In a world that is full of false advertising and eroding the trust of the audience, content marketing is something that should be at the core of any digital marketing strategy. Whether it is a large company or a small startup business content marketing can be a powerful tool for business growth.

Content marketing is the only type of marketing that thrives on customer`s behavior and does not cost much. What`s more? It is as profitable as paid search advertising or paid social marketing.

According to Hubspot, around 70% of marketers are investing more actively in content marketing. Why? Content marketing is a subtle way through which you are serving useful, relevant content to your potential customers to help them overcome their burning problems.

But to truly excel at delivering awesome content that is customer-centric and also aligns with your business goals, you must do more to stand out from the crowd. You must have a content marketing strategy that empowers your future goals and long-term vision of what you want to achieve.

While creating a content marketing strategy for a small startup business, entrepreneurs must begin with setting their goals.

So how can you come up with a content marketing strategy that is so enticing that helps you to grow your business? We have outlined seven key steps below that you can use to develop an ironclad content strategy for 2021:

Step 1- Identify Your Business Goals

There could be millions of reasons behind your content strategy. Maybe you just want to increase your followers, capture new search engine traffic, or you may want to only showcase your products. Hence, setting out a clear goal is vital when making a content marketing strategy.

The clarity in your goals in the very beginning will help you to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign in the future. This will not just give you a clear objective at the beginning of the process, but a solid framework too to build on.

Step 2- Discover your Target Audience

Once you have a clear objective in your mind, the next step involves who the content should we geared towards? Who is your ideal customer? There are many ways to find out and pinpoint your ideal customers. But the idea one that even the best business coach swears by is to think about demographics, age groups, geographical locations, education, lifestyle, and interests.

Entrepreneurs with small startup businesses should understand the core of their customer base. This helps you to assess the types of content that will deliver excellent results.

Step 3- Set out your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

If you cannot determine a way to measure the success of your content, it is highly difficult to measure the statistical data in a more meaningful way. Hence, setting KPIs, in the beginning, is an extremely important step.

Step 4- Decide Your Content Approach

Surely, there are multiple social platforms on the internet. But not every platform has your target audience. So will you use just one type of content or would you like to experiment with different mixtures? Knowing your target audience, you can consider the article, blog writing, video tutorials, short posts, reels, pictures, and a lot more.

Step 5- Establish a Content Calendar

To ensure the consistency of your business presence, creating a content calendar is vital. The best way to do that is digitally so that you can share the sheet online with all the stakeholders. You can pre-plan the content that you will like to post on special days and festivals. Do not forget to continually assess and update the sheet as your business requires.

Step 6- Content Creation & Editing Process

This step is where content turns into a reality. Look for distinct ways to keep your content flow block-free. Also, keep content writing separate from editing to reduce the chances of making any accidental errors.

Step 7- Analyze Statistics

This final step in setting up a content strategy involves measuring the success of your content and KPIs. Having statistical data is vital. However, it must be interpreted accurately and in the correct manner.

Content can boost the visibility, credibility, and reliability of a small startup business. But, a clear strategy must be in place. If you lack a clear content strategy, your approach will lack vision. So try to align your strategies with your business goals to boost the number of customers and revenue in the future.

To gain in-depth knowledge, you can take our foundational courses that come with hand-holding support. Our Business Coaching Program offers everything that you will need to make your startup business successful.