Budgeting is never a fun process. It can be stressful and chaotic.
It is imperative to set aside money for your content marketing efforts in order to understand the financial backing and availability of resources for the upcoming year.
You don’t have to come up with your budget from nothing, as we will show you how to plan financially for your content marketing. With these pointers and understanding, you will have the capacity to set up a financial plan that fits your requirements, and consequently enable you to achieve your objectives.
If you’re looking for a straightforward solution, here is the complete budget you need to allocate for content marketing.
To make sure your content marketing system functions in the upcoming year, you should take these steps to decide how much money you need to allocate. Here’s a step by step guide to preparing and using a content marketing budget:
1. Identify Your Goals
When you are creating your financial plan, it is wise to begin with the objectives that you wish to achieve with your content marketing.
Setting your objectives will let you figure out what kind of content you’ll generate, how much content, what supplies will be needed, and what channel expenses you might have.
As an example, if your aim is to enhance your website’s SEO ratings, you could choose to spend money on paid search adverts, take advice from a search engine optimization firm, or utilize tech resources which will help you manage SEO projects.
If you want to expand getting leads from your content, you need to invest in resources for multiple gated content, a platform for making landing pages, and advertisement expenses for social media outlets.
2. Define Resources
These would encompass both people and technical components when defining resources. If you have set a goal to produce twice as much content in the new year, you’ll need to look into either hiring more people within your business or consider sending work outside your company. No matter what option you select, it will come with a price.
Beyond human capital, there’s all the technology you need. An array of marketing technology platforms is available for selection.
You don’t have to have all the latest gadgets, but you will need some sort of technology in order to reduce unproductive activities, set up automation processes, and monitor how successful your content is.
Although you may not anticipate any alterations to your current technology configuration, that does not guarantee that the cost will remain unchanged. Aside from an increase in the starting cost, you might have to acquire extra account holders if your staff is becoming bigger. Be sure to include this in your 2021 budget.
If you’re considering changing to a different platform or bringing in additional ones, then you need to investigate to determine what works best for your requirements and is within your budget.
Content tailoring is a huge trend in content promotion. In order to provide buyers with more highly tailored content, it is necessary to include robust technology such as a CRM platform into the budget.
3. Determine Channels That Require Spend
Not all content marketing efforts cost money. Setting up a profile on social media is at no cost, but to get the most out of this platform necessitates investing some money.
Another area where you could decide to put money into is paid search promotions. But how do you know which channels deserve budget? You can by looking at overall trends.
Afterwards, evaluate how the channels did for you in the past year. If you have utilized any paid ads on any online platform, you should be able to measure the effectiveness of those promotions.
If you put in $2,500 on LinkedIn ads that got you a good amount of leads and money, then you might want to think about increasing the budget for next year.
For paid search, you may have mixed results. Investigate these topics to uncover which keywords are still valid to target in 2021.
It all depends on the level of rivalry for those search terms whether bids will increase or decrease. Additionally, you will need to update your keyword investigation for any new terms pertinent to your field.
The key to succeeding in paid search is to be judicious in your bidding and prioritize areas with the most success.
If you’re only seeing successes at certain points in time, then focus your budget on those occasions and don’t expend funds on days that don’t bring a positive outcome. You can do the same thing for locations. If some areas have higher profits, then direct your funds to those.
4. Support Thought Leadership and Influencer Marketing
Content marketing will become increasingly reliant on ideas generated by leaders in the field. A majority of people surveyed, according to the PAN Content Fitness Report, feel that making it a priority is imperative.
While developing thought leadership naturally is the ideal approach, it may require an expenditure of resources. You will need money and resources in order to create a reputation for yourself as an expert in your field.
These could involve investing in exhibitions where the firm’s professional specialists are headlining seminars, cooperating with industry magazines to generate supported material or covering fees for a specialist to write a book.
Using the services of a public relations agency may be a common expenditure for establishing yourself as a thought leader, allowing your brand to be put in the public eye.
You should think about putting some of your budget towards advocacy marketing. Having a Voice of the Customer program or conducting worker advocacy activities that are connected to your content plan will need some financial resources.
The financial plan you need will be determined by your ambitions, the resources you have at your disposal, the level of MarTech you have, and other aspects.
Influencer marketing was also a major focus of expenditure that coincides with advocacy marketing. Marketers reported in the Content Fitness Report that they would allocate financial resources to this initiative, constituting a quarter of the total budget.
Your influencer program should be synched up with your content marketing initiatives to guarantee you are deriving the best effects possible. Having influencers promote your brand should be a major consideration, as it brings legitimacy and trustworthiness when authorities champion it.
5. Hire a Freelancer
How much does it cost? $10-75 per post. The quality of your purchase increases with the amount of money you spend. This article is intended to address content marketing on a limited budget, with costs ranging from $10 – 75 in the lower range.
It may take a while to uncover an author of good caliber, but it’s possible.
Note: The average cost per article is around $20-30. How much time does it take? 15 minutes a week to 1 hour or more. Startup time may take from 2-4 hours.
How do to do it?
- Post an ad for a freelance writer. You can use Craigslist or Writejobs.info to look for writers. The more details you provide about the job, the better your job post will be. Include these details:
- How much you’ll pay.
- Payment method (check, Paypal, etc.)
- Areas of expertise required (e.g., in-depth and working knowledge of widgets)
- Whether you’d like samples, an interview, or some other form of application.
- How much experience you want the writer to have.
- What topics the writer will need to be familiar with.
- Any other expectations you have (e.g., familiarity with WordPress, word count requirements, weekly phone calls, etc.)
- Language abilities (e.g., native English speakers only)
- State your hiring process: 1) Phone interview, 2) Paid sample, 3) Selection
- Sort through the avalanche of applications. You will receive hundreds if not thousands of applications for your posted position. Quickly weed out the good from the bad based on their sample writing quality and any features that stand out to you.
- Select a handful of candidates, and conduct phone interviews. Ask them a few questions to gauge their level of competence. Hubspot provides an interview guide for working with freelance writers.
- Ask the writer to create a sample article. I recommend paying them for this, since you are asking them to do some work on behalf of your company. You should assign them a topic or title, word count, and deadline.
- Select the writer(s) you want, and begin working with them consistently.
Is this right for me?
- You’re comfortable working with freelancers and/or remote workers.
- You have a small budget ($20-75 weekly)
- You’re able to spend the startup time selecting and hiring a freelancer.
6. Use a Content Provider
Examples: Textbroker.com, Upwork.com
How much does it cost? Starts at $3.90 per post. Textbroker’s rates start at 1.3 cents (USD) per word. Using this pace, a blog post that is 300 words long would be roughly four dollars.
These items have been deemed of low quality, and it is anticipated that there will be mistakes in them. Higher quality work costs substantially more. It would be $21.6 to buy a 300-word article from a top-level writer on Textbroker.
How do to do it?
- Textbroker: Start a free account, deposit money, and post your job.
- Upwork: Select a freelancer, and communicate your project.
Is this right for me?
Textbroker’s writing that is of lesser quality is very cost-effective – a good option for companies who have a limited budget. It might take a lot of work to revise the writing, yet you can still obtain material for a much lower cost than would normally be charged.
Hiring a freelancer from Upwork, or investing in premium quality material is more expensive, yet potentially doable for certain businesses. Here are some signs that this is the right move for you:
- You and your team are not able to do the writing yourselves.
- You’re looking for quick turnaround times.
- You’re comfortable with a third-party system like Textbroker or Upwork.
7. Hire a Content Marketing Firm
This is usually a pretty expensive option, and I advise against it for several reasons:
- They usually lock you into a long-term contract. If you’re unsatisfied with their product, you’ve still contracted to pay a set amount for a specified duration.
- The cost is high. Often, such companies simply use the same resource of writers (e.g., work-from-home freelancers, Textbroker, etc.), but add a substantial markup.
- The quality is often subpar.
The beauty of employing a content marketing business is that you will obtain a fully outsourced service, from beginning to end. No longer fretting over search engine optimization, no longer having to manage a schedule of published material, no longer verifying the qualifications of authors, or looking through written pieces for mistakes. Despite any advantages, the disadvantages could be greater in number.
8. Reallocate Marketing Funds
An alternative choice is to redistribute money that was set aside for “conventional” marketing and use it for content marketing instead. There is no extra fee, although there might be a few extra time-related demands. Reallocation could work for you, if the following are true:
- You have an existing marketing budget (even a small one).
- You identify a budget item with low ROI.
- You identify a budget item that is outdated or too expensive.
Put some of your money into content marketing. For the 2018 State of Inbound, a majority of marketers found that inbound marketing was more successful in providing return on investment than outbound marketing.
9. Check for Gaps
It can be effortless to overlook expenses in the planning stage. However, you would not want to find yourself in a position where you do not have sufficient funds to cover an important requirement halfway through the first three months of the year.
The final phase of budgeting is to look over every component carefully and to ensure that nothing has been omitted. It is advisable to request more than what you need at the onset, rather than attempting to force the issue later. This includes budgeting for tools and technology.
We must start by gaining an in-depth comprehension of the expenses involved in creating and utilizing your company’s content. Let’s start with calculating costs.
Carry out an assessment for a portion of the material your company creates.
Figure out the approximate expenses in order to get a better grasp of the scope of the issue. Take into account the expenses of freelancers, wages, technologies, etc. when doing this computation.
Conclusion
content marketing. The investment in this can be minimal or even free, and will result in a remarkable return on investment, including more website visitors, improved search engine optimization, more potential customers, enhanced sales, and enhanced profitability.
As your content marketing efforts start to bring in money, you can use those profits to reinvest back into content marketing. Here’s how to keep improving:
- Scale up your quality. Be willing to improve your content spending to improve your quality.
- Increase your output. Eventually, you may get to the point where you can post daily or almost daily.
- Use a variety of content. Videos, infographics, and webinars cost more, but have huge results. As you earn more via content marketing, consider launching additional content efforts.
- Integrate content marketing with social media marketing.
- Leverage your content marketing to grow a mailing list and start email marketing.
- Create free resources (e.g., eBooks) that you can give away to gain leads.
Content marketing will pay for itself. Even with limited resources initially, you can eventually grow a budget that will have a tremendous impact on your business. Content marketing has the potential to transform a business with no notoriety into a widely recognized brand.
The potential is there. It’s essential to begin slowly by taking it one small step at a time.
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