From content marketing being the ‘buy-in’ to many startups failing due to lacking in this area, here are 19 answers to the question, “Why is content marketing crucial for startups?”
- Content Marketing is The Buy-In
- Gain a Loyal Following and Community
- You Stand Out Amongst Competitors
- Content Marketing Gives You Material for Social Media
- It is Cheaper and More Efficient Than Traditional PR
- Content Marketing Can Help With SEO and Organic Reach
- Content Marketing is Vital for Reaching Wider Audience
- Helps You Establish Authority Around Your Unique Point of View
- Maximizes Brand Exposure
- Invites Collaboration
- Helps You Introduce Your Business
- The ROI is Incredible
- It Gives People Something to Relate to
- Content Marketing Brings Short and Long-term Benefits
- Boosts Brand Awareness
- Helps You Gain Trust From New Audiences
- Content Marketing is Cheap and Effective
- Target Relevant Audience
- Many Startups Fail Because They Lack Content Marketing
Content Marketing is The Buy-In
Content marketing is the buy-in. It is what creates the idealization that the consumer wants to purchase or receive a service from your brand. As a startup, it is the best way to gain traction and create raving fans. Even better if you can convince your early adopters to create their own content (UGC). UGC goes a long way.
Logan Rae, Founder, Argon Agency
Gain a Loyal Following and Community
Content marketing helps startups to gain a loyal following and community. Companies can use content to educate potential customers about their product or service, and even offer free samples or discounts for a limited time to get people to try out their business. The more people see content about your startup, the more likely they are to sign up or purchase from you. A loyal following can also help your business grow, as customers can share content about your business with others to draw in more customers.
Matthew Ramirez, CEO, Rephrasely
You Stand Out Amongst Competitors
A brand blog is essential in content marketing. Not only will this set you apart as a leader in the industry, but it also helps viewers understand your brand and important industry trends. Some terms may not be recognized by a new audience, and you can use your blog to inform them on the topic. In doing so, readers will gravitate to the blog while the website increases its domain rating.
Karim Hachem, VP of Ecommerce, La Blanca
Content Marketing Gives You Material for Social Media
Content marketing is important because your content will come in handy for your social media strategies. For instance, if you have written a great blog on a particular topic, you can refer to this blog in one of your social media posts. Or, you could create posts as customer spotlights, telling their stories and using their positive testimonials. Showing is much more effective than telling, especially on social media, where visuals are such a crucial component. Engaging content is the best way to show your brand’s worth.
Drew Sherman, Director of Marketing and Communications, Carvaygo
It is Cheaper and More Efficient Than Traditional PR
With PR, a startup will likely compete for a spot in the media with many other competitors who are bidding their pitches to the media outlet. Spending thousands of dollars on press releases and distribution is therefore a waste of money. This can be strategized by doing content marketing, for example, creating a guest blog post or inviting others to do that, focusing on using SEO for the website, or promoting on social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. These strategies are more affordable for a startup to increase its visibility and promote itself, especially at the early stage.
Georgi Todorov, Founder, ThriveMyWay
Content Marketing Can Help With SEO and Organic Reach
Content marketing is an invaluable tool for startups looking to establish their presence in their chosen market. By creating content such as blog articles, e-books, and webinars that appeal to the target audience, content marketing can help increase a business’s organic reach and even support search engine optimization (SEO).
As the content builds up over time, it provides more opportunities for individuals to explore its offerings – potentially increasing brand loyalty and awareness. In sum, content marketing offers a cost-effective way to establish a startup’s brand in its industry without breaking the bank.
Jim Campbell, Owner, Camp Media
Content Marketing is Vital for Reaching Wider Audience
Most startups have very tight resources and budgets from the get-go. In such a situation, it is crucial to dedicate resources to marketing, and especially content marketing due to the widespread reach of the internet around the world. Recent research from 2022 shows that the average time spent on the internet was 397 minutes (six hours and 37 minutes) per day per person.
Content marketing allows startups to reach a wider audience of different age groups using channels like social media (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) and SEO (Google). This helps the brands showcase their voice to their readers as well as their offerings. Furthermore, they can make smart usage of sales funnels to capture the user’s intent and get them into the buyer’s journey by lead capture using top-of-the-funnel or middle-of-the-funnel content or direct sales through bottom-of-the-funnel content.
Swapnil Pate, Founder, Swapnil Pate SEO
Helps You Establish Authority Around Your Unique Point of View
Content marketing is often associated with “What is X?” posts written for search engine algorithms or gated PDFs to generate leads. However, one of the more important functions content marketing serves for early-stage companies is organizing and communicating the founding team’s unique perspectives.
Startups are built in response to an unserved need or a unique approach to solving it. Your content should help articulate and build a case for this set of perspectives. At more mature companies, dedicated product marketing teams codify a company’s messaging and positioning. Without those dedicated resources, content marketing can do double duty: building awareness around your brand while creating the resources that build credibility and authority.
Peter Zawistowicz, Head of Marketing, Pace
Maximizes Brand Exposure
Content marketing for startups is especially effective for building and nurturing relationships with potential customers. In fact, remember that it’s not enough to get noticed; you have to familiarize your audience with your brand. Beyond recognizing your logo, you need to understand your value proposition and how it meets their needs. No matter how good your product or service is, if you can’t reach your target audience, it won’t be successful.
Léa Soller, CEO, Digiberries Paris
Invites Collaboration
Content marketing is vital for startups because it invites collaboration. Good-quality content will get the attention of other businesses, websites, etc. as much as it does for customers. This can be critical for securing a partnership and getting content shared elsewhere, which increases overall exposure to a wider variety of audiences. Collaboration like that can be a major boost to any startup.
Adam Bem, Co-founder and COO, Victoria VR
Helps You Introduce Your Business
Just like new people we’ve never met need an introduction, so do new businesses too. And content marketing is a very effective way to introduce your startup.
People want to know what you are all about; what do you sell? How much do you sell it? What’s unique about you? Why should they stop getting their products where they were getting them before you launched your business? What new or special thing are you offering? These are the kind of questions you will answer via content marketing. You will help get the name of your business out there. Basically, you introduce yourself through content marketing.
Lydia Mwangi, Content Writer, Barbell Jobs
The ROI is Incredible
One reason why content marketing is crucial for startups is that it can result in a higher return on investment compared to other forms of digital marketing. The average ROI of SEO through content marketing is 500%, while the average return on investment for pay-per-click advertising is only 36%.
By investing in content marketing early, startups can save money on digital advertising compared to pay-per-click advertising and put that money towards hiring new employees and growing the business. Investing in content marketing can not only provide a higher return on investment, but also lay the foundation for future business growth and success.
Kevin Mead, Owner, Erabond
It Gives People Something to Relate to
Content marketing allows your target audience to connect and build a relationship with you. They want to be able to engage with the brands that they like, and a content marketing strategy does just that. As a brand, it also gives you the opportunity for your audience to get to know you better. How can they use your products? What are the brand’s values? A content marketing strategy is crucial for developing relationships and creating a name for yourself.
Randee Machina, Director of Marketing, Simpli Pleasures
Content Marketing Brings Short and Long-term Benefits
The value of most advertising fades almost as soon as the ad runs. A lot of marketing is similarly short-term in its benefits.
Content marketing is one of those rare types of marketing that can produce both short- and long-term value. For example, in 2013 I was given a column at Forbes and began to write articles about my business experiences. One article, in particular, attracted a lot of attention from exactly the right audience, and generated over $10 million in revenue for my company over the next several years. I’m still generating revenue because of that article, 10 years after I published it.
You could call this PR, but there’s a fuzzy line between PR and content marketing. Whatever you want to call it, I created content, put it where my ideal audience would come across it, and had triggers in that content that got prospects to contact me. One article, $10 million in revenue. Imagine how that kind of content marketing could benefit your startup.
Josh Steimle, Founder, MWI
Boosts Brand Awareness
Content marketing boosts brand awareness. Companies put content out into the world such as blog posts, video content, and interactive content, which helps to engage prospective customers and draw attention to their products or services.
Content marketing assists in helping startups rise above competitors, reach more target audiences, and build relationships early on in the process of launching a business. With content marketing, startups are able to create an online presence that resonates with their key demographic, and channels have the potential for infinite growth – it’s no wonder why content marketing is so crucial for startups!
Carlos Trillo, Founder and CEO, Evinex
Helps You Gain Trust From New Audiences
Content marketing helps you gain trust from your target audience that doesn’t know you. When you show that you are extremely knowledgeable in your field and answer questions that your target demographic is searching for, you begin building a relationship with them before they contact you for your service or product. It is also helpful for other digital marketing channels as well. It helps your SEO, advertising (with retargeting), email sign-ups, social media follows, etc.
Doug Darroch, Managing Partner, Symmetry 50
Content Marketing is Cheap and Effective
Advertising, over the past few years, has been becoming more and more expensive. Google PPC rates in competitive niches can be around $10-20 per click, which can be very expensive for a startup with a limited budget. That’s where content marketing comes in.
With the right content marketing campaign, a startup can:
- Drive thousands to tens of thousands of leads to their website
- Build high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites
- Improve their organic rankings on Google
And the best part is that content marketing can be very inexpensive, as you can organically promote your content on the internet.
Nick Zviadadze, Founder, MintSEO
Target Relevant Audience
One reason why content marketing is crucial for startups is that it allows them to target a relevant audience effectively. By creating valuable and informative content that speaks directly to the pain points, needs, and interests of their target market, startups can attract and engage potential customers in a way that traditional advertising methods may not be able to.
Additionally, by providing useful information, startups can build a relationship with their target audience and position themselves as a trustworthy source of information, which can ultimately lead to increased customer loyalty and sales.
n our case, we are usually targeting a technical audience, so we focus on writing valuable content. What has worked best for us is to build the product publicly and share content about that. For example, we write articles about the technology we use and the approaches we follow. Technical audiences need to see the value, or they will write you off as some shoddy attempt at marketing.
Jan Cizmar, CEO and Founder, Tolgee
Many Startups Fail Because They Lack Content Marketing
When it comes to startups, founders are passionate and believe their idea to be groundbreaking. It often happens that they are the only ones who understand what they’re offering. They are so in love with their product that they feel that everyone else will be. This of course isn’t the case because the market doesn’t know what they’re offering. Without creating awareness about your product (or service), the market won’t react in the way you imagined and actually, probably won’t react at all.
This is one of the main reasons for such a high rate of startup failures today. They forget to tell their story and explain their solution. Eventually, most of them are gone before you even notice them. Long story short, through content marketing you’re creating your brand awareness, which ultimately generates leads and clients. No matter the type of content, it is very important to determine and understand the audience you want to reach and to strategically plan how to direct your content at them.
Lucia Ursi, Employer Branding Manager, Async Labs
