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To build a strong brand and generate leads for DevOps startups, you must clearly understand what works in content marketing for IT and what will be a waste of money. In this article, you’ll learn the answer to that question and get valuable advice on effectively implementing a content promotion strategy.
Develop a content strategy
Content strategy is a collective concept that includes business analysis, market research, and evaluation of competitors’ activity. Before working on the content, consider the following questions: What to emphasize? How to attract visitors, and What channels to use? Consider also developing an individual content strategy for each IT project. Blindly copying competitors without in-depth elaboration will lead to a drain on the budget.
Why do you need a strategy? The answer is simple: it helps you define your business’s direction for the next 2-4 months. In addition, a structured plan enables you to keep track of tasks and have publications in stock and not work in haste.
How to create a content strategy? So, let’s get straight to the point: to profit from content, you should analyze the market, your target audience, and their preferences. Without this information, you’ll waste time and money. To do this, use the 5 W’s Method, which you can learn more about due to the All Top Reviews writing services review website. Here, you can choose the writing service that best suits your query.
The 5 W’s Method, which we have briefly described in the table below, will help you come up with topics that are interesting to potential and actual customers, solve their problems and close all the questions, and also decide on the content pitch because the style for experienced software developers and students is much different.
| What? | What do you offer? What product or service? |
| Who? | Who is your customer (gender, age, income, interests, needs, pains)? |
| Why? | What is your customer’s reason for buying your product/service? |
| When? | What circumstances and conditions make the person buy your product/service? |
| Where? | Where can the user buy your product/service? |
Create niche content
You can effectively promote content in IT if your materials are genuinely an attractive lead magnet for potential customers. Texts should be expert and in-depth and solve the customer’s problems. Keep in mind that if you show users a specific way out of a situation since it helps them become better acquainted with your product or service. So to create a substantial text, it’s essential to:
- Identify priority areas;
- Highlight the solutions from the services provided;
- Convert the solutions into search terms;
- Select suitable topics and analyze their potential to attract leads;
- Study the competitors to create a content plan taking into account the key queries;
- Decide on the presentation of the topic depending on the target audience;
- Assess the use of key phrases.
Take benefit of Guest Posts
You can also post articles on topical resources where the audience will be interested in your offer. Again, going to publishing on external sites, it’s essential to work out the content so that the article solves the user’s problem or closes a need. Readers will only pay attention to expert and practically applicable content. In addition, it’s essential to follow these critical principles:
- Work only with topics that will potentially bring in more traffic;
- Provide a link at the beginning (but not in the first two paragraphs);
- Use links to authoritative resources, confirming the data;
- Add unique graphics.
Therefore, if you implement some informative topic with maximum efficiency, you’ll get a high probability of getting natural mentions.
Remember about quality
Remember that weak content leads to low conversions. So, getting to the top of the results page with poor content is possible. And it also happens that an expert article ranks more bass than a weak one. However, the situation changes after a while because the excellent content will move up with the help of behavioral factors, outpacing the competitors. So your goal shouldn’t be to get to the top of Google but to get loyal leads for quality content.
Consider the visual content design
You may be surprised, but the same principle applies to articles as it does to people: meet on clothes. Readers entering a site, blog, or magazine evaluate the text for the first few seconds to ensure it is easy and exciting to read. Then, after the first impression, everything starts to matter: headings, bullet lists, graphs, tables, and short paragraphs.
Even the right fonts and colors in the layout affect the conversion level. Therefore, it is essential to structure the article. After reading the text diagonally or running your eyes over it, the essence should be clear. So what exactly does the reader need to understand while reading your article?
- What the article is about;
- What is the benefit to the reader;
- What problem the text solves;
- Whether some practical recommendations or descriptions can be immediately taken and applied.
Few last words on teamwork in marketing promotion
Remember that you can’t just delegate content promotion to an outsourcing company. No one knows the peculiarities and specifics of a product/service better than the owner or developer. And without understanding that, it’s impossible to create solid expert content, even with a clever marketing strategy.
Practice shows that when at least one person dedicates their time only to content creation, it’s much easier to keep up with the pace of publications on the website and external sites. So if you want results, get involved all the time since marketing promotion is all about teamwork.
Summing up
If you want your content marketing for a DevOps startup to succeed, you need to know what critical points you should consider:
- Well-planned content strategy before launching publications;
- Creating niche content based on priorities, competitor analysis report, converting services to solutions and customer needs;
- High-quality, expert, and in-depth content that shows an understanding of the needs and solves the problems of the target audience;
- Visually adapted content: headings, lists, blocks, color design;
- Constant teamwork participation in content creation by company specialists and outsourcing agencies.
