Content reigns supreme as king in your digital marketing programs. Whether its articles and blog posts or infographics and video, content is important. One aspect of content marketing that too many businesses overlook is the value of having a content marketing budget in place. This doesn’t just mean have a ceiling on how much you’re willing to spend, but also understanding how your various forms of content perform with your target audience and how you want to spread your available budget across the creation of various types of content.
No matter what type of content connects with your target audience, establishing an effective and efficient budget and process for generating that content is important to long-term success. It not only saves money, but it also boosts return on investment.
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Align Content with Marketing Goals
All marketing campaigns have to have a specific goal. Either you are looking to drive more calls to your business, or generate more consumer information through lead forms. It doesn’t matter what your goal is, what matters is that you understand your goals and that your marketing content is actually helping meet those goals. Before you spend a dime on content, step back for a moment and ensure that all of your marketing channels are focused on the same end goal. You can then work backward from this point to see what content you need and how that content can help reach those goals. This will help save money right off the bat by not wasting money on content that doesn’t serve the greater good.
Develop a Creation Strategy
Now that you have your goals clearly established, it’s time to do a little research and start to put that knowledge to work creating content. You need to know what content you need to create and how/where to deploy it. Don’t forget to answer these needs:
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What content to produce
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Why you should produce that content
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What is the ROI on that content
Make sure that as you go through this portion of your marketing budget and content development that you align all of your marketing channels with this information. This allows you to better target customers across various channels. By doing this, you can develop a cohesive strategy that is more effective both from a marketing standpoint and more efficient from a cost standpoint.
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Learn from Previous Campaigns
If you want to save money and establish a better content marketing budget, you should take time out to look back at the achievements and shortfalls of your previous campaigns. Simply start by identifying types of content and marketing channels that have failed to produce valuable ROI in the past. This can help you avoid wasting more money on both creating that type of content and in promoting across channels that don’t deliver results.
Check-in on Competitors
The last thing you want to do is spend working hours and money creating content that doesn’t work, doesn’t target your consumers accurately enough, and/or doesn’t capture attention in the right marketing channels. You can save time and money by researching what works for your competition. A quick review of the types of content and marketing channels your competitors use can give you insight into broadly applicable tactics that work for your target audience. This can save you money by avoiding the mistakes the competition has made and realign your budget to produce content that is more likely to work.
Repurpose Content
Finally, you can make more space in your content marketing budget by repurposing some of your existing content across multiple channels. The goal of any investment is to get the most out of any money spent on one individual item. If you’ve found that the same kind of content resonates with your target audience across multiple channels, you’ll free up room in your budget by repurposing the same item across various channels. This doesn’t have to mean using it in the exact same format. For example, if you’ve put out an in-depth white paper that was well-received among your target audience, you could repurpose that same content across a multi-series blog posting as well to capture a different part of your target audience.
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