Content marketing for startups: How to bootstrap a content marketing program

How do you start content marketing on a tiny budget without wasting a ton of time and money?

Say you’re the founder or first marketing hire of a bootstrapped startup. You’ve decided that content is the right marketing approach for your business. But you have a lot of questions.

• Should you start posting blogs and trying to rank? If so, how?
• And does that even work anymore? Is SEO really dead, or is that just something people say to get likes on LinkedIn?
• Speaking of which, should you be doing LinkedIn posts? If so, what about?
• Do you need to hire someone? If yes, who? Do you need a content writer? A strategist? A product marketer?
• And when should you hire them? As soon as possible, or after you’ve already got some kind of marketing program standing up?
• Does it really take six months for content to work? Is there any way around that?
• Where should you invest, and where should you duct-tape?

In this article, we’ll aim to answer all of that. We’ve gathered some of the content industry’s top minds to share what they’d do in your shoes (or what they did when they were in your shoes!)

Consider this a free content marketing consultancy session from:

• David Baum, the CEO of Relato
• Brooklin Nash, Co-founder of Beam Content
• Tyler Hakes, Strategy Director and Principal of Optimist
• Alex Birkett, Co-founder of Omniscient Digital
• Eric Doty, Content lead at Dock
• Mike Sonders, Head of Marketing at Rainforest QA
• Defne Gencler, Founder of Laurel Leaf
• Finn Thormeier, Owner/operator of Project 33

Startup content marketing: Where should you even start?

Content marketing is pretty different for early-stage startups than for more established brands:

• You need quick wins. You likely don’t have the budget to play the long game. You need to start seeing ROI from your content program quickly — or you simply can’t justify the expense.
• You may need to pivot. Chances are, you’re still figuring out product-market fit. You may not be 100% clear on how product-led (or sales-led) your GTM motion is. There’s no point in, say, spending a lot of money to rank for keywords which will be completely irrelevant to your revised target market.
• You don’t have a lot to spend. Good content gets expensive fast. Hiring expert freelancers, investing in big spendy initiatives like podcasts, going big on YouTube, or partnering with massive research firms is probably not an option.

But it’s still possible to gain significant traction without investing major budget in content. You just need a smart strategy.

Too many startups think about their content strategy in terms of channels and tactics. They start by saying, “We’re going to post on LinkedIn,” or “How can we rank for [keyword]?”

While that sense of startup urgency is understandable (those quick wins we were talking about), Tyler Hakes would tell you that you’re starting in the wrong place.

As the Founder and Principal at Optimist, Tyler has helped over a hundred startups build out their early-stage content programs. Here are his tips on content strategy for startups:

Define your goals

“I’m not talking about traffic,” says Tyler. “I’m talking about, ‘What are you actually trying to achieve with content?’”

Frame it in business terms, he suggests: “I'm going to invest $10,000, and I want to generate at least six leads in the next three months.”

Clarify the problem

The next question to ask yourself, suggests Tyler, is, “If your goal is to generate these six leads in three months, then what is the problem you need to overcome in order to make that feasible?”

Is the problem that people don’t know about you? That they don’t know they need the solution you sell?

Your answer to that question will give you your “guiding principle” (to paraphrase Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, a foundational guide to business strategy that Tyler recommends.)

For instance, if you know that your market is unaware that they have the problem that your solution solves, then your strategy will be to educate them on the problem — perhaps, by creating industry benchmarks that will show them they’re underperforming.

Decide on channels, formats, and distribution

Now (and only now) you’re ready to decide on where you’ll be publishing your content. These decisions hinge on your audience. Where are they hanging out? What other content are they consuming?

And that’s the quick-and-dirty version of building out a content strategy. If you’d like a step-by-step walkthrough on channels, formats, and distribution, check out our deep dive guide: How to Develop a B2B Content Strategy.

How to compete for attention on a shoestring budget

If you’re up against established, well-resourced competitors, you’re going to have to think laterally about your content strategy. To compete effectively, your content needs to be uniquely helpful, based on a deep understanding of your market, and chock-full of informed, opinionated insights.

Here’s how to create that kind of content without breaking the bank:

Identify the USP of your content

Content is a product that people pay for with attention. It’s your job to figure out what you can do that will make your content uniquely valuable.

Alex Birkett, co-founder of Omniscient Digital, says:

“My strongest piece of advice is to identify your comparative advantage and lean hard on that. Triangulate that with real problems your target buyers have, and some channel distribution strategy, and you've got some clear paths forward.”

Articulate your strong opinions

Well-phrased, strongly-held and original viewpoints on your industry are a great way to help your content stand out.

What do you believe about your market that others don’t? What do you think most people get wrong about your industry? What do you value that others overlook?

Reframe these opinions into “three messaging pillars, around which all your other content will be built,” suggests Mike Sonders, the Head of Marketing at Rainforest QA. “That’s how you’ll introduce incremental insights and information into what could otherwise be generic content.”

Talk to your market

Relationships are the foundation of all good content marketing, says Brooklin Nash, the co-founder of Beam Content. “You’ve just got to start talking to people."

For startups, getting really close to your end users is a way to build a unique edge over competitors with big pockets. Sure, you may be new, but if you can show that you really get them, then you can create far more relevant, share-worthy content than the big players.

This is something that David Baum, Relato’s CEO, is particularly good at. (David is British and easily embarrassed, but I’m hoping he won’t mind if I say that.)

By now, most of the content people I talk to have heard of Relato. That’s because David has invested huge amounts of his own time in building relationships with content marketers and paying close attention to the problems that they share with him.

His product development process doubles up as in-depth marketing research, he says:

“You have to understand what pains people have, and come to conclusions about that in order to actually build a product. That process, in and of itself, gives you enough intuition about what would be a good story, what topics and themes you want to speak about with your audience, because it’s just continuing the discussion from your user research.”

David’s process for building up brand awareness started by going out and talking to potential users. He used those conversations to build a hypothesis about Relato’s dream customer — their problems, their emotional state and so on — which he and the team iterated and refined over time.

He then used his understanding of what problems Relato could help solve to start creating content that would help solve those issues. He started by sharing on LinkedIn, then by creating long-form, deep-dive blog posts, and then by creating a newsletter.

Forget the funnel and just try to be helpful

As David explains, “The naive understanding of the funnel is that you sort of stuff people through it. And that is just so wrong on so many levels.”

High-performing startup content comes not from sympathizing with your customers, but from “sitting down shoulder to shoulder with them.” Once you put yourself in their shoes, you can ask yourself, “What are my problems now? What would help me move towards a better situation?”

Forget about the funnel. Instead, remember that it’s not your customer journey — it’s theirs. Ask yourself, “How can I be helpful?”

To quote David, “Being helpful is the ultimate power play. If you’re friendly, open, and genuinely interested, that’s how you can leave a lasting impression.”

9 content tactics that work for startups

Time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Let’s assume your strategy is in place, you’ve got a clear understanding of your initial target audience, and you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Here are some options for a good place to start:

1. Product-led thought leadership

When he joined Dock, Eric Doty partnered with Alex Kracov, Dock’s CEO, to build out some messaging pillar pages. He used the term “product-related thought leadership” — essentially pieces of content that clearly state your main messages, your vision for your product, and your opinions on the market.

For instance, Dock is a revenue enablement tool. One core belief they hold is that “instead of having a siloed sales team and a siloed customer success team, you should bring them both under one Revenue roof and you need products that support that vision.”

So one of Eric’s first actions as the first content hire was to create a thought leadership article that expressed that product vision clearly, which they could then repurpose as sales collateral and product messaging.

David has also seen similar results by creating long-form content that clearly expresses Relato’s vision for their product. Even pre-launch, their content has laid out their view of content marketing and Relato’s place in it.

David reports that “people have organically started resharing and reposting our content, and adding their comments, with absolutely no involvement from me, which I take as a strong indicator of success. That’s also matched with quite a bump in organic, branded search.”

2. Competitive alternatives

Mike Sonders likes to start with his “favorite bottom-of-funnel content, which is competitor alternatives.”

He explains: “Since competitive alternative pieces are relatively easy to rank (depending on what industry you're in), and because people who are searching for them tend to have pretty high buying intent or at least exploration intent, they convert really well, especially if you're offering a demo or a free trial.”

As a result, he says they can be a quick win for a cash-strapped startup.

3. Founder-led marketing on LinkedIn

Founder-led marketing has become quite the buzzword lately. Eric notes: “Founder-led content is a really easy win. People love founders building in public. So in the first year or two years of your company, people will just root for you and the founder.”

Finn Thormeier (the man who came up with the term founder-led marketing in the first place) has a few tips for early-stage startups looking to get started on LinkedIn:

• Founder-led marketing on LinkedIn only makes sense for your brand if “your audience/buyer is present” and if your founder has “relevant things to say to that buyer.”
• You don’t have to wait until you’ve got product-market fit nailed down. “Building in public can have all kinds of benefits — winning early users, attracting investors and team members, getting product feedback, finding cofounders, and so on.”
• Bear in mind, though, that if you’re pre-launch, or don’t have your product strategy figured out, your LinkedIn results will be “more random, and they won’t necessarily drive revenue.”
• He recommends “posting 2x per week for 6 months and see what happens (iterating and learning and improving as you go.”

For more in-depth pointers, check out our guide to founder-led marketing.

4. Case studies

“You need those case studies really quickly because no one's going to trust you right off the bat. You need to build social proof,” says Eric.

“So the earlier you can get those testimonials from your first customers, the faster you can build a base of case studies and make sure you have a case study for each key use case or each customer segment.

Case studies can double as great content. We use case studies as ads on LinkedIn and they perform really well.”

Finn agrees that case studies make for highly effective LinkedIn content: “Case studies are ALWAYS the best — breaking down how you drove results for someone step by step with real proof.”

5. User-generated content

Depending on your product, UGC can be a very effective content tactic. Alex Birkett shares how it plays into your competitive advantage:

“Let's say you're a reimagined business intelligence tool built ‘AI-first,’ where do you start? Well, perhaps you have influential companies and people as early adopters on the platform building out unique dashboards, and you could leverage these to create a curated UGC library of templates.

This solves clear audience pain points as well, specifically because BI tools tend to be very horizontal and essentially endless in their use cases (so it gives inspiration and faster time to value upon entering the product).”

6. Templates

Templates are an easy lift, a great way to capture and engage leads, and a source of quick wins from a traffic perspective.

“Gated templates are wonderful,” says David. Partly, he notes, because so many templates are “really disappointing,” meaning that if you can create a genuinely useful resource, you have a chance to really stand out.

To come up with template ideas, start as close to your product as possible. For instance, Relato offers a B2B content brief template and a freelancer onboarding checklist. Both checklists are highly relevant to their target market, can be used with or without the Relato product, and draw on the team’s specific areas of expertise.

7. Startup-friendly SEO

SEO is often not the right play for startups, says Tyler:

• It’s become less predictable: “The algorithm’s changing, Reddit ranks number one, there are AI overviews stealing a bunch of traffic that used to go to websites, people are using different search engines besides Google…There’s a higher chance that, as a startup, if you invest in that playbook, it won’t deliver the ROI you need.”
• And no, you can’t just do it with AI: “A lot of startups go into it thinking, ‘Hey, it's fine. We can just use AI. We can create super cheap content. We can scale up our program and rank for all these keywords and get all this traffic for very little money…A lot of companies that have gone that route have had temporary success and then later been dinged in an algorithm update — or a manual action in some cases.”
• It’s become more expensive: “There's more and more content, meaning there's more and more competition for keywords, plus a dwindling amount of search traffic. Which means that the companies who really want to do an SEO content strategy are looking at investing more money, rather than less.”
• You don’t get to choose your playing field: “SEO is not about being unique. You don't get to create a category and get a bunch of traffic by making up a new category name. You have to play in the existing keywords and categories that people already know in order to get search traffic[…]If I come out with a brand new CRM and I'm like, ‘Hey, I don't want to call myself a CRM because we're super unique,’ well, that's great. But if I want to capture traffic for people looking for sales tools, I still have to compete with Salesforce.”

But, in some cases, SEO can still be exactly the right play for startup content. Here’s when SEO might make sense for you:

• You’re the only one doing it. Brooklin and Eric have both used SEO to build up startup brands, but only when the established players weren’t doing it. “Generally, you should zig when other people are zagging,” says Eric.
• You have a solid grasp of keyword strategy. Mike and Tyler both agree that startups focus their SEO efforts on “juicy, bottom-of-funnel keywords and jobs-to-be-done topics,” as Mike puts it. In a recent consulting engagement, Tyler advised a startup client to “chop the head off the top of the funnel, and let the rest of the market educate people about these problems and show them why they need a solution. We're going to try to step in and we're going to try to capture the folks who are actively in the market only.”
• The fact that it takes a while is actually a good thing. Eric told us that Dock started SEO early on because the team wanted to “build up top-of-funnel equity before we were ready for it.” Because SEO worked as a slow burn, they were able to build a manageable amount of inbound traffic while developing the product. By the time they were consistently ranking their content, they were ready to handle the increase in inbound leads.

8. Newsletters

If they could do it over, both Eric and Brooklin would have put together a newsletter sooner.

Brooklin admits: “It was a mistake on my part to not take that attention and turn it into an owned audience with an email list, even if it was just a monthly roundup of what we were thinking about and wanted to share.”

A newsletter is a low-lift way to centralize your messaging and bring your audience into a single platform. David agrees: “Anything you do in a rented platform, you have to back up with an owned channel.”

9. Data-backed reports

While you might think of reports as a big, expensive approach to content, Brooklin and Alex both think they’re a good tactic for startups.

In Brooklin’s words: “I think it would almost always be a winner, no matter what your industry or vertical is, if you can be the player that comes out with an original report — based off either your platform data or an original survey that you ran to a panel of people who match your ICP.”

“It is a big one-time investment in your first year or two, but it will pay dividends for multiple quarters.”

Startup content mistakes to watch out for

Here are the most common mistakes that our experts see startups making with their content:

Spreading yourself too thin

Startups shouldn’t try to tackle all of the content tactics above at once. Defne Gencler, messaging strategist and the founder of Laurel Leaf, recommends that you:

• “Focus on one customer segment before trying to reach multiple groups. Your current customers are a goldmine of insight—they’ll tell you which channels they like, the messaging that clicks, and what they need from a solution like yours. Until you hit $1M in annual revenue, it’s far better to really nail one segment than to spread thin.”
• “Based on those customer insights, pick two channels where they’re most active and go deep. It’s much more effective than scattering across too many platforms. Once you know what’s working, start repurposing the content that resonates without heavy lifts or added budget.”

Not trusting your gut

Eric says he’s learned to “trust my gut faster. When something isn't working, just give it up right away because there isn’t time to do all the things.”

For example, Dock used to do a lot of advice posts on LinkedIn, but they didn’t get much engagement. They kept at it, assuming if they just kept posting it would start to pick up.

As it turns out, they should have trusted the instinct telling them that these posts weren’t going to work. “On the other hand, posting product stuff always went pretty well, so these days we pretty much only post product things and clips from our podcast on our Dock account.”

Neglecting your community

Defne thinks that communities (online forums, user groups, LinkedIn Groups, Slack channels, or industry associations) are the key to startup content marketing.

“Social media is getting more and more crowded, so standing out can be tough. Communities offer shared context and a more authentic way to connect with people who actually care about what you do. Building trust in these spaces can be incredibly effective and long-lasting.”

Starting too soon

It’s a mistake to start your content marketing program too early, says Alex, “if the content marketer doesn't have adequate resources or power to make meaningful and reasonable progress towards target goals and expectations.

I'd also say you want to dial in your positioning, messaging, and generally understand your GTM before layering on content (though I'm sure exceptions apply!)”

Content marketing works — even on a small budget

To quote Tyler Hakes, “Content works. Universally. Content is the fuel for pretty much all of marketing.”

That’s as true for a bootstrapped startup with a tiny budget as it is for a massive multinational with a six-figure marketing spend. Budget is just one element of building a content program. Successful content strategies are also about clarity, consistency, and knowing what will truly make a difference to your audience.

Content marketing doesn’t have to be a long game if you keep a narrow focus, play to your strengths, and listen to your customers.