Social media plays an important role in the success of many businesses in the 21st century. Social media networks can serve as an advertising and public relations medium, or be an excellent conduit for word-of-mouth referrals. The relatively low cost of running a social media campaign can also serve as a boon for startup businesses with small budgets.
Related: Content Marketing
You are a startup and you’ve now reached the content creation stage. Here you find the content card. The content card will help guide you through this process. Looking back on the goals, strategy, and technology cards you can now start the process of creating your startup content strategy for the startup blog by asking four key questions. The answers to these questions laid out on the goals and strategy cards will be the framework for your startup content strategy. With this in mind, you can start making decisions about the startup content strategy.
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What are we aiming to do with the blog?
The first step in creating a content strategy is to define a niche for your startup blog. And from there, define key topics to cover, and assign those topics to content managers and contributors. Finding the niche for your blog can be a challenging task. But it can also be used as a tool to clearly define what sets your company and its expertise apart from the competition. To start the process, you need to define where you think your company’s strengths lie in terms of expertise. Our example company, Zorays Solar, excels at green energy solutions, with a particular focus on solar energy. Because this is where the expertise is, this should be the niche focus of the blog.
How are we doing this on the Web?
The next step is to research your competition. Do they have a blog or social media presence? What are they talking about, are they providing valuable information about the industry? What are they not talking about?
For Zorays Solar, it may turn out that rather than sharing information about solar energy itself, something all the competitors are doing. The niche lies in the data Zorays Solar has collected over the years about how solar energy has improved the overall productivity of their clients. Or, how it has changed their public or internal perceptions. In that case, the niche would be how to improve overall business performance and business perceptions through the use of green technologies. Now, you need to search the web to see who else is sharing information about the same niche.
Who’s in charge?
Which is a better blog strategy for a web startup: Relevant content or controversial content? If there is lots of information out there already, you need to refine or re-define your niche and do new searches. In the end, you’ll have a clearly defined area of expertise that you can excel at without having too much competition. With a niche defined, you can move on to define key topics. Here, I would urge you to pick no more than six topics or categories to be addressed. This will further define your content production and give structure to the blog.
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And how do we measure success?
To refine these key topics you can use tools like the Google ad words keywords tool, which shows you what type of keywords or phrases people are searching for in Google. For Zorays Solar, these topics can be solar saving, green initiatives, public awareness, education and the like. When you defines these topics, mark them down on the content card and assign them to a content manager.
In order to successfully utilize social media, a business must have the ability to publish useful and interesting content. This can include content that is either directly produced by the business, or content that is simply retransmitted from another source. The goal of the content is to focus on and appeal to the needs of the customers and help them feel engaged in the business.
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