I’m sure you’ve heard of content marketing before, and how it has revolutionized the way businesses get top-of-mind awareness and leads for their service and product. And if you already know its value, then the question here is whether your startup can benefit from this marketing strategy.
You’re probably young, small-scale and don’t have the luxury of resources. You need to get on top of things quickly.
While we cannot give you a magic formula for content marketing to work for your startup, we can shed some light on 5 startups that show exactly how content marketing can help your startup grow.
See also: How content marketing drives sales in 2022: Expectation vs Reality
1. Glossier
So how did Glossier do it? How did they go from just a blog to a cosmetics brand with over 800,000 followers?
It all started with a pre-existing blog: “Into the Gloss,” by Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier. The blog focused on cosmetics, so she leveraged the power of her loyal readership to push the Glossier brand to her audience even before it started officially.
Additionally, she spoke with her target market in real time via Instagram, finding out what they desired from the Glossier brand and acting on their answers.
Emily also employed the use of creative teasers to keep people on their toes till the launch date and further grow and establish Glossier and its incoming presence.
A major learning here is that the simplest actions and interactions with your audience could easily take you to where you want to be as a brand.
2. Oh Joy
Guess what? Oh Joy started as a blog too. Are you seeing a pattern here?
Joy, the founder of Oh Joy, started a blog when she was in search of a job as a graphic designer. She started writing about what she loved doing—graphics design—and yes, it was just that.
Eventually, the blog gained traction; more and more people were searching for, reading, sharing, commenting on, and talking about her humble little blog. Over time, she started getting jobs, and viola! That’s how Oh Joy was born.
Oh Joy later expanded to Pinterest where their visual content started to take the platform by storm. Today, they can boast of over 15 million loyal followers.
So what exactly did Oh Joy do? Joy leveraged the loyal readership of her blog and the power of selling herself through value-adding content. It attracted the people she wanted to find her brand while keeping her readership wrapped around her fingers.
3. Copy.ai
Today, Copy.ai is one of the best and foremost AI tools that can create your marketing copy for you. How did they get there?
Before Copy.ai became what it is now, here’s what its founders did in terms of a content marketing strategy: it’s something called #buildinpublic. It’s common in the SaaS space. They shared what I would call intimate details about the growth journey of the company.
What do I mean?
No, it wasn’t just some random posts on social media where they gave vague information concerning the formative journey the brand was on. It was a detailed and intentional rundown of the gruesome details of trying to grow a startup to live up to its name—startups and growth are supposed to be synonymous with each other.
So Copy.ai shared things like the work they were doing on new features for the software, made product launch announcements, and even conducted polls to engage with their audience. They leveraged the importance of having an audience well intimated with the progress of the brand.
Copy.ai started in 2020 with 500 followers. Twitter got them their first 2000 signups, and now they have over 500,000 users. They are known among copywriters as one of the best tools for writing marketing copy.
See also: 10 Content Marketing resources Startups need to check out
4. SumoMe
This tool was launched in 2014, and in that same year, it reached about a billion people. How? Wait for it…….you guessed right—content marketing.
But again, what exactly did SumoMe leverage?
You see, the common thing among these brands is that they don’t operate on vague concepts of content marketing. They work with specifics; they determine their strength in the market and use it to their advantage.
So what exactly did SumoMe roll out that helped them reach a billion people?
SumoMe leveraged email marketing. They understood the importance of building an online community and staying in regular contact with them. They configured their email marketing into one where they provided courses for their subscribers through the emails they were regularly sending out.
SumoMe released a 30-day course focused on building an email list of subscribers. They also went ahead to organize online workshops along with other expert marketers outside SumoMe.
How did they make that translate to more reach? They made some of these workshops accessible only to customers, and since a good number of people already knew how great they were at email marketing, they had no problem pledging their loyalty to the brand by becoming customers. See how smart that sounds? It’s content marketing.
5. Blendtec
If you feel like your brand is one that will struggle with getting its own audience because it is perceived as boring by many people, Blendtec will inspire you.
Blendtec deals in blenders. How did they grow? That’s a good question.
Well, they leveraged the power of video marketing. No, they didn’t just put a camera on someone while that person talked about how their blenders were good, and neither did they just show the blender blending fruit and veggies.
Blendtec put a twist on video marketing. They experimented with strange ingredients in their blenders and made an entire YouTube series to see if they would blend.
The YouTube series gained traction—to put it mildly—and it resulted in them realizing a colossal increase in sales in a three-year period.
They marketed the video content of their product and made it. Content marketing is truly King!
See also: Why Content Marketing for Startups is totally worth it
Wrapping up
As long as you know what the goals are for your startup, winning big with content marketing is definitely possible. Although it might sound like it works miracles out of nowhere, it requires the right amount of work and strategy for it to become effective.
We know this terrain like the back of our hand. Let’s do the heavy lifting for you. Hera Marketing has helped a lot of startups win big with content marketing. Hit us up today!
We have worked with over 24 startups to drive conversions through increased community presence and relevant blog posts that we help distribute. To understand our process, book a 15 - 30 minutes meeting with us.
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