7 Tips and Tricks to Maximize Your Content Marketing Budget
Marketing can be referred to as something of a long-term investment instead of an expense. Every penny spent on the marketing campaign returns with benefits in terms of enhanced conversion rate, more audience coverage and overall, increased brand awareness. However, budgeting regarding marketing needs to be accomplished through strategic means.
In order to calculate how effective your marketing campaign is dependent upon the return value. Before discussing the tips and tricks behind an effective content marketing budget, let’s discover the cost associated with content marketing first.
The Cost of Content Marketing
The cost of content marketing differs for each kind of business, its goals and its respective targeted audience. The content marketing budget in general tends to vary between $5,000 and $50,000+ per month as dependent upon multiple factors.
For small businesses, the content marketing budget is on average said to be around $5,000 per month, which includes $4,000 allocated as salary to content marketers, $800 for paid services and $200 for miscellaneous tasks.
For ventures/medium businesses, the content marketing budget is $15,000 per month on average, which includes $4,000 allocated as salary to content marketers, $8–10,000 for agency/freelance support, $1,000 for paid services and $500 for miscellaneous tasks.
For enterprise/mega businesses, the content marketing budget is of $50,000+ per month on average, which includes $5–7,000 allocated as salary to content marketers, $8,000 for content developers, $4–5,000 for graphic/video designers, $8–20,000 for agency/freelance support, $8,000 for paid services and $1–2,000 for miscellaneous tasks.
7 Tips to Make the Most of Your Content Marketing Budget
In order to make the most of the content marketing budget, the strategies adopted need necessarily complement each other. Rather, they can enhance each other’s effect as well. There are a number of tips that can be adopted to make most of the content marketing budget in an effective manner:
1. Start a Blog for Your Business
A blog is one of the basic free resources and basically costs nothing. For a website custom-made, the blog setup may take a few hours before it’s ready to go and may charge around $50/year. For the website is made through WordPress, the blog setup usually takes from a few seconds to minutes, depending upon the complication level of the theme layout and is free of cost. You can either create the content yourself if you are a small business or can hire someone if the budget allows it.
For cost-effective blog setup and marketing, follow these steps:
- Choose the same domain for your blog as that of your website. It allows you to achieve the SEO benefit.
- For WordPress, it is one of the effective CMS setups for blogging. It costs nothing if the main website is WordPress-based too.
- Link the blog to the main website page for effective content marketing practices.
2. Write Yourself or Take Help From Your Team Members
A well-versed content is indeed expensive, however, there are multiple ways through which copy content can be curated for marketing purposes. Depending upon the expertise of copywriters, they can charge altogether a minimum of $25,000 or $3–400 per content write-up.
Hence, for a cost-effective content marketing strategy, bear in mind these points:
- Write the content yourself, especially if your budget is limited. It will cost nothing monetarily except your time and efforts. Allocate separate timings for content development within your schedule.
- Take help from other team members if you are leading this new project from scratch. If applicable, rotate the content curation task around for a diverse approach and avoiding any burnout, case.
3. Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing the old content has been a proven content marketing strategy that helps you reduce & cut them cost-effectively. There is always a line or a theme idea within a content piece that can be utilized generically within different content streams.
Here some of the ways where content can be repurposed as per the marketing medium:
- Content from blogs can be shortened and utilized for social media channels, along with links provided for more traffic generation.
- Combine content generated for different mediums around the same theme and convert it into a blog.
- Combine all the blog content generated around a single theme and publish an ebook with inbound links.
4. Manage an Email Newsletter
Effective content marketing also takes into account email marketing campaigns for raising brand awareness. It is one of the economical methods to spread the word about your product/service by choosing the type of content based upon your audience’s preferences. The charges for email newsletter campaigns vary between $9–1,000 if self-managed and $3–500 via outsourcing.
Here is how you can make the most of the email newsletters for effective content marketing strategy:
- Include links to your blog, website or social media channels for promoting them and also make them visually appealing.
- Include effective call-to-action buttons and employ a strategic newsletter layout for effective marketing.
5. Promote Content on Social Media
Social media channels are one of the prime mediums to promote content and increase brand engagement. Social media marketing strategy, if aligned perfectly with the content marketing strategy, will allow you to achieve your business target and reach more audiences. On average, $4–7,000 are spent per month on social media engagement.
Apply these points while promoting the content on social media:
- Establish KPIs to measure the successful implementation of social media marketing strategy.
- Audit the existing social media channels to understand your strengths and weaknesses.
- Define the target audience and device the content according to their preferences.
6. Search for Free Graphics and Animation Tools
To make your content look more visually appealing, make use of the free graphic and animation tools available online. They not only attract the audience’s attention but also convey the brand message as evident from the color palette and design theme.
Let’s discover the free graphics and animation tools to assist in the economical content marketing strategy:
- Crello
- Visme
- Moovly
- PixTeller
- Vectr
7. Develop Your Team’s Knowledge and Skills
Engage your existing human capital in the content marketing responsibilities for its cost-effective implementation. Instead of relying on the content marketing agencies or freelancers, assess your own team member’s knowledge skills.
Consider the following points before outsourcing the task:
- If the existing human capital has the potential, train them and develop their skills.
- If the team members have some prior knowledge, allow them to cater to the challenge. They will receive a much confidence boost and become a permanent resource in the process.
