Many brands and startups when starting afresh with marketing like to be aware of the potential pitfalls, challenges and best practices.

Here’s a summary of content marketing do’s and don’ts for startups that you must follow when implementing your brand new strategy.

Content Marketing For Startups: 5 Do’s and Don’ts

Here are some content marketing do”s which you must consider in your branding strategy.

1. Make sharing easy: There’s no substitute for this. Creating great content is not enough. Ensure that everyone who visits your site is able to share the content easily on platforms they use. There are plenty of services that allow you to implement sharing on your sites. Some examples are: AddThis, Shareaholic etc.

2. Design well: Google forces websites to look good on the mobile. So, if you’re lagging behind, ensure your site is responsive and catches the eye. People are visual and need some great clean designs to navigate well and be curious to look at your site. Some metrics you may want to check could be:

a) your bounce rate;
b) time spent on the site.

All these metrics can be identified on Google Analytics, so ensure that you’re creating content and designing it to keep consumer behaviour in mind.

3. Follow your brand ideology: Everything that you create – content, images, typography, tonality, stories – need to lead back to your brand ideology. It does not help your business if you create content that’s irrelevant to your followers. It is critical to maintain the brand perception in all aspects of your startup. Content is not an exception.

4. Get creative: Do not get scared to create content that’s different. Liz Ryan writes blog posts on LinkedIn using images that are art created internally. It does not look similar to exquisite photographs, but it’s designed well and makes her brand stand out. At Brandanew, we often use art (internal) or images/photos (that we create internally too). We like being original – that’s a part of our brand culture, even though it’s not always the most common thing to do!

5. Involve your whole team: Content IS a team sport. You won’t go far if you’re leaving it up to one person to do it all. Involve your team into creative discussions, sharing, curating and generally doing things together with a great sense of ownership. Your startup can achieve more with more hands.

Content Marketing Don’ts For Your Startup

1. Follow competitors mindlessly: What works with one competitor may not work for you. Define your own path, strategies and goals.

2. Steal content: This may seem like a stuck-up tape, but it’s true. Do not shame your brand by stealing. It’s hard to recover from that brand nosedive. Be original!

3. Underestimate the benefits of a well executed content strategy: It’s not just leads, SEO benefits, social engagement, positive brand perceptions, humanization of brands and more. Content marketing offers you an opportunity like no other – to create remarkable brand stories and a brand legacy that stays. Forever.

4. Underestimate the costs of a content marketing strategy: Content creation is not free. Nor is your time and effort. A content marketing agency will incur a cost. You can buy followers and blog posts at $5 but it’s hard to buy quality at that same price. Creating organic engagement requires expertise and many years of experience, and these can’t be replaced by an intern or a ghost-writer running your social media and content.

5. Be severely me-centric: Someone recently asked me this on Twitter: how much sales content must a brand share? Everyone has a different answer to this question. But to create authentic content and engagement, it can be quite disastrous to only scream about yourself on social channels. Sharing only your own content on every channel reduces trust of the community.

What would you add to these content marketing do’s and don’ts? Leave your findings and suggestions in the comment section below.

First appeared on Brandanew.co.