lightworks open source video editing software
- WordPress simple web editor for professional outcome
- Anchor.fm to create, host and broadcast your podcast
But of course the content is only a means to an end… so let’s get into action.
CALL TO ACTION – turning your Content into Sales
After the Acquisition comes the Activation phase. Whatever your established goals are, it is critical to ensure you have a Call To Action.
If your business relies on a large community of users, consider having a sign-up landing page. Strategic landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads.
But of course, most Tech solutions need to build a personal rapport with your prospective clients. Be prepared to share details about your solution in online call, live or recorded demo and a personal sales meeting.
Tech Content Marketing is a wide topic! This content marketing guide for Tech Entrepreneurs is to trigger thoughts and actions. Since we all can benefit from everyone insights, we invite you to comment and share your experience.
Note: many statistics from https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics