11 Content Marketing tips for Businesses on a shoestring

by Startacus Admin

11 Content Marketing Tips for Businesses on a shoestring

Last month our friend Sophie Turton, digital and content marketing specialist at creative digital agency Bozboz shared 4 simple and effective ways to turn your customers into brand champions. This month she returns with 11 handy content marketing tips for businesses on a shoestring. Over to Sophie to explain all...

Content Marketing is an expensive mistress, a luxury afforded only to big businesses and digital warriors. Right?

Nah.

Follow these 11 tips to building an excellent content marketing strategy that will suit any budget, and grow your startup for little more than some creativity and a dose of good old fashioned savvy.

1. Learn to curate. Content marketing is about being a thought leader and providing your audience with quality content. It is becoming increasingly obvious that customers are less interested in promotional material and as a result, you should invest your energy in developing yourself as a reputable source. The most time effective way to do this is to curate relevant content from around the web and provide your audience with the really useful information they are looking for.
   
   

2. Write about the tools you use to do your job better. Are there any apps that make your life so much easier? What do you rave about to your friends? Productivity hacks are some of the most popular on the web and some of the easiest to produce - just tap into your own experiences.

3. Turn your team building events into content. Have a jolly old beach BBQ, take lots of pictures and get on social media. This human aspect to your company will attract people far more than corporate stiffness.

4. Look for other companies (not competitors) that have done great infographics that relate to your audience, write about their findings and embed the graphic. Just make sure you credit them with a nice follow link to the source. Check out this video debunking the myths about sugar by Business Insider, posted on Iflscience, which has been shared over 36k times.

5. Hold Q&As on Twitter. Encourage your biggest influencers to get involved and answer questions from your followers on a specific topic. Make sure these Q&A sessions are structured - number questions so you know which ones are being answered or discussed. You can then create a storify stream, which is a great way of easily sharing content around a specific event or campaign. Check out this Storify we recently did for our client, Cognitive Media.  

6. Embrace video. Get your iphone out. Encourage your employees to give ‘whiteboard sessions’, providing useful, actionable advice about their area of expertise. Moz do it particularly well, check out their whiteboard Fridays and learn more about content marketing and SEO.   

7. Create a list of facts that would be super useful for your target market.

8. Turn any presentations you or your employees make into Slideshare posts. This is a fantastic, and super cheap and easy, way to repurpose content and spread your ideas further.

9. Turn your email outbox into blog posts. What are the most common questions you’re asked by customers? These are great fodder for really useful advice posts – a large part of doing content marketing well is to identify pain points and provide a solution through your content.

10. Relate popular culture to your topic. A tried and tested method that really works. Tap into people’s passion and use it to your advantage. Hootsuite, for example, did this fantastic Game of Thrones inspired video that quickly went viral.

11. Tell real, compelling stories. Humans of New York is one of the most popular websites in the world, with 3.3 million followers on Instagram and 13 million on Facebook. The key to their success is simple – people relate to people. Keep your content real and you will quickly see the results.
    
    

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Published on: 3rd July 2015