Four essentials for building a startup content strategy

Most startups are creating content, even if they’re just updating a blog occasionally. That’s because the importance of content marketing is ubiquitous for startups and SMBs. Those that use content marketing get 126% more leads than those that don’t.

But if your startup doesn’t have a documented content strategy, you’re mostly relying on chance and guesswork to succeed with content.

You’re not alone, either. According to one survey by the Content Marketing Institute, only 37% of B2B marketers had a documented content strategy.

Imagine if your favorite magazine only published a new issue whenever they felt like it. What if the tone and subject matter of the magazine’s articles were different every time?

You probably wouldn’t be willing to sign up for a subscription to that magazine, even if it were free.

This is what startups do when they don’t have a content strategy. They know they need content, but they don’t have a coordinated plan for creating it, publishing it, and disseminating it.

When Chris and I started discussing this topic, we were originally focused on content formats. We asked ourselves: “What combination of content types should a startup use?” But we quickly realized that the success of a startup’s content strategy depends on its foundation—we’ll cover what content types to use in another post.

Here are the four elements we believe are essential for startups to launch a viable content strategy:

1. Buyer Intelligence

If you want to create effective content, it needs to speak to someone specific: your buyers.

Before you even start writing, you should research what your audience needs and investigate what types of content already exists in your market. You’ll probably discover that your market is saturated with content—that’s okay, you’ll just need to create better content than your competitors.

Next, create buyer personas:

(Source: HubSpot)

These are semi-fictional, documented representations of your ideal customers based on market research and real insights. In addition to demographic information, catalog anything else about your buyers that you deem pertinent.

Even knowing what a typical day looks like for your buyer can really help.

Next, you’ll want to answer three questions:

What content do our buyers want?
What content do our buyers need?
How will the content we provide our buyers support our business?

The content your buyers want may not be the same thing as what they need. Most content marketers recommend you use content to help solve your buyer’s problems. While the bulk of your content should do this, you don’t need to write how-to guides exclusively.

Most B2B buyers will find white papers and industry reports highly valuable.

2. Editorial Guidelines

Your editorial guidelines should stem from your brand guidelines. They should consist of the following:

Brand voice
Content Mission statement
·Writing guidelines
Style guide

Of course, you can always expand upon this list as your content matures. You may have specifications for how to use data, for example.

Brand voice

If you’ve already developed brand guidelines, you should have a documented brand story and some understanding of what your “brand voice” should sound like.

Of course, “brand voice” can be a nebulous concept. Ideally, your brand voice will be informed by your industry, your company, and your customers. For example, the brand voice for a criminal defense lawyer will be markedly different than the brand voice of a tech startup that markets to millennial consumers.

There are four elements to your brand voice: character, tone, language, and purpose. You can use adjectives to describe each of these elements:

You may switch some of these elements around depending on what type of content you’re creating and where your customer is in the buying process. But for the most part, your brand voice should stay consistent across every channel.

Content mission statement

It also helps to create a mission statement for your content. Anyone who creates content for your brand can then keep your mission in the forefront. Your statement should include your buyer persona, what you want your buyer to do, how you want your buyer to feel, and how you want them to act.

A content mission statement should look something like this:

Our content helps [buyer persona] by providing information so they can [do something], [feel something], and ultimately [take action].

For an excellence example of a content mission statement, let’s look at Fast Company’s “About Us” page:

This description includes:

Buyer persona “Written for and about the most progressive business leaders”
Do something: “Think expansively, lead with purpose, embrace change”
Feel something: “Fast Company inspires readers”
Take action: “Shape the future of business”

As a startup, the action you want your buyers to take should have something to do with your business.

Writing guidelines

Your writing guidelines should provide details about how you want your content to be presented. They should tie into your brand voice and provide steps for writing clearly.

Here’s an example of writing guidelines from the United Nations University Office of Communications:

(Source: UNU)

Sometimes, a simple bullet list is all you need. However, you can also specify how to write on different mediums and different channels. For example, you may have guidelines for how many words to use in a social media post or a blog post.

Style guide

Your style guide should outline how your company uses grammar and punctuation, such as whether your company uses the Oxford comma (also known as the “serial comma”) in a list. Do you want to use contractions? Do you want pronouns to be gender-neutral if the gender of the reader is unknown?

These are all important questions to ask if you want your writing to be consistent. It may be that only one or two people are creating content now, but that could change in the future.

While your style guide and your writing guidelines sound similar, they address different aspects of writing. Your writing guidelines are more generalized, while your style guide should be more technical.

3. A Content Calendar

A content calendar details who is responsible for creating content, when content must be finalized and published, what formats you intend to publish content in, and which channels your content should be published to.

Maintaining a calendar is essential if you want to publish content regularly, even if you’re just writing one blog post per week.

Your content calendar could be as simple as a spreadsheet or as complicated as a Gantt chart in a project management tool. But if everyone understands their job and is held accountable for their responsibilities, you’ll be able to publish content confidently and consistently.

It’s usually a good idea to create a content calendar for 1 to 6 months’ worth of content. We recommend adding time for brainstorming, research, and data acquisition in your content calendar, as these are the elements that will fuel your content.

4. Skills, Resources, and Data

Finally, you’ll need the skills, resources, and data to put your content plan into action.

We recommend running a survey of your target market to generate data. You can then use that data to create numerous content assets, such as blog posts and white papers. A single survey can help you generate months’ worth of content.

As a startup, you may be stressed for time already. If you need help producing content that converts readers, feel free to reach out to rand&rand to learn more about our services.

our latest insights

Startups need these four elements to build a content strategy