How To Acquire Early Users Through Content Marketing

As the cost of paid acquisition strategies continually rise, it’s more important than ever for brands to leverage content marketing within their digital strategy.

After building my own product, I turned to content marketing as a cost-effective way to acquire early users.

As I was building a community-based platform for digital marketers, I knew the product would hold little value without users.

This is why it’s crucial for brands to prioritise content marketing from an early stage.

Across any digital marketing facet - whether it be SEO, social media, or paid search - content marketing will play an important role in fueling growth.

With a myriad of readily available tools and platforms, it’s never been easier to begin creating and distributing content.

Like all areas of digital marketing, it’s important to understand what tangible value content marketing can add to your startup, and how you can attribute its performance.

So how can your brand leverage content marketing to not only scale your audience, but also drive product conversions?

When creating any form of content, your main priority should focus on adding value to end-users.

With so much content available, it’s become more competitive than ever to engage users.

Driving high engagement-rates comes as a result of providing the most value. By understanding user needs throughout their lifecycle, you can create the most suitable content.

Don’t just create for the sake of it, create content to serve a purpose.

Publishing blogs are of course beneficial for SEO performance, but the sole purpose of that content should be to serve value to the end-user.

If your content is so valuable, users will often share their data in exchange for it - this is why lead generation strategies perform so well.

Repurposing content allows you to be more strategic about the time you spend creating. It’s an effective way to work smarter and create more with fewer resources.

As an example - if you were to create a 30-minute podcast, you could repurpose this one episode into several pieces of content, all in different formats.

You could not only publish the podcast itself, but also use a tool like Headliner to create engaging, bite-sized snippets of video content. This could then be distributed across your social platforms.

Going further, you could transcribe this content using a tool like Rev, repurposing the content into a blog post.

By taking the time to record just one podcast, you could create weeks worth of valuable content across a myriad of channels.

Effective content marketing is far beyond just driving engagement and traffic. The goal of any digital marketing strategy should be to drive a conversion-based outcome.

Throughout a users lifecycle, a conversion can have several different objectives.

By understanding the unique conversion funnel of your brand, it’ll help you determine the best strategy to convert users.

As an example - for some SaaS startups, a conversion funnel could include: 

Top-of-funnel conversion: Registered lead from an eBook download.

Mid-funnel conversion: User then registering for a webinar or product demo.

Bottom-of-funnel conversion: User purchasing product.

By understanding the process of your conversion funnel, you can create different formats of content for unique each stage.

Remember, each stage of the funnel should add an additional layer of value to the end-user.

When you have enough data to uncover the conversion rates between each stage of the funnel, you’ll understand how different content strategies can drive conversion rates.

Let’s say your conversion rate from the top to the bottom of your funnel is 4%, and your product costs users $100. To generate $10k in revenue, you’d need to convert 100 users.

If your conversion rate is 4%, this means you’d need to drive 2,500 unique users to your website.

Knowing this, you can then develop a diverse content strategy that will help you drive this portion of traffic. 

Pro tip: By using a tool like Google Keyword Planner, you can uncover search volume trends for particular queries. You should aim to target queries that have a reasonable search volume with little competition.

There’s no right or wrong way for brands to kickstart a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing plays an important role in every area of digital marketing.

The most effective approach is to just start.

Remember, your content will never be perfect from the beginning. You’ll soon uncover insights as you consistently create, allowing you to iterate your approach based on user engagement.

Building an audience is a strategy that takes time, so it’s essential to start the process as soon as possible.