Eunice Ajim, Founding Partner at Ajim Capitals, a Venture Capital firm focused on African early-stage startups, once said:

“Don’t build a marketing team. Build a media company for your niche. Create content, build an audience around that content, and monetize your audience.”

We agree. She also mentioned:

‍"Your goal is to create an audience so engaged that advertising your product is almost unnecessary. This way, you're no longer just a company. You're an authority—the go-to source for information and entertainment."

But even though many founders know they need content, not all understand how to tailor their content to meet their business goals.

In this article, we’ll show you:

• The right strategy for different business goals
• How content marketing adds to your bottom line
• 3 metrics to measure your content marketing efforts.

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The right strategy for different business goals

While investing in engaging content is the way to go, you still need the right content strategy to meet specific business goals.  

For example, if your goal is to improve retention, relying solely on influencer marketing to run promotions without checking if the influencer’s audience matches your Ideal Customer Profile is a poor strategy.

You’ll most likely get some signups, but it won’t convert to actual activity on your product. Your content strategy must match your business goals to get lasting results. 

Below is an overview of two typical business goals and the right content strategy for each.

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How does content marketing add to your bottom line? 

Now that we’ve highlighted the right content strategy for each business goal, here are some benefits your business will gain from content marketing when executed right: 

1. You reduce customer acquisition costs by building brand trust.

Consider yourself. Would you save your money with a Fintech brand you barely know? Right. It’s the same way your potential customers won’t part with their money unless they trust you.

The most effective way to earn that trust is producing valuable content: content that addresses their problems, shows your product’s unique way of solving them, and paints a clear picture of how their lives will improve after using it.

Odun Eweniyi, the co-founder of PiggyVest, shared how Grown Ups, their comic series, led to increased signups.

According to Odun, investing in engaging content led to a 10% conversion rate, 80% more than digital ads. This doesn’t only reduce their acquisition cost, it also saves them thousands of dollars in ad spending.

You’re probably thinking, “Can’t we just hire influencers to do this? Why do we have to build our content?”

Sure, you can pay influencers and PR firms to promote your product occasionally (and there’s a place for that). But that shouldn’t be your only long-term growth approach for several reasons.

One, content marketing is more cost-effective than influencer marketing in the long run. Two, content marketing is an ongoing organic activity that will continue to generate long-term results, while influencer marketing is usually a short-term arrangement that yields short-term results. 

Depending solely on borrowed platforms is like living in a city and constantly lodging in a hotel without building your property. You’ll enjoy the comfort for a short while, but that’ll never be your home—customized to your taste and increasing in value daily.

In this case, buying your own home is investing in a library of resources that caters to your customer’s needs and pain points. You want to create content that answers their questions and provides solutions. And then promote it where they’re most likely to find it. 

Now is the best time to invest in quality content that reduces customer acquisition costs and saves thousands of dollars in ads spend in the future.

To achieve this, you’ll need a team to create content according to the formats and channels that align best with the interests and preferences of your target market.

If you’ve already hired a Marketing Manager, you’ll also need to hire a: 

• Content Strategist
• SEO Writer
• Editor
• Content Creator
• Motion Designer, and so on. 

Depending on your budget and project scope, the list can be longer or shorter. With a solid team, you can start creating high-quality content that’ll help you build trust and increase conversion at a lower cost.

2. You get quality leads through relevant organic traffic.

About 8.5 billion Google searches are done daily. So, imagine how many eyeballs you’ll get on your content if optimized for search. 

This was how one of our clients grew their website traffic by over 100% in less than six weeks. And yes, they’re a startup like yours.

Your startup has many opportunities to rank in search, and you may be missing out on them, but we’re here to help you discover and leverage them. 

We have many Fintech products for small business owners. Still, when people ask questions like, “best POS for small business in Nigeria,“ one blog post from Motivation Africa shows up before Fintech brands (you can confirm).

Sadly, they aren’t even your competition, nor do they have the tools your customers seek.

You leave thousands of potential customers to get information about your product on a random website. Think of how much money you’re leaving on the table by not paying attention to SEO.

SEO is no magic; it takes time. But if you use the right strategy when investing in search, you can speed up the process and get results sooner.

As a new site, your best approach is to start by targeting ranking for relevant low-competition, low-volume keywords known as ‘long-tail keywords.’

Ensure the keywords you’re targeting aren’t just informational but commercial, a.k.a. money keywords. These are keywords directly related to customers purchasing from you. 

Go further by building topic clusters around these keywords and start creating. Ideally, it’ll take about six months before you start ranking or seeing trickles of traffic.

However, we’ve had clients ranking as early as one month like the one in the picture below.

With the right SEO tools and knowledge, your content team will get results. But if you don’t have a team yet or they aren’t conversant with SEO, you may need to hire a content strategist to help.

3. You build a robust and compelling brand.

Why do many consumers prefer iPhones to Samsung phones? Why do sneakerheads prefer Nike to Adidas? It’s not necessarily because their products are better than those of their competitors. 

It’s because of one word: Brand. The stories they’ve told over time–content that resonates with their audience, educates and inspires them.

According to Victor Fatanmi, Brand Leader and CEO of FullGap, stories are the real stuff. Good stories are the core of compelling and memorable brands.

The tech industry is becoming increasingly saturated with innovative and excellent products. Competing based on core technology alone is no longer a unique selling proposition. Chances are anyone can build your MVP with the right team and resources. 

What will set you apart from the competition is not simply designing new features but creating an emotional connection with your audience through storytelling-driven content.

Here’s the thing: whether you’re actively investing in the stories you tell or not, you’re building a brand. You’re telling your customers how to think about you. Are you showing them the right things?

Is your content giving them a reason to choose your product beyond ‘competitive rates,’ ‘lowest prices,’ and ‘friendly user interface’? 

Now is the best time to invest in the stories you tell and find the resources you need to build your brand consciously.

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3 metrics & tools to measure your content results

You’ve seen how quality content drives business growth; how can you know whether your content is effective? Simple. By measuring your content marketing efforts. 

Monitoring your content performance will give you insights into what's working and what's not, so you can improve your content strategy and get better results.

Below, we discuss three metrics to judge the effectiveness of your content.

How do you set KPIs and measure results after hiring a content strategist and building your content team from scratch?

Although the metrics to measure vary for different business goals, we’ll explore three metrics relevant to every business in this section.

1. Social Shares

One of the most effective ways to judge the effectiveness of your content is to track how often it gets shared organically on your relevant social media platforms.

High-quality content is often shared, bookmarked, and referenced, so tracking your social shares can give you insight into how effective your content is.

The goal is to create high-quality content people are proud to share. Like Ross Simonds said, “Create content so good, even your colleagues are proud to share on their social media pages.”

With word of mouth being a key customer acquisition channel for B2B SaaS brands, creating high-quality content that gets shared on socials and across communities is one of the ways to drive conversion and build brand reputation.

Different social channels have unique metrics, so you must create specific goals for each one. For example, you can measure comments, DM inquiries, and reposts on LinkedIn, while for X (Twitter), you can track the number of bookmarks, retweets, and impressions.

2. Organic Search Traffic

Google Analytics is the most popular SEO tool for measuring organic traffic and viewing visitor insights for your website. It also shows information about how visitors interact between pages on your website.

It gives reports of traffic sources, popular landing pages, bounce rate, conversion rate, and page views. It also helps you see how any content piece is performing on your website and which page pulls the most traffic.

This way, you understand what content your readers consume and where to focus your resources. 

The image below is from the Google Analytics report of a new startup that just started investing in content marketing.

We took this just a couple of days after publishing the post, and you can see the drivers of traffic to this client's site are two of their top-performing blog posts.

This way, they know what brings customers to their website and how to improve the results.

3. Time spent on the page

This typically measures how engaging and valuable your content is to the reader. If people spend more time on a page, chances are you have given so much value or told a great story that keeps them engaged. 

With Search Console, you see how long people spend on your page, which gives you insight into your best-performing content. You also see which page gets the most views, has the longest session time, and drives the most traffic to your products. With these insights, you can optimize your content and make better decisions.

For more tools to measure content efforts, see this blog post: SEO tools and software for tech startups.

Conclusion

It may be tempting to take storytelling lightly because you want to extend your runway as much as possible. But storytelling and content marketing is not merely an expense; it’s an investment in your brand’s future.

It only makes sense that after you’ve invested in building a solid product, you should also sell to the right audience and build brand loyalty with helpful content.

If you want to leverage content marketing to stay top of mind, grow organic reach, and generate more revenue but don’t know where to start, you can start by booking a free consultation call with a content strategist here.