… And never build a website without a list of content. At Crowded Ocean, we specialize in helping startups through their first year of marketing, so we like to give our startup clients a “to do” list to help build a content plan. That content must support their goals—whether that’s increasing inbound traffic, converting leads at a higher rate, shortening the time to sale, or increasing the return from each website visitor—or all of the above.
In other words, a list of content helps focus marketing spend.
Depending upon the startup, the business sector and the nature of the sales cycle, there will be different priorities. But these top five recommendations for website content apply for all our startup clients:
1: Blog. By that we mean a robust blog with new content posted at least weekly. Content for a blog can be built with repurposed white paper content, field reports from key executives, mini-case studies (with or without actual customer names), or commentary on a breaking news article relevant to your industry. Whatever the subject matter, remember that leveraging the blog to bring more inbound traffic doesn’t happen overnight. A blog is a big commitment of resources and time. Distribute authorship across your company to make it easier to maintain and to leverage more influential voices at your company.
2: Narrated sales presentation. Tell your story and crystallize your value proposition in a short (less than two minutes) overview that can be played back with a single click. Keep the graphics simple and use online tools to record an audio presentation for your web audience.
3: White paper. Information Week recently surveyed technology influencers, and 76 percent of them said they downloaded white papers for general education on specific topics; 44 percent downloaded a lot of them. White papers are the workhorse of customer education, particularly for the B2B sale. Smart marketers will excerpt gems from white papers and repurpose them into their blog.
4: Demo video. Explain the customer benefits of your technology, product or service in a handy demo video that is brief (less than two minutes) and accessible from the home page. Repurpose a link to the video on your targeted social media channels. The cost of video production is dropping rapidly today which makes video content that produces leads within reach for many startups.
5: Recorded webinars. Hearing your product experts explain your technology, taking questions from callers and driving home the value proposition is great content for any product innovator. Many websites simply have too much text. Recorded webinars are a great way to promote your story using other media.
Has your startup gained traction in the first year with other content? We’d love to hear about your victories.
