📚 How to Create a Killer Startup Content Strategy...

3 transformative content strategy tips by Elvorne Palmer guide startups to captivate audiences: Emulate a media mogul mindset, craft unique offerings, and harness new channels for standout digital presence.

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You’ve got a product (or on its way!) and it’s time to start creating some buzz around it, building an audience and activating potential users. Great!

But now comes the thing: What content exactly are you supposed to do?

I mean, it’s a busy space; web, socials, YouTube, podcasts – there’s so much going on already. How do you stand out?

Nothing drains your marketing budget (and your audience’s excitement) faster than dull, boring copy-pastes of the same old thing everyone else is doing. So it’s time to think way outside the box…

Unlocking the “Unique” in a Crowded Space

1. Forget your brand & pretend you’re Rupert Murdoch

The biggest mistake brands make around content is they start with questions like: What do we (the brand) want to tell people? Content is just like a product – it’s all about the user and their journeys, not yours.

Rather: pretend you’re an editor who was just hired by a big media company to create a new publication/podcast/TV show etc. targeting your audience. What commercial content product would you build to attract and engage them? Make that your content strategy.

2. Give them something they can’t find anywhere else

Go find out 1) what your audience really wants to know/see and 2) what information is not available out there on the net or socials yet. And build that into a strategy.

Example: I once had to do a strategy for a boat dealership. All the competitors were posting about engines and boats. We went a step further and said: What do people use boats for? Fishing, of course. So we became the first boat brand to build content around fishing and fishing competitions instead, and were rewarded with tens of thousands of active, engaged users and zero competition for our content (because they couldn’t get it anywhere else).

3. Or just ship it on a brand-new channel

Ok, so some topics are done to death. In most places, but usually not on all channels. So you can use the existing channels as your resource and ship the content on a new channel (that you know your users would really prefer.)

Example: Yeah I lied about being the first to talk about fishing competitions for that boat brand. You could get lots of fishing news at that time; the problem was it was only in printed magazines. So all we really did was take that info and publish it online and on the socials – where people actually wanted it – and boom! Content success.

You can do it too. Just look at what’s available on blogs but not on YouTube yet. Or deep-dives on podcasts that are not on carousels or video yet and give it to your people.

BONUS: Thinking of your content as a separate “product” is very useful, because it forces you to ask: How’s this gonna make money (or pay for itself)? It reminds you to include your organic traffic in your marketing channel analysis and physically check: How many new users is it bringing in, at what cost (CAC), and what’s the conversion rate?

Remember: The ultimate goal of content is for organic to eventually replace or overshadow your paid traffic, so you can lower your CAC and make a profit.

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