social-media-management

The Definitive Guide to Content Marketing for Tech Startups

The Definitive Guide to Content Marketing for Tech Startups

Are you a tech startup looking to accelerate your company's growth with content marketing? In today's digital age, content marketing has become a must-have strategy for startups to build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive conversions. In this definitive guide, we will walk you through the key steps and strategies to create a powerful content marketing plan for your tech startup.Why Should Tech Startups Invest in Content Marketing?Content marketing is crucial for tech startups as it allows you to establish thought leadership in your industry, build trust with your target audience, and differentiate yourself from competitors. By consistently creating and promoting valuable content, you can attract and engage potential customers, drive organic traffic to your website, and ultimately convert leads into loyal customers.9 Steps to Building a Powerful Tech Startup Content Marketing StrategyCreate a Foundation for Your Startup's Content MarketingAlign Your Content with Your Business ModelDevelop a Deep Understanding of Your Target AudiencePrioritize Topic and Keyword ResearchHelp Your Audience Achieve Its GoalsDiversify Your Content FormatsDecide on Your Distribution ChannelsRepurpose Your Content GoodsSelect the Right Content Marketing ToolsDo Pre-Launch or Early-Stage Startups Need Content Marketing?Even if you are a pre-launch or early-stage tech startup, content marketing can play a significant role in establishing your brand presence, building anticipation for your product or service, and attracting early adopters. By creating valuable content that addresses your target audience's pain points and provides solutions, you can build a strong foundation for your startup's growth.Getting the Buy-in from StakeholdersBefore diving into content marketing, it's essential to get buy-in from your stakeholders, including co-founders, investors, and key team members. Present the potential benefits of content marketing, such as increased brand visibility, lead generation, and customer acquisition, and demonstrate how it aligns with your overall business goals and objectives.Prepare Essential Marketing AssetsBefore launching your content marketing efforts, make sure you have essential marketing assets in place. These include a well-designed website, a blog, social media profiles, and lead capture forms. These assets will serve as the foundation for your content distribution and engagement with your target audience.Setting Your Content Marketing ObjectivesDefine clear and measurable objectives for your content marketing strategy. These objectives can include increasing website traffic, generating leads, improving search engine rankings, building brand authority, or nurturing customer relationships. By setting specific goals, you can track your progress and optimize your content marketing efforts accordingly.Identify Your Audience TypeUnderstanding your target audience is crucial for creating content that resonates with them. Identify your audience's demographics, psychographics, challenges, and pain points. Conduct market research, surveys, and interviews to gain deep insights into their needs and preferences.Research Your AudienceOnce you have identified your target audience, conduct thorough research to understand their online behavior, content consumption habits, preferred channels, and influencers they follow. This information will help you tailor your content to their preferences and effectively reach and engage them.Go Where Your Audience IsTo maximize the impact of your content marketing efforts, go where your audience is. Identify the social media platforms, online communities, industry forums, and publications where your target audience is most active. By focusing your content distribution on these channels, you can reach a larger audience and drive more targeted traffic to your website.Start with Your TopicsWhen creating content for your tech startup, start with topics that are relevant to your industry, products, or services. Brainstorm a list of potential topics that address your target audience's pain points, provide educational value, or offer actionable insights. These topics will form the foundation of your content strategy.Proceed to Keyword ResearchOnce you have identified your topics, conduct keyword research to identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords in your industry. Use keyword research tools to uncover keywords with high search volumes and low competition. These keywords will guide your content creation and optimization efforts to improve your search engine rankings.Semantically-Related KeywordsIn addition to target keywords, incorporate semantically-related keywords throughout your content. Semantically-related keywords are terms and phrases that are contextually relevant to your target keywords. They help search engines understand the context and relevance of your content, improving its visibility in search results.Finding Engaging Content Ideas for Your AudienceComing up with engaging content ideas can be challenging, but it's essential to keep your audience interested and coming back for more. Here are some content formats you can explore for your tech startup:Blog ArticlesSales EnablementCase StudiesLead MagnetsEmail MarketingPodcastsVideos7 Best Ways to Use Content Marketing for Tech StartupsNow that you have a solid understanding of the key steps to build a powerful content marketing strategy for your tech startup, let's explore some of the most successful ways to leverage content marketing:Establish Your GoalsDefine Your PersonaResearch Your CompetitorsComplete Topic and Keyword ResearchReview Your Existing ContentDevise Your StrategyPlan Your Execution Steps1. Search for New Industry Hot TopicsStay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in your industry by actively searching for new hot topics. By being one step ahead, you can create timely and relevant content that positions your tech startup as a thought leader.2. Submit Guest Posts to Reputable & Trustworthy SitesExpand your reach and build backlinks to your website by submitting guest posts to reputable and trustworthy sites in your industry. Guest posting allows you to tap into established audiences and enhance your brand's credibility and authority.3. Create Content that has Visual AppealVisual content, such as infographics, videos, and images, is highly engaging and shareable. Invest in creating visually appealing content that communicates your message effectively and captures your audience's attention.4. Involve Industry Influencers in Your Content CreationCollaborate with industry influencers and thought leaders to co-create content. Their expertise and credibility can add value to your content and attract a wider audience. Consider conducting interviews, featuring guest blog posts, or hosting webinars with influencers in your industry.5. Promote All Your Content on Social MediaSocial media platforms provide excellent opportunities to amplify your content's reach and engagement. Share your blog articles, videos, case studies, and other content assets on social media to generate interest and encourage social sharing.6. Write About Niche Topics and Target Long-Tail KeywordsExplore niche topics within your industry and target long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and have lower competition, allowing you to rank higher in search results and attract highly targeted traffic to your website.7. Create the Perfect Posting ScheduleConsistency is key in content marketing. Create a posting schedule that aligns with your target audience's preferences and your available resources. Whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly, stick to your schedule and deliver valuable content consistently.By following these best practices, you can optimize your content marketing efforts and achieve significant results for your tech startup.ConclusionContent marketing is a powerful strategy for tech startups to build brand awareness, attract leads, and drive conversions. By creating valuable and engaging content, understanding your target audience, and leveraging the right distribution channels, you can establish thought leadership in your industry and drive sustainable growth for your tech startup. Remember to measure and analyze your content marketing performance regularly to refine your strategy and achieve continuous improvement.

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Social Media Task List For Fast Growing Businesses!

Social Media Task List For Fast Growing Businesses!

Growing up, businesses can’t afford to be dormant on social media. Imagine you do everything right on SEO, people have started to find you on Google search results, they visit your website, clicks on Twitter plugin and finds out that you only got 150 followers. That is putting your business in “Very-small-to-work-with” category. If you’re still figuring out how to go about your social media marketing, let me help you with this blog. Thank me later. Sidenote: Before we get started with listing out tasks, please note that the work items are for those business who wants to grow on social media, quickly and organically. So to say, growing aggressively. The task list has been created as per industry standard and after we have spoken to hundreds on social media experts. Some tasks can be tiring and can take a lot of time. Marketers generally use tools like FirstHive to schedule posts and manage channels. Hope this blogpost helps your social media profiles and subsequently, your business.

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Instagram Marketing Tips for Better Engagement

Instagram Marketing Tips for Better Engagement

Instagram has grown from being a photo-sharing platform to a mainstream social media channel in just over six years of its existence. With people ranging from “Business dealers” to “Selfie crazzys”, Instagram is adding large number of users everyday. This mobile-only app currently holds about 500 million active users worldwide, and half of Instagram’s user-base is between 18 to 29 years of age. Do you get the idea where I’m going with these facts? Yes, Instagram offers a huge marketing opportunity. And if you think your business is missing out, we are here to help. Hashtags Whether it’s your first post or 1000th, whether you are a small business or multinational, you just can’t afford to not use hashtags with Instagram posts. Every single hashtag increases your impressions depending upon the popularity which Instagram displays while writing hashtag. The platform allows up to 30 hashtags per post, so use wisely and try to be relevant to your business. Engage One of the best way to pull targeted people to view your profile is to engage with them. Like their posts, comment on them, strike a conversation. Keep a list of influencers and follow them. Track their posts. Check out an example dashboard below. It makes it easy to follow people’s posts and interact with them. Location Tags If you’re a local business and seek customer walk-ins, use your location tags to let people know you’re around. Location tags are also relevant and useful when you post images of company headquarters or corporate events. Locations are searchable and you might find users from your neighborhood looking for your product/service. Visual Treat Instagram is simple and intuitive. It offers a hassle-free photo sharing platform. Share your visually rich content here like videos, infographics, ad banner etc that entertain, educate or inspire. Use relevant hashtags in the description to reach out to right set of audience, but sadly you can’t use a link in the description since Instagram love their users and doesn’t want them to leave the platform. If you really want to put a link, do that in your profile bio. Be active. On all channels. People on social media tends to forget your messages, but then it’s free and you may use it n number of times. So try and be active, spot high traffic timezones, try and be relevant to the hot topics, or something that is of interest to the group. Keep engaging with influencers. All this not just for Instagram, but for other social channels as well. The best way to keep this going is to sign-up for a marketing platform like FirstHive and manage multiple social profiles from one dashboard. With FirstHive, you may even send and track email and SMS marketing for your cross-channel marketing strategy. Instagram is a valuable tool when used to its capability. With 400 million active users, it is very difficult to leave Instagram out of your marketing strategies. Start exploring the platform with your brand page, gain followers by using relevant hashtags, keep educating your followers with interesting posts. Keep an acumen of story-telling (not selling) and you’ll see a long lasting relationships with your followers. *Stats by Statista.com

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20 Actionable Tips to Leverage Social Media for Your Business

20 Actionable Tips to Leverage Social Media for Your Business

You may have come across similar infographics in the past around what happens in an Internet minute. Let us consider the one below by Smart Insights.   As is clearly seen here, the volume of content generated across social channels is increasing at an astounding rate. Bottom line being, more customers of yours are adopting social every day. Is your brand equipped to keep pace?   At FirstHive, we pride ourselves on being among the leading B2C cross channel marketing platforms, so obviously social media is a core functionality used by our users. Here are some tips from our experts on managing your social presence effectively. Create a plan specific to the channel You may be managing a community on your Facebook brand page. While those users may want to hear from you, the kind of content you would post there would be very different than the content created for a 140 character restricted Twitter platform. Instagram and Slideshare would have their own requirements. So would Snapchat, or Foursquare, well you get the idea. Ensure that you have a clear, actionable content plan created for each social channel that your brand is present on. ‘Winging it’ is not necessarily the ideal thing here. Create a social publishing calendar Ensure you have a documented publishing plan for your content, across each channel. Understand your follower profile across each channel. What kind of messaging do they respond to? What time of day works best for them? When are they active? Create a calendar including your own and curated content. (will also help you plan the content creation and curation better) Different forms of content for same post Create multiple templates for the same post, while you schedule it for posting at various time of the day. Let us take an example of a tweet series following a blog post. With blog release: NEW BLOG ALERT: Check out our new blog on customer engagement at 3 Hours post release: Did you know – 41% of customers respond to tweets post 10pm. Read more at 12 hours post release: If you are a #marketer, you need to read this now #engagement Schedule tweets, posts Your marketing does not need to be sleeping while your marketing team would need to. Use a social media management functionalities of platforms like FirstHive which will allow you to schedule your tweets or post on a  particular channel. You can very well sit in your US office and tailor campaigns for the European market. Different geographies are online on your account at different times. Ensure they do not feel alone. E.g. for a blog post, create a twitter post to go out along with the blog post release. Create a different form follow up in 3 hours. Create a new template for a 12 hour tweet. Get your team to create a tweet post a day and retweet the same from your brand handle. Discipline – stick to the plan This cannot be overstated. Once you have created the plan, the onus is on you to stick to the plan. The only way you can expect to see results from social is if you put in the requisite effort and time to cultivate your following and build your social reputation. Sync your social channels While your channels may not necessarily have the same content, ensure you use a aggregation platform like FirstHive to give you a single window visibility into your social. Having all your social streams in a single page will ensure you never miss a comment or a tweet that needs your attention. Use a Social Media management platform Your social initiatives are never that small that you could not use a social media management platform to help you manage it better. Having a dedicated platform ensures you have the requisite tools to make the most of your social engagement, and never miss an interaction that could boost your social profile. Use the power of lists on Twitter Create Twitter lists and tag the relevant folks into meaningful lists in your account. As a brand, you can now simply select a particular list to view the curated content from those set of members. You are thus creating a mini community for folks with some common shared interest or attribute. If the lists are relevant, you would have folks who wish to subscribe to a particular list, and more often than not, follow your brand as well. Another unspoken advantage of lists is that Twitter provides a notification to the individual you are adding to the list. If you are lucky, and play your cards right, you might get a follow back from a key influencer. Or a chance for engaging with the individual. Be sure you are ready for it. Create search streams and localize by region Another powerful functionality available in some platforms like FirstHive is the ability to create search streams. Search twitter for a hashtag or keyword that is relevant to your brand. Localize it by adding the geographic filter, and you have a list of all users who are tweeting on a particular topic in your region. Start replying to or engaging with the content thus retrieved. Use relevant hashtags Hashtags are an effective discovery mechanism in most of the social channels. Ensure that the hostages you use are relevant to the topic at hand, as well as meaningful. If relevant, latch on to trending hashtags and increased your probability of discovery. Do not, I repeat, do not go overboard with hashtags in your posts. Below is a good example of what not to do. Use visual content As a child, you would have heard the adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words”. That is even more true with social, With images and videos, you can create stunning, compelling content that draws reactions from your followers. According to a recent research, content with relevant images get 94% more views than content without. 71% of digital marketers use visual assets in their social media. Can you afford to lag behind? Provide a seamless visual experience If you are directing your followers from your social channel to your website or a destination site, you need to ensure that the messaging and design are consistent across both mediums. Imagine how you would feel to click on a particular link with messaging A and land on a page with messaging B, and a different design to boot. Your customers will not appreciate such a disjointed experience. Focus on quality over quantity While it is pertinent you create and share content on your social channels, it is even more pertinent that the content is relevant to your audience. The last think you want to do here is create content for the sake of creating content. If you manage to consistently create quality content, your followers would know what to expect from your brand and your tribe would only grow. Below is another good example of what not to do here, for the sake of drawing followers. Sync blog strategy with social publishing strategy When you are creating content on your blog or website, or any other similar channel, it is important to use the same to feed your social streams. While social would obviously be a good source of traffic for your content, doing so would also ensure that you are directing the right kind of traffic to your content, viz. people who trust you on a particular channel. You also need to ensure that you have kept placeholders in your content distribution strategy to disseminate such content. Experiment with paid reach Put in $5-$10 per day to amplify the reach of your campaign. Look for posts that are performing well, and try promoting those to reach a larger audience. The intention here is to  try and attract more followers for your accounts, so that your messaging has a wider reach. Create small experiments with various targeting parameters on your favourite channel, and optimise. Be human! Sample this tweet below: This is not normal conversational prose. When you were to ask your friend or colleague what their favorite biscuit was, you would definitely not choose to frame your query like above, would you? So why is it ok to ask a few hundred or thousand of followers who have chosen to give you some mindspace to have your say. Analyse your competition A good way to improve your social performance is to keep a close watch on what your competition is doing on those channels. Are they tracking higher engagement scores than your brand? What is the kind of content of theirs that elicits a greater response?  How often do they post? What are the major keywords they are targeting? All these will help you design better copy for your messaging and make your content more relevant and engaging. Track and measure performance What cannot be tracked cannot be improved. As you spend this effort on social, be sure to track the performance of your posts by content type, media used, channel, time of day, and engagement achieved. It is a good idea to draw a baseline over a couple of weeks before starting to set small incremental targets for your brand engagement, and devising appropriate interventions to achieve those. Platforms like FirstHive provide an integrated Social Media Insights section which enable granular tracking into which of your posts are performing well, and where are your maximum engagement coming from. Identify and Target Influencers Influencers can provide your brand a major engagement push. Identity the key influencers for your brand and look to build a rapport with them on the respective social channels. Have a conversation, respond to their questions, provide exclusive access to new releases if need be, do what it takes so that you are in their radar and are able to entice a mention or even better, a shout out. Create lists of your key influencers and try to tailor some content specific to their interests to elicit a response. Ensure you proof read what goes out Check out the below image posted by a major brand. Not the ideal message you would want to necessarily send out.   Apply these social media marketing tips to your social media strategy using FirstHive. Your first month is on us. 🙂  

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