With a new startup making the rounds each passing day, it goes without saying that your business, in order to excel and be different from all the others in the crowd, needs to invest in content marketing strategies.

While it is natural that businesses should focus on the quality of their product as the principal concern, it shouldn’t be the only focus of attention. Remember: people can’t buy a product if they don’t know it exists. Ensuring that a considerable number of visitors are looking at your website and are aware of your products is the first thing. Converting those visitors into customers by encouraging them to make a conversion is the second—this in a nutshell is what a content marketing strategy is supposed to do.

In the U.S. alone, some 28 million small businesses are operational, out of which 22 million fall in the self employed category. More than half the working population of the country is engaged in small businesses, which have in turn created a significant number of jobs—65%—since the year 1995.

But where these stats might make us feel good, let’s not forget that according to Forbes, the number of new startups added to the existing pool on a monthly basis is 543,000. 7 out of each 10 new startups can only survive for 2 years, and only a quarter of these remain operational for 15 years and beyond. Needless to say, while new startups are added to the marketplace in droves each day, the strategies behind them are hardly strong enough to keep them grounded in business for long.

Content Marketing: The Key to Successful Businesses

One area in which a small business—especially a new startup—should excel in is content marketing, which becomes pivotal to the digital and commercial success of these business ventures. Although it might not strike you as significant immediately, content marketing has a major effect on how your business plays out, helping you in:

• It helps drive more traffic and attain more visitors
• Better link building
• Better SEO strategies
• It allows you to maintain an authoritative voice regarding your product or service
• It allows you to establish your brand in whatever way you wish
• Through blogs and other content marketing avenues, you can communicate your message and details about your product better to your potential customers, with there being a greater chance of you roping in newer customers, targeting newer niches
• You have the option of answering the questions that are likely to pop up in the minds of potential customers, thereby offering them trusty advice
• Quality content is timeless and stays relevant forever. Staying away from hypes, fads, and trends is the key to surviving for the long term in the digital arena. A Forbes report revealed how a moiety of new startups is latching onto hypes for relevance.

Setting Up an SEO Marketing Strategy

You probably know of all the basics that there are: blogs, keywords, backlinks. You know what you have to do, but do you know how you have to do it? Bear in mind that most businesses out there know they have to keep up with these elements, and are doing their level best, as are you, to churn out blogs and articles regularly.

But it isn’t all the businesses out there making it to the arena of success. Only a few ever make it to the top rankings on SERPs, and there’s a good reason for that. Here’s their trick:

• They don’t just churn out blogs and articles at random, but keep their content relevant, informative, and designed as answers to potential questions.
• Their keyword optimization isn’t forced and irrelevant. They don’t bombard their content with long-tail keywords just for the sake of it—they use their content and the keyword optimization tactic wisely.
• They drive increased traffic and quality leads to their sites with the help of content that has been strategically prepared using solid SEO and white hat linkbuilding strategies.

How Can You Break into this Niche?

It’s easy enough on paper, but it’s a tough nut to crack when you actually sit down to do it. We have some suggestions for you:

• In order to determine the keyword strategy and the scope of your content in general, explore your business’s purpose and the expertise you’re offering. Work out, therefore, a wide “category” or “topic area” instead of targeting random keywords.
• Determine your target audience, your competitors, the current trends in these niches, and plan your content accordingly.
• Start from broad fields, narrowing the keywords down to suit what your consumers and customers are most invested in. use these ROI keywords in your content, and always use them in the H1, H2, and meta tags/descriptions.
• Publish regularly and keep up with the times.
• Encourage conversions since as long as your visitors remain visitors there will be no profit in terms of business. Anything—even something as little as subscribing to your business—would do.
• To repeat: know your area of expertise, and understand your audience.