Startup marketing doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. The winning formula lies in identifying your objectives and carefully using all available resources to get the maximum return from them. Organic marketing is one of the most effective ways to rise for a business in its nascent years.

We spoke to Claire Trevien, author, poet, and a content marketing genius, to share her views on ‘data-driven storytelling’ and the other organic marketing factors that can make startup marketing effective in 2019.

What do you mean when you say ‘data-driven storytelling’?

Data is a word that scares a lot of people but what it essentially boils down to here is ‘the right information’. Every day I see businesses creating content without a plan, just to see what will stick.

That’s how you end up with press releases masquerading as blogs. Data-driven storytelling is about creating content thoughtfully, with your target audience in mind and the information you have about them.

It’s all about peppering your organic marketing strategy with the right ingredients.

The storytelling part is really just about making your content appealing and interesting to them. Because your content should take the reader through a journey and not just dump information on them. Ask yourself after you’ve drafted content: will it be interesting to them? will it be entertaining? will it be useful? will it be relevant to their pain-points? will they understand it easily?

If you can’t answer yes to any of those, go back to the drawing board.

What are some of your favorite methods/ways to identify the right keywords for SEO?

For your organic marketing tactics to truly work, you have to start with creating great content built around your customer’s needs. If you’re doing that, then you’re already going to be working with some great keywords in mind.

When I’m stuck for inspiration, I find Answer the Public absolutely invaluable as it aggregates the questions typed in search engines around short keywords, helping you to come up with some great long-tail keyword options.

When it comes to content analytics, tell us about some metrics that startups should focus on?

Vanity metrics are incredibly tempting, but you have to think of them as the visible part of the swan – that smooth gliding isn’t possible without the less glamorous paddling under the surface. I always caution businesses not to take low or high vanity metrics at face value as what counts is what’s happening under there.

With B2B especially, I find the most valuable customers aren’t always going to be the ones that interact with social media content in terms of likes, shares, or comments, but if it resonates with them, they’re going to be the ones to reach out in other, more private, ways.

The metrics SMEs should focus on will really vary depending on the business and what they’re trying to get out of being online. However, some of the usual suspects will be click-throughs and conversion rates.

When it comes to organic marketing tactics, what are your thoughts on content repurposing?

I’ve always been a fan of content repurposing and have written and talked about it a great deal. If businesses have a plan in place for their content, content repurposing can be a hugely useful avenue of populating your channels and boosting up your organic marketing strategy without having to reinvent the wheel.

Repurposing can be done in two main ways: dissecting the same topic into multiple pieces of content over time so that you can also end up with one big comprehensive piece of content; or translating a piece of content into a variety of another medium to fit different channels and reach your audience from multiple angles.

The trick is to have repurposing in mind from the start and integrate it into your schedule so that you’re not wasting time doing things haphazardly.