Unlike established brands, startups don’t often have massive budgets to invest in advertising or other expensive user acquisition tactics. This is why content marketing is the best bet for startups.
Studies show that content marketing is the cheapest method to acquire customers. Although it costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates three times as many leads.
If you’re looking to outperform establish brands, you need to invest your time and resources in content marketing. Let’s take a look at a few ways startups can compete in content marketing with established brands.
1. Create a content strategy quickly and adapt it on the fly
While startups can’t develop the sheer volume of content like established brands, they can quickly adapt a new content strategy that works.
In fact, according to a study, nearly 90% of companies were using content marketing to grow their business, but 68% lacked a documented content marketing strategy. This means a vast majority of companies are investing in content marketing without a clear idea of what they’re doing.
You can start by looking at your existing customers or followers and then, create a document explaining user personas. Identify the concerns of your personas and solve them by creating relevant and high-quality content.
You’ll also want to define concrete and measurable goals for your content marketing strategy. This way you can measure your progress and identify how well your content is performing.
2. Grow your email list like crazy
The best way to build a connection with your prospective customers is to capture their email addresses and nurture your relationship by sending helpful emails. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to grow your email list like crazy.
An effective way to rapidly grow your email list is to offer an exact targeted resource that your visitors are looking for on your site rather than providing a generic resource in exchange for their email address.
For example, HubSpot adds a relevant opt-in at the end of every article they publish. This strategy helped them to triple their leads from every blog post.
If you don’t have time and resources to create post-specific resources, you can grow your list by blocking a portion of your content for subscribers only. You can even create a premium content area and make it accessible to users when they submit their email address.
3. Discover how to outperform
The key to outperform established brands with content marketing is to find ways to create and distribute content from a different angle with a different approach. You need to experiment with many different content marketing approaches until you find what works for you and your situation in particular.
For example, Mint found that their competitors like Quicken were only blogging monthly, if at all. To outperform them, Mint hired a full-time editorial staff to create and publish high-quality and relevant on a regular basis. They also regularly published finance tips and visual content including videos and infographics, which helped them establish as a trustworthy brand in the industry.
This strategy of developing a unique content marketing approach to reach new audience helped Mint to scale to over a million users, within a matter of years even without a viral loop.
4. Invest in the right tools
For your startup, competing with established brands is next to impossible unless you’re willing to invest in the right tools. With the right set of tools, you can streamline your content marketing efforts and take your business to the next level.
It lets you analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. You can start by entering your keyword into the search box. You can then discover what content performs best for your specified keyword.
With BuzzSumo, you can also find key influencers to promote your content.
This tool allows you to track the keyword strategy by your competitors, conduct an SEO audit for your site, and look for link building opportunities.
If you’re not using content marketing to reach your audience and compete with established brands, you’re already behind. By adopting the above tactics, you can outperform your competitors in content marketing.
This is a free tool that helps you identify the questions your target audience is googling. You can then write content to answer their questions so your blog appears as they are searching for the answer.
The internet has leveled the playing field. These are just some of the ways that you can step up your content strategy game and better compete with established brands without spending a fortune.
Liked this article? Check out my other article on 6 Ways to Automatically Grow Your Email List Overnight, 5 Optin Bribe Examples to Grow Your Email List, and 3 Things to Know Before Creating Your First ECommerce Site