10X your audience with your content strategy

Last week we ran a masterclass with SeedLegals on scaling your marketing and we spoke about the challenges of knowing where to invest your time and money when you're starting out.?

It’s really tempting to dive straight in with paid ads (like PPC and paid social) for quick results, but the reality is that as soon as you turn the ads off, your performance will immediately drop. Growth will stall and you’ll be back to where you started.?

Without a strategy, you risk not knowing what to say and who to target.??

Another approach is to identify and focus on your sustainable growth channels early on - those that will have a compounding effect over time.?

One channel that we love is content marketing, because a great piece of content has the potential to grow 10x what you invest into it. It can be re-used and re-purposed many times over at different points in the customer journey. It’s just one part of the puzzle, but one worth investing in.?

Here are three ways to get started with content marketing for sustainable growth:

1. The Hero, Hub, Help and Hook model

Your content marketing strategy should strike a balance between paid media (ads and sponsored content), owned media (your website, email and social) and earned media (PR and reviews).

Owned media gives you full control of your content as an extension of your brand, paid media helps to broaden your reach and earned media really helps to build trust.?

A great way to put this into practice is with the Hero, Hub, Help and Hook model:

Hero content puts your purpose front and centre. It’s often the first touchpoint for your brand, and where you want to create an emotional connection, so you’ll want to make an impact with a brand video or whitepaper.?

Hub content is your regular beat of activity to build and maintain a great relationship with your customers. A regular email newsletter is a very popular format.

Help content brings people closer to your brand. Try asking your existing customers what their pain points are and how you can help. This can be turned into how-to videos, blogs and webinars.?

A Hook is all about lead generation, for example getting email addresses (with consent, of course) in exchange for something useful such as an ebook or downloadable guide.?

2. Worried you’ll run out of ideas?

If you’re not sure where to start or you need fresh ideas, here’s some inspiration:

• answerthepublic.com gives you three searches per day and it can spark lots of ideas for topics to talk about and build into your plan around?
• Write down the top 50 questions your target audience or customers have for you (or you think they might have) and answer them all through your content
• Ways to talk about your business by Rebecca Mackay Miller on LinkedIn is a really useful list of questions to ask yourself and create content around when thinking about some of your Hero and Hub content?

3. Don’t be afraid to repurpose content?

You don’t need to create content from scratch each time. One of the main takeaways of our content production cycle is that your content should do the heavy lifting. For example with our Power Up newsletter, this is shared by email, LinkedIn and Twitter, with snippets reshared across social media on both my account and our Scale Up account.?

We love how copy.ai have approached content marketing with their extensive blog , (with lots of posts about content marketing), videos and weekly demos. Hubspot is another great example of a brand using content marketing for growth, with a series of podcasts, videos, guides and e-books. Their hugely popular blog covers the full range of marketing topics and through their newsletter and academy, they reach their audience at all stages of the customer journey.?

Both copy.ai and Hubspot write about topics which stretch far beyond copy and CRM, but they know their audience, and their audience is mostly marketers who will love their Help and Hub content.?

Don’t be disheartened if you can’t match this level of activity (few can!) as these examples have a huge budget and content creation team. But do take inspiration and focus on nailing one or two channels where you can hit the right audience with your hard-working content.?