Founder's growth guide to content marketing

Content marketing is a key growth strategy for startups, and investing early in it can pay off down the line.

Content marketing is a hot topic these days. It’s especially relevant for new startups entering crowded markets with established players. While you may not have the budget for a traditional marketing campaign, content marketing can be an easier, cheaper, and more effective way to bolster your marketing efforts. This article will explain what content marketing is, how to design a content marketing strategy based on your marketing funnel, and the best channels and formats to focus on.

Let’s dive in.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing involves building a long-term relationship with your customer through helpful, relevant, and timely content.

You can create different types of content and distribute them through various channels. This includes blog posts, videos, e-books, newsletters, podcasts, and webinars.

Creating valuable content instead of typical sales content is meant to solve problems people have — not sell to them. You want visitors to your website or corporate blog to read an article about why double opt-in is better than single opt-in, go away feeling enlightened, then come back later to buy your opt-in software.

Digital content marketing plays a significant role in the success of your business for the following reasons:

Content is a moat. On the order of things that make your customers want to keep coming back to get more of you, digital content ranks high as a magnet.
Content drives awareness: Through search engine optimization (SEO), a great content strategy can help you rank for valuable keywords on major search engines. This helps with lead generation.
Content can inform and educate your customers. You can use content to tell the world about your products and services, educate them on relevant topics, and drive increased adoption of your product.
Content drives conversions. When you offer high-quality content, your customers begin to trust that you’re the right solution to help solve their problems — and are more willing to buy from you.

A content marketing example

To explain the journey that content marketing can take a customer on, consider the following scenario:

On her way to work, Raechel discovers her car isn't starting as quickly as before — her battery struggles noticeably. This is the second time this month it’s happening.
Raechel types "car battery not starting quickly anymore" into her favorite search engine and lands on a blog about car batteries and when to replace them. She realizes she's had her car for five years and that the battery might be due for replacement.
Raechel then types in "how much is a new car battery?" and lands on the website of a local battery retailer, Ray’s Batteries. After reading the product page and checking out their pricing, she decides it's worth the spend.
Raechel visits the company's social media pages to get a feel for how legit they are before buying anything. She spies some positive reviews on Facebook, Google, and Yelp and decides to note down their operating hours and contact details.
After the purchase (where she handed over her email address), Raechel receives an email from the founder, Ray, thanking her for her purchase and offering some tips on maintaining her car. She then gets these emails once every month, which she thinks is a nice touch.
After three months of helpful emails, Raechel receives a special email from the company: they're offering her 10% of the cash any of her friends spend at Ray’s Batteries. All she has to do is spread the word. She has plenty of friends who have also neglected their cars and she wants them to avoid the same situation she went through, so she drops a message in her neighborhood Facebook group.
And with that, Raechel goes from being a cold prospect unaware of Ray’s Batteries to buying their products and eventually advocating for them.

Now, how much do you think Ray’s Batteries will eventually make from Raechel and her friends?

That's the power of digital content marketing at scale.

But how do you create valuable content in a time-efficient way that doesn’t waste money? Let’s look at a handy framework for thinking about content creation next.

Thinking in funnels and channels

It’s all too easy to start spraying content all over different platforms and hoping something sticks. This approach results in wasted time, money, and effort.

A better way to think about content marketing is to first analyze your marketing funnel. Your marketing funnel represents the different stages of your customer’s buying journey and gives you insight into what content they might need at each stage.

Your marketing funnel consists of three phases:

Top of the funnel (ToFU), where your priority is building brand awareness and making prospects aware of a problem.
Middle of the funnel (MoFU), where you focus on influencing the customer’s purchase decision in your favor.
Bottom of the funnel (BoFU), where your goal is to drive conversions and repeat transactions.

Let’s look at each in turn.

Top of the funnel

At the top of the funnel, your goal is to build brand awareness and drive lead generation. However, today’s customers don’t trust ads and aren’t willing to call a salesperson early in the buying process. You’ll need to warm up potential customers at the top of your funnel before asking for the sale.

The best channels to use with ToFU activities are those with a broad reach. This includes social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram; podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts; and video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Your website and corporate blog are also critical ToFU assets you can leverage.

At this stage of the funnel, consider using content formats like:

Blog posts: Each blog post you publish keeps your prospects and customers updated on the latest news and products you have. Longer blog posts get more traffic and backlinks than shorter ones, so consider creating at least one long-form blog post each month. You can fill out the rest of your content calendar with shorter product pieces and thought leadership posts (if you’re a B2B brand).
Social media posts: Establish a presence on one or two popular social media platforms. Depending on what you sell, you might opt for Facebook (2.7 billion active users), Twitter (353 million monthly active users), Instagram (1.1 billion monthly active users), LinkedIn (700 million monthly active users), YouTube (2 billion monthly active users), or other relevant platforms. A content calendar with 1-3 posts a week is a good start.
Infographics: Condensing lots of information into an easily-digestible format makes for highly shareable content. From our hypothetical example, Ray could create an infographic on "5 car maintenance tips to prolong your battery life" that Raechel could then share in her neighborhood Facebook group. This would drive awareness and traffic to the company's website for lead generation purposes.
Videos: Video marketing delivers outstanding results. 81% of businesses prefer to use Facebook for their video marketing, while 52% of marketers say video delivers the best ROI for their marketing efforts. You can create how-to videos, guest interviews, and short animations to delight and inform your audience and get them to choose you over the competition.
Podcasts: In the US, almost 1 in 5 Americans listen to audiobooks, and 55% of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast. Audio content is on the rise, and having a strategy to reach users via audio can result in big wins for your marketing strategy.

Middle of the funnel

In the middle of the funnel, your prospect is considering whether your product is the right solution to their problem. Your job at this stage is to influence their buying decision in your favor through helpful, relevant content.

There are plenty of content types that perform well at this stage. Let's run through a few:

Ebooks: ebooks are long-form content PDFs that your prospect can read anywhere. Best of all, ebooks make for excellent lead generation magnets. A good strategy is to write a series of blog posts and then compile them into an ebook.
White papers: A white paper is a well-researched report that you use to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. White papers influence 82% of B2B buyers and are a great way to highlight new research related to your product. While white papers are a lot more time and labor-intensive, they are invaluable to driving consideration of your product among executive buyers in complex sales cycles.
Reports: Ever read one of those insightful Digital 2020 reports? Similar to white papers, reports condense relevant information together with expert commentary to drive further awareness and consideration of a solution (typically yours). Think about what kind of data you can collect about your industry and put together a branded annual report. Reports are also great for PR efforts and backlinks.
Guides: Guides help customers solve a specific problem. You can find guides on almost any topic as people will always need step-by-step instructions to get things done. Primarily used as lead-gen magnets, guides are another great way to swell your email list with potential customers.
Case studies: A case study details how your product has helped another customer solve a pressing problem. A case study typically has three parts: the problem the customer needed to be solved, the solution you implemented, and the implementation results. For a customer to decide whether to buy your product over another, a series of case studies could help them pick you over other options.
Templates and toolkits: Templates and toolkits make it easy for customers to get things done as they're merely adapting a proven method — yours — to their situation. At FMP, we've created our own set of templates for founders to use when planning their marketing strategy. Get access to them in our Member's section.
List of resources: One powerful way to build trust among your audience is to be a resource. If you're building a product for freelancers, for example, consider putting together a list of websites where they can get free design assets or the best contract templates for their business. This makes you a trusted resource and makes them more likely to buy from you.
Email courses: If you're looking for a way to educate, engage, and inform your prospects, look no further than an email course. Typically sent out every few days over a couple of weeks, email courses are like guides, toolkits, and resources in one. They keep your prospects opening each email to learn something new (and potentially buy things that would make their learning process easier, like worksheets, templates, or a subscription to your product).
Quizzes and assessments: People love discovering more about themselves, and quizzes are a fun way to drum up engagement and subtly nudge potential customers towards your desired action. For example, as part of a content marketing campaign, Ray could design a quiz that lets social media users assess their battery life. The results would then be sent via email (adding them to his list), and he’d follow up with an offer for them to come down to the shop for a free battery check.
Webinars: Got a content marketer on your team who loves engaging people on camera? Adding webinars to your content marketing campaign could yield positive results. A webinar is essentially live video marketing that is recorded for later access. During a webinar, you can answer questions and showcase your product to drive new sign-ups and purchases.

Bottom of the funnel

The bottom of the funnel is where you ask for the sale. At this stage of the funnel, your prospect is adequately warmed up and ready to buy and just needs a final push to get them to spend. There are a few types of content you can use to accomplish this, such as:

Competitive comparisons: When a prospect is ready to buy, they'll typically compare your product to other options on the market. This presents a chance to get in front of that process and show how your product stacks up against the competition. Here's an example of a Drift vs. Intercom comparison.
Detailed specifications: For more technical buyers, they'll want to know about every last feature your product has to help them make a more informed decision. You can sway these buyers by providing detailed product specifications on your website.
Customer stories and testimonials: What better way to convince your target audience to buy than to let them hear stories from previous customers? Testimonials and customer stories assure prospects on the fence that others have trusted your product to solve their problems and that they, too, can benefit from it. To get started, speak to previous customers, set up interviews to get their stories, and turn them into vlogs, blog posts, social media content, or podcast episodes. For example, you can check out stories from our previous playbook members at thefmp.io/founders.

Beyond content, the bottom of the funnel is where you can offer promotional discounts, product demos, and free trials to drive conversions.

Promoting your content

If a piece of content lands on the internet and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? This is something all startup marketing teams should consider when creating content. Ideally, you should spend as much time promoting your content as you do creating it because content that nobody sees is effectively wasted.

There are many ways to promote your content, and the best approach is to use a mix of tactics to reach the widest audience. Here are some common promotion tactics you can use:

#1 Social media

Post content on your social media sites to drive engagement and traffic to your website. Remember that content should be evergreen so you can republish it over time. Beyond your social media accounts, you can also post your content to relevant groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media isn’t just about posting content, though, as you can also use it to ask for feedback on your content to improve it.

#2 Email marketing

If you've got an email list, use it to get the first few visitors to your content. After you've emailed your list, sit back and watch the results. Did it get opened? Did it receive replies? How much traffic did it drive? These are all metrics that help you determine the impact of your content.

#3 Press and influencer outreach

You can reach out to journalists who cover topics in your space and pitch them on your content. Influencer outreach is similar but can be more effective because influencers tend to attract a more engaged audience. They can drive traffic toward your content through social media shares or links in their blog posts.

#4 Paid promotion

You can use paid promotion on search engines, display networks, and social media sites to target different audiences. This tactic gives you flexibility and variety and is limited only by your budget.

#5 Guest blogging

If you have a blog on your website, consider writing a guest post on other people’s websites in your industry or niche. This way, they can link to your site and promote your posts to their audiences while getting valuable content in return.

#6 Online forums

Many online forums like Reddit and Quora allow you to post links. After joining the right forums, build up authority and trust by providing valuable insights and information to their members before linking to your content. Forums are also great places to ask questions and get feedback on your content before publishing it.

Brands doing content marketing right

To create stellar content, it helps to know who’s currently excelling at it. Express Writers has compiled a list of top content marketers creating content that you can check out, emulate, and improve upon. These include names like Neil Patel (co-founder of CrazyEgg and Kissmetrics), Jodi Harris (Director of Editorial Content and Curation at the Content Marketing Institute), and companies like Hubspot and Buffer. You can check out the full list here.

At this point, there’s just one more question to ask:

Should you hire a freelance content marketer or a content marketing agency?

The short answer is it depends on how much firepower you need.

If you're just starting your marketing campaign and need quality content for a defined target audience, a freelance content marketer might better serve your needs. They'll be able to:

Map out your content marketing funnel.
Review your buyer persona profiles.
Work on your SEO strategy to bring in search engine traffic.
Identify the best distribution channel to establish you on.
Build early brand awareness, and
Determine which content asset would be best for your target audience at different phases.

On the other hand, if you've been in business for a while, have a robust content marketing strategy, and have already produced a lot of great content, it might be time to hire a content marketing agency.

A content marketing agency can do a couple of things:

Perform a full content audit of your inbound marketing channels.
Set a relevant KPI for each aspect of your content marketing effort.
Employ a mix of B2B and B2C marketers who can address different aspects of your marketing strategy, and
Help you ramp up your video marketing efforts to create visual content at scale.

Get started

Content marketing is an effective way to promote your company and attract potential customers. A content-based approach can improve your marketing strategy by providing relevant, timely, and valuable information to your target audience.

There are many channels and formats you can use to reach your customers, and your content marketing strategy will depend on your business needs and capacity. We’ve given a few options in this article for you to try out, but keep testing different combinations to find what works.

Our marketing playbook explores how content can play a role in your overall brand strategy, and we’ve crafted it especially for founders like you. Take a peek at our free guide to learn more.