Six Steps to Acing Your Startup’s Content Strategy

Kris Hughes is a content material technique and storytelling wizard. He:

✍️ Wrote (and bought) blogs earlier than it was cool

👻 Spent years ghostwriting each day social content material for shoppers, from businesses to CEOs

🖥️ Runs his personal digital strategy consulting firm (on monitor to hit 30% YoY income progress)

Listed here are Kris’ six suggestions for nailing your content material technique — to generate strong, genuine leads.

1. If You Don’t Inform Your Model’s Story, Somebody Else Will

As a founder with one million priorities, content material like blogs and social media posts can appear to be low-priority objects.

However in the event you don’t inform your model’s story, another person will make assumptions and inform it for you. 

Don’t sit in your palms in terms of content material. Your story and voice must:

• Be genuine
• Really feel pure to you
• Make sense to your target market

Sizzling tip: Check out your rivals — in the event that they’re not doing a robust sufficient job of telling their story, they’re leaving content material gaps on the desk so that you can capitalize on.

2. Do a Thorough Mind Dump

Spend ~30 days on a “mind dump” train, utilizing voice notes and free-form writing. Document each thought you might have in your model, then move it on to somebody who’s near, however not part of, your enterprise.

Ask them what they see from the surface wanting in. What phrases are used time and again? What matters preserve returning? This deep-dive step is significant for 2 causes.

One: “Persons are their very own worst entrepreneurs,” Kris says. “There’s most likely a ton about your individual model story you’re not telling. The deep dive and out of doors perspective brings this to the floor.”

Second, this train will spin off aligned speaking factors as a way to hit the bottom operating with a transparent technique and financial institution of nice content material — in your individual phrases.

3. Extrapolate 4 Key Pillars for Your Content material

Sift via your mind dump and set up every thought, spicy quote, or matter, into one in every of 4 pillars:

Supply: Kris Hughes / Zanate Ventures

Every pillar provides rise to particular sorts of content material, and alternating between them will make sure the matters you discuss stay diverse and contemporary, but additionally on model.

For instance, one week you might speak concerning the outcomes you’ve pushed for a shopper (Pillar II), and the following share a few of your founder story (Pillar IV).

And in the event you ever get author’s block, you may return to your pillars as inspiration and a reminder of what you wish to convey to your viewers.

4. Concentrate on Group-Constructing earlier than You Put Out Content material

Create a group from the get-go by interacting along with your perfect shoppers, rivals, and friends via value-driven feedback and messages.

This step will get you snug with the way you write, the way you painting your self, and the way folks obtain you.

Holding monitor of feedback you make (e.g., in Notion) can even guarantee you might have a content material concepts financial institution; most useful feedback can often be bulked up right into a submit.

5. Now You Can Get Your Content material Out There

Use your pillars, saved feedback, and mind dump to generate content material that’s genuine to your model. Bear in mind to:

📈 Have a transparent KPI: Is your content material to construct generalized consciousness, or drive leads?

📝 Develop a voice information, a useful resource information, and a content material calendar.

Kris is an advocate of scheduling content material to be sure you get it on the market. Whereas the cadence and strategy of posting will depend upon the platform, consistency is all the time key.

6. Bear in mind: Content material Is A Lengthy Sport.

It takes time to construct up a status to the purpose the place your content material drives leads. Preserve at it. 

“Many founders are available in weapons blazing with excessive vitality, after which fizzle out after just a few months,” says Kris. You’ll miss the magic in the event you do. Keep motivated by:

• Setting new benchmarks
• Specializing in optimistic suggestions
• Reusing your top-performing posts each few months

As a last tip, Kris suggests speaking to your clients when issues are going properly.

Supply: Tenor

“We have a tendency to achieve out solely when we have to put out fires,” he instructed us. “However getting shopper suggestions through the good instances means you’ll discover room for incremental enchancment — when you might have the capability to behave on it.” 

Constructive buyer transformation journeys are highly effective additions to your model story.