Everyone knows that you need content - but what type of content should your startup focus on creating to give you the most bang for your buck?
Your content is your first impression. It’s where you define your voice, value proposition, purpose, and branding. It communicates the stories behind your innovative ideas and products and helps sales teams nail the message to close the deal.
The common lore leads us to believe producing high-quality content is a considerable expense and time-consuming endeavor, further complicated by myriad formats and distribution channels. Malek quickly dispels this notion, offering up a strategic approach, a set of building blocks and basic proven practices for attendees to have a roadmap for their businesses to produce high-value content as they’re establishing their place in the market.
Startups need to produce content that is meaningful, relevant, and timely; but what type of content and channels should you focus on to garner the best impact?
Malek tells us: “You’re not writing, you’re building.” Build something that will excite the customer, give them a meaningful experience, and catalyze sharing your content to other potential evangelizers! that they will want to share!
What content do people want, need, and how does it support your business?
Following these phases will help you answer this foundational question.
Ideating Content: the phase exploring what ideas appeal to and capture the attention of your audience
Building Content: applying the basic building blocks of content strategy
Good Content Structure: to make it legible to not only your human audience but enticing to analytics engines that ultimately rank your SEO score
Strong Call-to-Action: inspire readers to take action, to share, consequently leads
Distribute Content: It’s only worthwhile if it’s seen. Share often!
Redistribute: What content can be used for multiple touchpoints?
Design good content: the best content is inspiring, helpful, and valuable.
Google ranks quality vs. quantity
You should invest in video content
Consistency, in timing and output, is key
Guest bloggers: Are they experts in their field? Is there a mutual advantage? Ensure they’ll be as valuable to you as you are to them.
To build strong relationships with customers, put your heart, soul & energy into blog posts
Malek’s invaluable insights and guiding principles on content development gave attendees the information, motivation, and confidence for teams to try new marketing methodologies, measure results, and think outside of the box, especially when budgets are tight.
Malek oversees product and marketing operations in order to produce content that accelerates sales. Previous to his current position, Jibran was the Senior Marketing Manager at MassChallenge, where he grew their email list by 30%, achieved an open rate of 31%, and drove marketing efforts for their events, consistently hitting over 1000+ attendees each time.
See Jibran Malek's Grapevinelogic Page for a collection of pieces to drill down on content and Influencer Marketing.
If you’re a marketer, Startup Boston Week’s 2020 Sales and Marketing track has perfect programming for you this year—all virtual, all Boston. Get your ticket here for events like:
See you there!