Well over 50% of all entrepreneurial startups fail within a year of launch. Some estimates go as high as 90%. It is never enough to just launch a product or idea into the marketplace and hope that it sells. A startup company should know their potential demographic just as well as they know their own product. Why would your demographic need or buy your product? You may also need to adjust your business plan based on the commerce needs and wants of your demographic.
There is a way to gauge potential success of your product and market it to a demographic before official launch. It is a process called content marketing. It is a set of custom marketing strategies you need to engage in to ensure that your product identifies, attains, retains and grows its demographic.
Content Marketing Basics
Content marketing is a marketing method that involves disguising the direct marketing of a product to an audience. Essentially, content marketing is an informational campaign, usually executed over social media, designed to educate and inform a demographic about the uses and practicality of your product. A content marketing campaign could involve infographics, blog posts, articles, ebooks, YouTube videos, and so on, that discuss the need, practicality and uses of your product.
A content marketing campaign informs your demographic audience why they need your product while simultaneously marketing its existence. As a startup, you can better assess demographic interest, reevaluate the product according to feedback and possibly project potential launch profit margins. With a solid business plan and content marketing strategy, you can identify your demographic, sell to them and strategize how to grow this base.
The Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing strategies allow your startup to present its product as a solution or answer for an unfulfilled or unrecognized consumer need. This is done through a process called A.C.C.C.R. Or, awareness, consumer consideration, conversion and retention. Your startup needs to make a target consumer base aware of your existence and the solutions your product offers. This strategy creates an awareness of need for the product, not just the existence of the product itself.
Stuart McHenry of McKremie SEO Firm explains, “Make sure that you have SEO optimized your product well before launching a content marketing campaign. That way, your consumer demographic can learn about it via online research when they make their considerations to buy.”
If your informational campaign strategy works, then that will guarantee that considerations will turn into sales conversions. Your startup must continually assess the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign to retain your demographic and expand it in the future.
Content Marketing Tactics
There is no one size fits all method when it comes to content marketing. You should have a visible, pre-launch social media presence and have exacting research detail on your demographic based on your business plan. Distribute a blog post or article about the solutions your product offers to your demographic on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Solicit the creation of a podcast to tout the uses of your product and the problems it solves. Create an infographic, YouTube video or short ebook that explains how your product saves money, solves a problem, is more effective than other products and so on. The key is to inform and educate your demographic as to why they need your product.
The Old Ways of Marketing Are Over
The traditional, pre-digital era ways of marketing are pretty much obsolete. Now, you pretty much have to bring your target audience, or demographic, to you instead of widely marketing to a general audience. Your startup can do this with a customized content marketing campaign.
