How to Successfully Use Content Marketing as a Blockchain Startup with Tight Resources?

The world of content marketing is booming and quickly evolving. Social media platforms are flooded with all sorts of content — from factual information, to instructional guides, ads and entertainment. This forces companies to constantly be on the lookout for the next hot topic, which might surface at any time.

Companies with limited resources like startups need to deliver relevant and engaging content to their target audience. In this regard, blockchain startups face an additional challenge: the blockchain sector is still in its infancy and most people don’t understand the basic concepts behind this technology. Thus, content needs to be both engaging and educational to successfully communicate a start-up’s business model.

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The Facts About Content Marketing

According to a study by Hubspot, companies that blog generate 55% more website visits on average, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. Blogs can serve as the gateway to a startup’s landing page and thereby increase the conversion rate. What’s more, a blog can serve as the foundation for other social media channels — each element of an article can be broken down into short posts tailored to each channel. Thus, content marketing not only drives traffic to a website, it also increases brand awareness, helps to build a community, provides information about services and products, and helps you know what people are saying about your brand.

Furthermore, if you write really high-quality long-form posts, you can demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership in the field. Especially in the blockchain sector, startups need to clearly explain the real-world use cases of their technology, which is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of content creation.

While the benefits sound great, if you are going to invest time and resources in content marketing, do it properly or not at all. This means that you need to recognise early on that strategy and analytics are just as important as research and writing.

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Groundwork is Worth its Weight in Gold

Good content marketing starts with a sound strategy. This should identify the target audience, plan which channels you will use to reach them, and define the overall communication goals. Here, it is particularly important to spend time thoroughly researching target audience “personas”. These are people who could potentially become visitors, leads, and ultimately, customers of your business.

Social media is constantly evolving and audience behavior changes with it. In order to maximise engagement and impression rates, rigorous testing and experimentation is essential. This is a key part of Growth Hacking — a way for startups to expand their visibility and encourage more people to use their product or service. One way to drive the audience to long-form blogs is search engine optimization (SEO). This can be an effective method to get your content in front of your target audience and there are a number of basic, free tools that can help you improve your search engine rankings.

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Best Practices for Long-Form Blogs

The style of a long-form article can greatly affect its performance. According to Word Stream, an ideal blog post takes seven minutes to read and is around 1,600 words long.

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Although this provides a general rule of thumb, the length will also be determined by the subject matter. For example, articles about finance average 1225 words, whereas web news articles average 329 words. The length and style of the piece will also be influenced by the overall social media strategy.

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Data is Essential — Before and After the Process

In order to accurately track the effectiveness of content marketing, a startup needs to measure the right metrics. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the top three metrics marketers use to measure the impact of content are website traffic, audience engagement and quantity of leads.

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Each startup must create its own measurement plan and decide which metrics are most relevant according to its overall strategy.

At THE RELEVANCE HOUSE, we have years of experience in building relevant brands and strategies. Our team includes senior professionals with decades of experience, covering every relevant content marketing discipline — from strategy, to PR, to growth hacking and social media. Find out more about us.

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