Six Steps to Acing Your Startup’s Content Strategy – InstantFollowerz

Chris Hughes is a content strategy and storytelling wizard. hey

✍️ Wrote (and sold) blogs before it was cool

👻 Spent years writing daily social content for clients ranging from agencies to CEOs

🖥️ Lead your own digital strategy consulting firm (on track to achieve 30% YoY revenue growth)

Here are six tips from Chris for crafting your content strategy—to generate solid, authentic leads.

1. If you don’t tell your brand’s story, someone else will

As a founder with a million priorities, content like blogs and SOCIAL MEDIA posts can seem like low priority items.

But if you don’t tell your brand story, someone else will make assumptions and tell it for you.

Don’t sit idly by when it comes to content. Your story and voice should:

• Be authentic
• Feel natural you
• Make sense of your target audience

hot tip: Look at your competitors – if they’re not doing a good enough job of telling their story, they’re leaving content gaps on the table for you to exploit.

2. Do a thorough brain scan

Spend about 30 days on a “brain unplugging” exercise, using voice notes and free-form writing. Jot down every thought you have about your brand, then relay it to someone close to, but not part of, your business.

Ask them what they see on the outside looking in. What words are used over and over again? What topics keep coming back? This deep diving step is vital for two reasons.

First: “People are their own worst marketers,” says Chris. “There’s probably a ton of story about your own brand that you’re not telling. A deep dive and an outside perspective bring this to the surface.”

Second, this exercise will launch aligned talking points so you can start with a clear strategy and a bank of great content — in your own words.

3. Extrapolate the four key pillars for your content

Go through your brain dump and organize each idea, witty quote or topic into one of four pillars:

Source: Chris Hughes / Craft Ventures

Each pillar creates specific types of content, and alternating between them will ensure that the topics you talk about stay varied and fresh, but also on brand.

For example, one week you can talk about the results you achieved for a client (Pillar II), and the next week share some of your founder story (Pillar IV).

And if you ever get stage block, you can refer back to your pillars as inspiration and a reminder of what you want to convey to your audience.

4. Focus on community building before You’re throwing out content

Create a community from the ground up by interacting with your ideal clients, competitors and colleagues through value-based comments and messages.

This step will facilitate the way you write, how you present yourself, and how people receive you.

Keeping track of the comments you make (eg in Notion) will also ensure you have a bank of content ideas; the most valuable comments can usually be collected into a post.

5. Now You can get your content there

Use your columns, saved comments and brain dump to generate content that is authentic to your brand. Don’t forget:

📈 Have a clear KPI: Is your content building general awareness or driving leads?

📝 Develop a voice guide, resource guide and content calendar.

Chris is an advocate of scheduling content to make sure you get it published. While the cadence and approach of posting will depend on the platform, consistency is always key.

6. Remember: content is the long game.

It takes time to build a reputation to the point where your content leads to water. Keep it up.

“A lot of founders come in guns blazing with great energy and then fizzle out after a few months,” says Chris. You’ll miss the magic if you want to. Stay motivated:

• Setting new benchmarks
• Focusing on positive feedback
• Reuse your most successful posts every few months

As a final tip, Chris suggests talking to your customers when things are going well.

Source: Tenor

“Let’s take cover only when we need to put out fires,” he told us. “But getting customer feedback in good times means you’ll find room for incremental improvements – when you’re able to act on it.”

Positive customer transformation journeys are powerful additions to your brand story.