Discover Yagmur’s 8-stage roadmap to creating a content strategy that helps establish your business and build brand awareness.

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Hi, Moz fans. I'm Yagmur Simsek. I am one of the SEO managers at Philip Morris International and also the founder of Search 'n Stuff events and meetups.

So today, we will be talking about the eight stages of the content strategy journey for startups, and we will be discussing the initial needs and the potential ramping up to the success story.

So, first of all, I would like to emphasize why it is really important for startups.

It is important because startups need to establish their voice and brand tone in the industry when they start their journey. Also, they need to build brand awareness. They need to build their growth and their business strategy on the way, which also brings challenges because they need to adapt to the agile environment. They need to adapt to the rapid changes in the industry, and they also need to create ways to tell their target customers about their products or services.

But those challenges can also bring them some opportunities because, in established companies, the content strategy process is always a bit challenging. They need to have decision-making processes, and also, by the time they execute the content strategy, they may be a bit late. So startups can take advantage of these things and also have a rapid journey and then actually establish their brand awareness quicker than they expected.

Before we go into the details of the eight stages, I would also like to mention the organic versus paid perception.

So before you start your journey, it's really important that you think about your initial focus in between organic and paid because since we have a really limited budget, if you focus on paid more than you expected, you may end up losing your budget on temporary rankings with your content strategy.

But if you actually find the balance in between and if you utilize and optimize the budget you spend for organic content strategy versus paid content strategy, you may bring some opportunities for yourself and actually have a stable organic visibility and take advantage of the paid channels when it comes to generic keywords and generic content strategies. And you can actually take advantage of organic channels when it comes to long-tail keyword research, the long-tail approach.

1. Customer journey vs. search journey

So, let's start with the first one, customer journey versus search journey. So with the customer journey, in the past we have been only talking about awareness, interest, consideration stage or evaluation stage, or purchase and even post-purchase. But when it comes to now to creating a content strategy organically, we also consider the search journey now.

What we need to do is we need to find a way to actually combine them with the informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial with your initial customer journey stages because it brings the importance that if you have awareness content, you also need to have maybe dropdowns for if it's informational, if it's navigational or transactional intent.

So, these journeys can actually interact with each other, and you can come up with a compelling scenario that you can actually attract your target audience in the specific points of their user journey.

2. Goal setting

When it comes to goal setting, in the second stage, you can think of different questions to answer before you start your journey and research.

For example, what is your business niche? Are people aware of this niche? Are people aware of your services, your products? Are they really aware that they need that product or service? Are they on that stage, or do you still need to make them aware of your journey because it also interacts with this informational and awareness stage? Again, what's your market size? Do you think that you are the only one in the ecosystem? Or do you think that you have competitors and you can actually get the benefit of it that we will be actually talking about in the later stage?

For example, if you have questions in your mind regarding how much online presence you have, how much online presence your competitors have, you can actually check their online visibility with several search tools or several online marketing tools, and you can actually get information on their top-performing pages, top-performing categories. You can actually check whether they are actually good at what they are doing, or whether they are telling their products and services really clearly. Or maybe you have an advantage in there because maybe the search journey and search visibility have not been captured that much, and then you have a potential and advantage on that point.

3. Content audit

So, to be able to do this, you can actually conduct content audits for your website if you are an existing startup, and then see if you have any missing points against your competitors or if you have content that is underperforming and you need to update or you need to optimize.

Or if you're a new startup, from the output from your questioning, you can find competitors' websites, audit their websites, and see what is actually performing well, and then in which steps you should start to take the most out of your journey.

Because time is important for you and budget is important for you, and if you start from the highest opportunity and highest impact, you can actually have more advantage in the upcoming stage.

So in this stage, basically, what you need to do is audit your website content if you have a current website, see which page or which content you are getting traffic for or from, and see if you have technical problems on the website that are preventing you from getting indexed by Google. Or if your internal linkings are not accurate enough, you can improve your internal linking and user journey across your customer and search journey stage and also across your business niche and your goals. For example, if you want to collect leads, if you want to sell a product, if you want to end up just increasing your awareness, then people may find your stores later in some other area, etc.

So, these are all integrated into each other, but at the same time, you need to answer some questions before you get into the other stages of the journey.

4. Content gap analysis

Let's come to the fourth point. With the content gap analysis, as we mentioned, if you're an existing startup, it may be easier for you to conduct this analysis because you already have your content ready, maybe the previous content that you were not paying too much attention to before. You can still use different SEO tools to identify the keyword gap is, which is actually also the content gap between you and your competitors, and start the journey from there.

But if you don't have an existing website yet, you can still use content gap analysis because you can check your search competitors, you can put them in the SEO tools and then see the common keywords they are ranking for. That common keyword is actually maybe the starting list when you start creating your website and creating your content strategy.

So basically, in the content gap analysis part, you can either focus on the gap between you and your competitors, or you can also focus on the content gap analysis still but use that data to come up with new ideas for your new website.

At the same time, when you create this journey for yourself, I recommend you take a Google sheet and merge all the information you gain from competitors' content gap analysis and then group those keywords and actually create for yourself a kind of topic cluster so you actually, in the future, can use those topic clusters as a starting point for your keyword research and content journey for your startup.

5. Buyer Personas

Which brings us to creating buyer personas because, obviously, you might have thought about it before you started your journey with your startup.

But this is a dynamic world, everything is changing so fast. So, you may start creating different buyer personas for a specific product or service that you offer. And you can benefit from current trends. There are a lot of trend reports on online platforms. You can use Pinterest Predicts industry reports or more serious industry reports in your niche area, in your startup's area.

Then, get some ideas on the new personas and actually use the integrations in AI platforms to come up with different scenarios for your buyer personas in your mind because you may be giving them information about demographics, let's say, and also their occupation, their position, their company, and title.

Then you can ask AI to come up with different scenarios for your buyer personas, and then from those scenarios, actually you can bring some content ideas to your blogs, guides, resources, or category section so that people in your mind as your target audience can find valuable information on your website.

You can actually start the journey from there but expand as you go.

6. Topic clusters

Which brings us to the topic clusters because as soon as you create your buyer personas, you can start thinking about your topic clusters on your blog or on your informational or editorial content areas on the website. This helps you start your comprehensive keyword research because you are a startup with a limited budget, and you may need to think wisely when you start your keyword research and content production.

You need to have specific topic clusters so you can start with the first one and wield topic authority over that topic. You can then link those topics together on your website, which leads to your maybe service page, which leads to your lead form, etc. Then, update and expand those topics regularly if needed or if you see any further potential.

Once you are done with that, you can continue with the second topic cluster. Then, you can expand your content strategy and journey from there, which again brings us to the keyword research side of things.

7. Keyword research

So once we have some ideas on the topic clusters and buyer personas, you can start listing your seed keywords because these keywords will not only help you with creating a content strategy for your informational sections on the website, but will also help you to create content for your category pages, services pages, or product pages, and even the home page.

I think sometimes we focus on the editorial side or the category and product side too much, with the PDPs and PLPs, that we actually forget about our home page, which is going to be the strongest page on our website.

So you can actually start listing your seed keywords and then brainstorm variations, synonyms, or semantic alternatives of those keywords so that you can start building up your home page content, too. You can start using those keywords on your home page, bringing the most relevant target audience to your website and then starting their journey from your home page to your subpages and subcategories, too.

While doing this, you can benefit from Google Trends data, which is a free platform.

You can also go into your startup niche forums and webinars. Your job is really hard. Your job is really difficult. You need to go and be visible in different areas of your niche. You need to be even attending industry conferences and events.

8. Content project

You need to be talking to people and understanding their pain points, understanding how they actually approached your startup, your potential products or services, and how they understand your startup. Ask them questions. Show them your home page and ask them what they really understood from your home page without even going to other pages because your home page is your showcase page, and then from there, you need to be leading people to the subpages and subcategories.

But if your home page content doesn't speak their language, you are missing a point from the start. So even if you create awareness content and even if you have a long-tail strategy and then maybe even if you are seen on the featured snippet with one of your blog posts, if you kind of get people to your website from that blog post, what's the next step?

Are they aware of your product, or are they just on your page to read that content and then leave? So once you grab your audience, you need to make sure that you create a really compelling search journey for them, which brings us to the beginning because, again, you need to be considering these steps again and again in a circle that, okay, I'm now receiving some traffic to my blog post.

But am I actually welcoming the customer journey here and integrating it with some information or commercial intent? And what's the latest point that my audience or visitors are ending up on my website? So, there are a lot of free tools out there, like heat maps and UX tools, that you need to use to check the user journey on your website, and then you can use those insights for your next content journey on the website.

At the end, you will create a compelling strategy, and you will keep updating your strategy clustering over these eight stages and their details.

So that's it. That's the eight stages of content journey for startups.

So, if you want to discover more and discuss any ideas, you can find me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening.

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