For many startups and B2B businesses, content marketing is a hidden gem that is often neglected. For business owners, hiring writers that can draft quality articles within their niche is seen as time-consuming and unnecessary. While some managers retain a single marketing employee to handle all social media and PR, very few employ a writing team that can generate large quantities of articles every week to be featured on the company’s site, newsletters, and distributed to reporters.
In today’s digital economy, a brand’s content is its connection to its audience, stakeholders, and potential customers. A brand’s voice is defined by how compelling, instructive, and plentiful that content is. Moreover, web content is ubiquitous, and brands are defined by it, whether by their design or not.
Google, for example, is defined by its web content. If it returned web content that was irrelevant to a user’s search, it would be useless. When you search for something on Google, it returns large amounts of highly relevant and useful content, in the form of search results. That’s what makes it a good product.
A brand’s success is defined by its ability to influence its audience’s and potential customers’ perception and behavior. That influence directly correlates with its ability to drive sales and convert calls to action.
Influence must be communicated in some form. And that communication is always some form of content. In the past, the content that drove consumer behavior was the newspapers, TV ads, and radio. Today, it’s increasingly web content and new media.
Businesses today ignore this new paradigm at their peril. In a digital age where every company has a platform and voice online, being silent means being ignored. Instead, businesses must strive to define their brand voice with original content that tells their story.
All this is to say, for companies that want to survive in this rapidly advancing digital ecosystem, producing quality content regularly is a must.
When I first began working with Start It Up NYC, I would have never expected the need companies have for help telling their story through content. Assisting them to do so has been an eye-opening and rewarding experience.
After building a media site and mobile app consisting of original content in a storytelling format, brands began hiring our team to write articles en masse to be featured on their sites, sent to reporters, promoted on social, and syndicated in other publications, all because of the value and social proof added from features.
We received so much inbound demand for content services, that we began running them through a subsidiary company called Rriter.
Helping startups and B2B companies tell their story has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It’s helped those companies build trust with investors, users, potential customers, and a broader connection to their communities.