Hello, everyone. I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Um Hi, I'm Kira Woodard and this presentation is going to be about marketing, content strategy for start up companies.So in this talk, I will cover the importance of content marketing and why it's one of the most valuable marketing activities that a start up can invest in. Uh I will also talk about how to systematize the content creation process in order to reduce uh wasted effort. And I'll also touch on how to make sure that every piece of content your company creates is driving business revenue. So what is content marketing? Uh So content can be blog articles, email newsletters, social media, uh white papers or customer success or case studies, podcast episodes, videos.

Anything it's any time a business creates content in order to promote itself. So you can use content marketing to attract potential customers uh to educate them about the benefits of your product or service um or to make sales and convince potential customers to buy from you.

So here's why content marketing is particularly important for a start up. And I'm going to use an example of advertisements versus content marketing in order to illustrate the particular importance of this. So when you do advertisements, you can get results more or less immediately.

As soon as you start paying, you get your ads shown in front of potential customers. Whereas with content marketing, uh it takes a little bit of time to start building your following organically. Um with ads, uh you're paying some sort of outside service in order to display your ads. Uh So for example, you're paying Google, you're paying Facebook or linkedin. Um and you're buying into an auction. Uh So you're bidding on placements for those ads which is controlled by a machine algorithm. Whereas with content marketing, you're publishing for free on channels that you already own. Um With ads, you have to pay more in order to reach more people. So let's say you need to reach 1000 potential customers every month um in. But if you're currently reaching 500 customers, you have to increase the amount that you're paying in order to hit that milestone of 1000 customers. Whereas with content marketing, you can simply redistribute the content that you've already created, want wherever you want for free forever. Uh With ads you have to continue paying in order to get the same results. So let's say you've got your advertising system set up, you have your ads, you're using Google or Facebook advertising or whichever channel you're using. Um And maybe you're getting on average about uh 100 leads or 100 customers coming through that channel every month for your business.

So in order to keep getting 100 people coming through and buying, uh you have to keep paying to get that 100 people um every month you're paying around the same amount. Um Whereas with content marketing, once you create a content piece, once you then own it forever for your business. So let's say uh your business creates so many blog posts and one of them uh brings in a considerable amount of traffic, maybe it brings in uh 1000 potential uh buyers or visitors to your website. So once you've created that content piece, it will keep bringing in 1000 people every month regardless of what you pay for it. So you don't have to keep paying in order to get the same results. And every time you invest in content again, you create the next content piece you're building on to the amount of traffic that your website is getting or that your, your company is getting, you're getting more customers by paying the same amount over time. Um And with ads, you're limiting the amount of return that you can get on your investment because you can never spend more on ads than it's bringing in for you in terms of actual sales uh and revenue that you're generating.

Whereas with content marketing, uh you can have unlimited business returns, you have an opportunity to keep growing your following and your revenue indefinitely, there's no upper limit or ceiling as to how much you can spend on content marketing. So content is an asset which you pay for once and then reap the benefits forever. Essentially, imagine being able to bring in all of the customers that your start up needs in order to be profitable every single month without spending a penny. That's completely possible with using content marketing because all of the content that you have on your website or distributed through your content channels is bringing in those customers, regardless of whether you continue spending on it once you have it created and once it's already attracting people.

So now I'm going to show you a systematic method for creating content such that you get those results without wasting any effort, creating content that isn't going to be driving results for your business. So here are two diagrams. Uh This is the marketing funnel and the buyer's journey.

And I'm going to show how these relate to uh bringing in revenue from your content marketing efforts. So the marketing funnel means you're as a marketer, as someone who is trying to attract customers, you are creating some content that's attracting customers, you're pulling them in.

You're trying to find a particular subset of people who would be likely to buy from you and you're trying to speak to some need that they already have and attract them to your business. And once you've got them sort of in your ecosystem. What you wanna do is educate them. You wanna tell them why they should buy your type of product service. And then once they're familiar with you, they know you, they like you, they trust you and your business, then you convert them into actual customers, uh who are, who are buying your product or service. So you're telling them why they should actually buy from your company and not any of your different competitors or similar products. So this same process from the buyer side as an actual consumer or an actual customer, what it looks like for you is first you become aware of a particular company, let's say you're searching for something like maybe you're searching for uh running shoes and you're, you're a marathon runner.

So maybe you are online, you're googling about um how do I improve my performance in a marathon? And you become aware of a particular company through their content by seeing a content piece on improving your marathon running performance. So then maybe you sign up on an email list and you start to consider running shoes as a potential solution to your problem. And then as you get a few more emails, you start to realize that this company based on their reviews uh that that you're seeing or their product videos, you, you start to watch, um you determine that this company as opposed to all the other companies has something within their running shoes, that's the best for you and your particular situation.

So then you decide to buy from them. That's what the buyer's journey looks like through content. Um So when you're creating content, you can break up the types of content that you're creating into these different categories. So you have your top of the funnel content, your awareness content that makes potential customers aware. Um And typically those are gonna be something like blog posts, podcasts, webinars, uh things where you're giving out general information and then you have your consideration type content.

So those are your ebooks, your white papers. Uh They can be for business to business. That's white papers with email. It can be an email newsletter, it can be webinars, that's where you're getting them to consider the types of services and products that your company offers and, and then there's the decision making content. So that can be customer reviews like a product review on Amazon or, or some kind of uh product hunting site. It can be a case study, it can be a for business to business companies, it can be a sales demo. It's anything that's getting your customers to make a decision. And this is just another example of what this process looks like. So you might create blog posts on a general topic, link people to download an ebook or a white paper. Um, create a series of emails that explains the benefits of your product or service. And then those emails maybe lead to a webinar or sales demo that explains your service or include some kind of customer views, testimonials or uh uh links to a sales page. Um That explains why they should buy your particular product over the competition. So here's how to ensure that the content you're creating is driving revenue. So here's what I call the Magnetic content system and here's the overview of it.

Um First, you're gonna identify the type of customers that your business is selling to and you're going to turn those into personas. Um And I'm going to break that down in the next slide. Um And then you're going to brainstorm how to create content pieces for each stage of that buyer's journey for each target persona. And then once you have that laid out for each of your target personas, you're gonna set goals for each of those campaigns and then you publish your campaign and compare what you predicted the results would be to what the actual results are. And then once you're comparing those predicted to the actual results, you create new content that helps you get a better result next time. So let's see an example of that process. So first to identify target personas, uh let's say you are a business that sells to consumers. Um And so some things that you might want to look at are the demographics of a particular person. Let's if you keep going with like the fitness example, maybe you're targeting marathon runners, um, and maybe they live in urban areas so that could be their demographics, like ages, geographies, things like that.

Um, the common problems that they have, uh, the kind of mindsets they have or the behaviors, um, that, that, that are typical of that particular audience that is going to be your best sort of customer. Um, and on the business to business side, let's say, uh, you're selling to other bus, your, your business is selling to other businesses. Um Then you're looking at things like the company size. Uh what industry, the businesses you're selling to are, are in um within each of those businesses. What specific roles um job roles are you targeting? So are you talking if you're selling to people in the insurance industry, are you selling to small businesses or large businesses?

Are you selling to managers or are you selling to executives? Um And what are the common problems that people within that role are facing once you've done that and you've identified your target personas, you want to create a campaign for each of those target personas. So a campaign is a series of content pieces which includes each stage of the buyer funnel. So that's awareness consideration and decision making content. Um So if we have it broken down here for target persona, a, uh if you're targeting consumers, maybe you create some blogs on how this particular uh type of consumer can improve your fitness routines. And then maybe that leads them to your email list where you start talking about why that persona should use fitness smartwatches because that's the the ca product category that you're selling. Um And then maybe after you've sent them a couple of emails, you send them a product video or a few more emails that have uh product reviews or discount offers. Um And it, and the type of content you're sending is why our company's particular Smartwatch is the best for, you know, this particular target persona. So why our company smartwatch is the best for marathon runners.

Um And now on the business side, if you're selling business to business, it's a similar process. Uh So let's say you are targeting um marketing teams within uh small to medium size businesses. So you might write some blogs on how uh marketing teams can improve their, their marketing results. Um And then you might send them some emails or some white papers on why that particular um demographic should be using marketing automation software in general. And then you might send them some case studies or a link to a live demo or webinar on why our particular company's marketing automation software is the best for this particular persona. So that's pulling them into actually making a sale and purchasing. So the next phase that you wanna do is once you've got these campaigns set out, you wanna set targets for each of them Um So I've broken this down in this example, maybe you want a certain number of views on those blog posts, a certain number of emails you wanna collect on your email list and a certain number of sales you want to be making every month for each of these target personas.

And what you wanna do at that point is compare your goals to after you've published that blog, that email those, those videos, those those discount offers uh after you've published it and sent it out, what did it actually do? Did you get the number of views or emails or leads or sales or customers that you actually wanted? So the next stage is to adjust. So you're creating new content based on the previous results of your last campaign. So if your goal was to get 100,000 views on your blogs, but you got 50,000 views, well, now, you know, you need more of that top of the funnel awareness content like blog articles for this particular persona. But if you, in our other example, let's say you got more views on your content than you actually wanted or that you actually predicted you would get, but it didn't lead to the number of uh people signing up for sales demos that you actually wanted. So that means you need to do a better job of convincing people that your particular product or service is right for them. Um So you need more of that middle and bottom, bottom of the funnel content like those white papers and case studies for this particular target persona. And you do this across each of your personas you played out. So with this system, you'll now know exactly which piece of the marketing funnel to focus on in order to attract more customers. And you'll never waste time creating content that isn't serving a purpose for your business.

And then as you repeat this process over time targeting um comparing the results and then adjusting based on the previous results for each of your broken down campaigns, then you'll have a system that's bringing more and more customers to you as your business is growing. And so here's a, a final illustration of what the process can start to look like over the long term. Um So maybe within the first year, you're building traction very slowly, you're getting a few followers, you're getting a few uh initial piece uh bits of traffic to your website, maybe a few initial people on your email list or watching your videos. Um And then you start to acquire those first initial customers from your content as you learn what your, your target audience really wants. And then maybe in the second year, you start building up that loyal following a little bit more. Um and you get opportunities to market to them again because now they're in your ecosystem, right? They're on your email list. Uh You have you have their, their eyes and ears looking at your content. So you're, you're not just building your company's reputation by having your, your, your actual products and services spread by word of mouth. Now you're actually having your content spread by word of mouth.

So if you're targeting marathon runners, then your, your loyal customers are not just saying, hey, check out this company's um great smartwatches. They're also saying, hey, check out this company's really great content on how to build an exercise routine. So you're, you're doing twice as much to win over the hearts of your particular uh customers and that's building that brand loyalty for you and creating engagement. Um And then your older content continues as time goes on to generate traffic and customers for your business while you're still creating new content and increasing your following. And then over time you continue adding to that stockpile of quality content and you have the potential to exponentially grow your web traffic and the number of customers you require. And so you'll be able to build up a loyal following of customers who know your brand and are lining up to buy from you as opposed to you having to go out and find them. All right. Thank you.