Kauffman Founders School, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Anita Newton, Content and Objectives
All right. You have a sound marketing strategy.
You've completed your positioning statement. Only three things stand in your way from starting
to execute your marketing plan. And that is to hit that upper right corner and really
set the foundation that will be so critical for your success as you start to execute.
And what we want to do here is define your marketing objectives, outline a good content
marketing plan and make sure you set your budget.
So let's talk about setting your objectives. It's really important to define success. And
it's going to be different for every startup. Write it down and share it with your team.
And pick one goal that you think is relevant for everyone. And that could be subscribers,
sign‑ups, revenue or profitability. It's really important to make sure that everyone's
on the same page. Content marketing is one of the most effective
things you can do to help your business grow at a very, very low cost. It's the reason
why companies such as Mint and HubSpot have been so successful. Companies who actually
document a well‑defined content marketing plan are four times more likely to generate
leads than others. So what is content marketing? Why do you need it? And how do you do it?
Content marketing is nothing more than identifying compelling pieces of information that are
interesting and helpful to your audience. It can be in the form of many, many things,
whether it's social posts, blogs, newsletters, videos, photos, the list goes on and on. The
goal of content marketing is to build credibility for your brand to be relevant for your target.
But most importantly it will encourage customers to keep coming back to your website. And ultimately
will help you grow your sales. A marketing automation software company did research on
the topic and they found that companies who do consistent, effective content marketing
reduce their cost per lead by over 80 percent. So let's talk about how you do it. I suggest
you create a list of 30 to 50 potential topics that are relevant and interesting for your
customer. And it can be related to your product or your industry or it can be things that
you think would be useful for that customer that has nothing to do with your product.
As you think about content, I always look at a litmus test to see is it really actually
being helpful. And I go back to the vowels, A E I O U.
The A stands for be actionable. HubSpot does a great job of providing very actionable ideas
that you can put into practice the next day. The E stands for educational. If you can make
your customers smarter that is so helpful. A great example of this is LinkedIn. They've
done a phenomenal job of curating content throughout the web that they share with their
users. And that section of their website is one of the most highly trafficked aspects
of anything else that they do. The I stands for inspirational. If you can
make your customer feel better about the world, that is always a great thing. One company
that does this better than anyone is Dove and their real beauty campaign.
The next big thing is O. Be outrageous. Be funny. If you can entertain your audience
that's a win. If you've ever looked at a Dollar Shave Club video, you know exactly what I
mean. And in fact, that video is what's driven their sales more than anything else that they've
done in terms of marketing. And the final vowel is useful. This is probably
the most important because you want to make sure that you provide feedback and content
that's actually helpful to the customer. A good example of this is McDonald's Canada.
They actually invited their customers to submit questions about their product, their company,
or anything else they wanted. Since the site launched they've had over 16,000 questions.
And they've done a great job of answering over 10,000; 400 per day.
Marketing is no longer one‑way, it's a dialogue. I always use a ratio of four‑to‑one. Four
elements that are truly helpful across those vowels. Actionable, educational, inspirational,
outrageous or funny and useful to one part trying to sell. It's like having a relationship.
So let's say you and I are friends and every time we meet the only thing I do is talk about
myself, try to sell you things, and oh by the way, I never listen to anything you have
to say. Chances are you are going to avoid me like the plague. And so that's very much
like social media. Don't be that guy. Be the kind of person that actually listens, adds
value, is useful. If you do that you will really win in the content marketing field.
It's really important to set aside dollars for your marketing activities. And my recommendation
is to start small. And that's going to be different for different people. If you're
just starting out you may only want to earmark a couple hundred dollars. If you're a venture‑backed
big firm, it may be more. But the reality is it should be a relatively small amount
of money. Just enough for you to test and learn and experiment with the one or two tactics
that you decide to use when you're executing your plan. And invariably as you start to
test and tweak there will be one or two things that start to take off. And that's when you
want to double down and really put your money against that key channel to drive growth in
your business. So the punch line here is, make sure you earmark
your dollars, start small. And then once you see success, double down so you can drive
growth and meet your marketing objectives.