There is currently a startup renaissance going on and there is no indication that it will decelerate any time soon. 2021 was the yr record yr for US enterprise capital, with investment levels almost doubling yr over yr and early-stage funding increasing for the first time. However, this does not mean that starting your own business becomes easier. There’s an outdated mentality that you simply have to maneuver at breakneck speed to innovate, which prevents startup founders from consciously defining how they will scale.
Startups face many obstacles when attempting to get off the ground, some of which are obvious: financing, customer acquisition, and team building are just a few. However, there is one barrier that it’s possible you’ll not even realize is holding you back, but which is crucial to the continued success of your business: content.
Content is all the things. These are the presentations you create, the metadata you collect, and the videos that welcome consumers to your site. Content is sometimes the only visual representation of your brand, which suggests it is essentially the lifeblood of your business. Rapid content creation failures could weigh on startup leaders again as they scale their operations, especially if brand and content issues spread among a growing group of employees, customers and investors. Content infrastructure is key to building brand equity, and startup leaders must make it a priority if they need to compete in an ever-crowded marketplace. Let’s take a look at the role content will play as your business scales and the resources in place to make sure you get it right.
6 steps to building a content strategy for your startup
Content at scale
Content is crucial to the health of your startup. You’re already recent to the scene and must navigate the difficult world of financing and growth. But you are also tasked with quickly learning how one can implement technologies and processes—some of them perhaps for the first time—in a distributed and distant world. You don’t have time to mis-enter content while looking for opportunities to scale and applying for more funding.
Over the last few years, and especially during the pandemic, there has been a significant shift towards the “digital headquarters.” Most business activity now takes place entirely online, and as automation increases, our workflows are becoming more and more digital. This implies that employees now have a wealthy technology stack stuffed with applications and services that help them do their jobs. This may very well be anything from Google Workspace tools to social media engagement platforms to transcription services – most hybrid workflows rely heavily on tech tools, and that is not going to vary.
With the explosion of technology comes an explosion of content. Every application and service an worker uses stores and exports vast amounts of content and data. If your average worker has 10 tools at their disposal and you have 50 employees, that is a whole lot of data! As your business scales, so does your content.
In the past, there have been far fewer applications at the heart of content creation. You can often click on a single folder and download content from a single source. Sure, looking through corporate repositories for content will be a hassle, but at least with a little effort you could possibly find what you were looking for.
This is now not true. With so many tech tools used in the average worker’s every day work, it’s virtually inconceivable to trace every piece of content they need, and even tougher to make sure it complies with the latest branding and regulatory requirements. And with recent standards like GDPR and the California Privacy Act continually emerging to control and protect technology tools in the digital headquarters, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain pace and ensure compliance.
Content status
This brings us to the seemingly inevitable errors that appear in the final content, which are more common than you would possibly think. Even small mistakes can have serious consequences for your business, especially in its early stages.
In Templafy recently examined over 600 full-time US-based employees in corporations with over 1,000 employees. We desired to capture the role that content plays in supporting brands, and we found that the average worker is heavily burdened by a lack of content infrastructure.
Ninety-three percent of respondents agreed that even small errors in final content can damage customer trust, while 76% said the same for worker trust. As your business grows and must serve more people, there is an increased risk that your explainer videos will use legacy safety features or that incorrect disclaimers will find yourself in the hands of your customers and prospects.
When the responsibility for maintaining order in the content rests with employees, outdated materials or materials that do not comply with the latest regulations easily reach customers. In fact, respondents found that despite extensive reviews, only 4% of the final content was error-free.
So what does data from global corporations with over 1,000 employees mean for your seed-stage startup? Manual errors and content errors – irrespective of how small – won’t be eliminated if you do not have existing brand equity to fall back on.
Startup teams are lean and mean and don’t have as many resources to handle these issues as established corporations do. You must eliminate the risk of outdated or completely incorrect material ending up in the hands of your customers, so you’ll be able to focus on a more essential task: growing your business.
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The power of sharing content
As you scale your business, you do not have to fret about information getting lost in the ether or failing to fulfill regulatory requirements resulting from human error. Although there’s not Good time for lack of compliance or delivery of off-brand content, especially bad The time is at the startup stage when market awareness and investor support are a every day struggle.
That’s where content sharing comes in – a recent category of technology that supports and connects content across the modern enterprise. The demand for content-enabled solutions, and due to this fact connected content, has increased significantly resulting from 4 significant changes in the way forward for work:
Content is all the things. We’ve already covered this topic – your brand’s repute depends on the terabytes of knowledge, documents, emails and audiovisual materials your company has. However, with so much information, finding the right content at the right time is inconceivable.
As we speak, the points of content creation are multiplying. Microsoft Word is now not the center of the content universe. There are many applications available today that must be integrated into your worker workflow to make the development process seamless.
Regulatory requirements are also increasing. Businesses are under increasing pressure to make sure compliance, and with the advent of the digital headquarters, we will see more regulations emerge.
Data must drive your content strategy. Your email campaigns or video explainer series mean nothing if you do not know how they’re performing.
Content sharing technologies bring your static content to life, irrespective of what stage of development you are in. As an evolving category, it is emerging as a substitute for ECM technologies, which include various varieties of technologies such as digital asset management solutions, sales enablement, document generation, document management, and content creation. When these kinds of platforms are managed by content enablement, it ensures that content across an organization’s technology stack is all the time consistent and on-brand.
Without content support, organizations risk not with the ability to maintain brand integrity, alignment and quality across all employees creating content, which is invaluable, especially when a company is just starting out. You don’t have the luxury of the good thing about the doubt when you are starting out. To avoid this, organizations must invest in content-sharing technologies from the very starting. In this manner, the entire technology stack intelligently connects content to people and workflows right where they work, enabling organizations to win in today’s digital headquarters reality.
But that is not the end of selecting the right technology stack. While this will definitely provide greater insight into how your content actually performs and automate the stages of the creation process that are most vulnerable to human error, the right tools won’t mean much if you do not work to redefine the way you and your company think primarily about content.
As the way we do business evolves, so must our approach to key business resources. By simply recognizing that each the scope and role of content have modified, and allowing these 4 pillars to influence your creation and compliance processes, you are already on the right path to protecting and promoting trust in your brand as you scale.