We have all heard the term ‘Content is King’. But, how many of us know that way back in 1996, Bill Gates published an essay named ‘Content is King’ which is where this phrase originated from. Today, more than two decades later, content marketing is the focal point of most businesses. Every website is trying to create high quality content with a long term strategy in mind. Content promotion to the target audience involves many aspects like keyword position, SEO, etc. Cost is a big factor in marketing content and needs to be budgeted meticulously.
Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. In order to craft a successful content marketing strategy, businesses must focus not only on increasing the overall traffic to the website, but increasing the right kind of traffic; that being the number of visits from real people who have the potential of becoming a customer for your business.
To achieve the desired results, distribution of content through organic efforts like search engine optimization or paid efforts should be deployed. Without being too much of a fence-sitter, both paid and organic have the potential to be used at the same time to great effect. But it ultimately boils down to your business goals and what you intend to achieve with a content marketing strategy.
If you are looking to drive traffic and conversions quickly and money isn’t a constraint, then paid social advertising will be a quick fix. However, if it’s for something that will focus more on your client-customer relationship, organic would be well worth investing in.
In this article, you will get some guidelines to set your content marketing budget:
1. Focus on your organization’s business and size
Is your organization into manufacturing or technology services? You need to understand that each industry has its own content requirements. Focusing on your organization will help you understand the volume of content and the thrust required for a successful content marketing campaign.
Further, if you are a start-up, then your budget can be lesser than a big organization in the same business.
2. Define precise goals
What do you want to achieve with the campaign? Steer clear of generic replies like ‘getting more orders’ or ‘increasing customers’. These can be the ultimate motives behind any marketing activity but for content marketing you need to have more tangible and quantifiable goals. Some such goals can be:
- Increasing organic traffic to your website
- Improve search engine rankings
- Build authority of your website, etc.
These goals will determine your content requirement and marketing needs, thereby giving you an idea about the possible budget.
3. How will you execute the campaign?
Do you have a fulltime resource to work on content marketing? Or, are you planning to employ an agency? Or, freelancers? Consider these options well because each one of these cost money and you will need to plug these costs in to your budget.
These three tips can help you set a content marketing budget especially if you are just starting out. If you already have such a plan running, then you can look at the areas that have given you good and bad results and plan accordingly. Remember, high quality content is king, provided it is marketed well.