How much should I spend on content?

Even though 88 per cent of B2B marketers currently include content marketing in their marketing strategy, only 32 per cent have a documented content marketing strategy. This shows that many businesses know how important content marketing is, but they’re still not completely confident about how it should fit into their overall efforts.

Short on time? Here’s what we’ll cover; you can save it for later

• Integrating content with other activities in your marketing mix.
• The basics of developing a content strategy.
• Building out a content marketing pilot.
• How much should you spend on content marketing?
• Case studies of successful content marketing investments.

Don’t think of your marketing in siloed stacks

Being a relatively new discipline, many senior marketers are still struggling to understand the real returns possible from a well-executed content strategy, and how much to allocate to the content budget at the expense of other proven marketing channels.

This complexity is compounded by the fact that content isn’t really a siloed activity, but in fact is often tightly integrated into other parts of the marketing mix, such as:

SEO: high-quality content is loved by readers and search engines alike. Producing content for searchability and shareability is one of the cornerstones of a successful SEO strategy.

Social media: Rather than competing with your social budget, content helps build meaningful social media campaigns.

SEM: PPC (social or search) can drive immediate product sales, but it can also be an effective channel for amplifying your content objectives (which may or may not be revenue driven).

So, how should the marketing pizza be sliced, and how big a slice should content be?

The answer, of course, is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but the good news is that some clear evidence is starting to emerge around best practices and potential rewards.

Knowing how to resource your content marketing starts with recognising the need for quality content, creating a content strategy aligned with business priorities, testing your plans, refining, measuring and optimising your efforts, and using this data to determine what works for you.

Get the basics right - address customer challenges

Traditionally, marketing starts by defining the company, brand or product value proposition, establishing who the target audience should be, then creating suitable messages based on these attributes.

Content marketing takes a different approach. It looks at the challenges and issues that potential customers are searching for answers to, and finds creative ways to tell stories that link their need to your solution, allowing a potentially unknown audience to find and come to you.

The purpose of content marketing is to provide answers to your customers’ questions or to entertain them in a way that makes sense to them, not necessarily to you.

Good content should deliver authentic answers and joy, in a way that doesn’t simply promote your own solution or push products down your audience’s throats. The subject should be well researched, and ideally show real-world examples of how the problem is being addressed. (For the interested, when you’re done with this piece, take a look at this article on the state of content marketing in Australia by our CEO, Craig Hodges. Among other things, it touches on how brands need to move away from price and product pushing – something we know brands are often loathe to do.)

Developing your content strategy based on purpose

A well-designed content strategy should integrate tightly with the broader marketing strategy, which in turn should support the organisation’s overall strategic goals. From purpose to distribution, there are a few things you should be certain of before you start thinking about exactly how much you should be budgeting for.

What is the purpose?

What are you trying to achieve through your content marketing efforts? While all marketing activities should ultimately help drive revenue, content can help with other strategic initiatives, including:

• Building brand awareness.
• Promoting thought leadership.
• Positioning the business as an authority in a particular arena.
• Socialising the organisation around a cause, for example, charitable giving, or environmental credentials.
• Educating existing customers about the other ways the company’s products or services can be used.
• Creating a lead pipeline.

What types of content will you produce?

Will you produce snackable content, or are you going to invest heavily in deep research and expertly crafted knowledge assets?

A study by BuzzStream and Fractl analysed the popularity of 220,000 pieces of content published on social media over a period of six months, and found that:

• Listicles in the travel and entertainment category earned 25-32 per cent of shares.
• Why-posts (articles with headlines starting with ‘why’) in the news and travel category earned 22 per cent of shares.
• Videos did especially well in the entertainment and education categories, with 25-35 per cent of shares.
• How-to articles performed best in the news, entertainment and business category, garnering 15-22 per cent of shares.
• What-posts (articles with headlines starting with ‘what’) work well for the news, technology and entertainment categories, but are also the most volatile – earning both the highest and lowest peaks in that sixth month period.

It’s also worth noting that the same study found that people’s responses to the above content types varied vastly over the observed period. So what does this mean?

It means that there is no definite formula that tells you what types of content or how much of it you need to invest in to become successful. What you do need to produce is content that is valuable for your audience, and offers them useful takeaways that meet their needs and interest points. That will keep them coming back for more.

Who will create your content?

This is a critical question for most businesses, especially when starting to invest in content marketing. Do you have sufficient internal resources – writers, designers, video producers – or will you need to outsource some or all of your content production?

Where will you distribute your content?

Content is only ever useful if your potential audience gets to view it. Fortunately, there are many valid free and paid distribution options, including:

• Organic distribution options include your internal publishing sites (blog, email) and free social media options (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare), ideally amplified by staff personal accounts for greater reach.
• Paid content amplification options include Google AdWords (PPC); LinkedIn ads – PPC and Sponsored InMail; and, directly placing ads on websites, such as banner ads, or paying for the placement of sponsored posts directly through publishers or through distributors like Outbrain.
• Getting your content covered or republished by the media is important for reaching a larger audience. Start with distribution through your own media lists; if you’re going bigger, try a PR team or a paid newswire tool to target relevant outlets and journalists.
• Leverage partners to share assets with their audiences to access a new or crossover audience.

Having built a basic content plan, you can begin to answer the question of resourcing through trialling what works best for you.

Create a content marketing pilot to gauge budget attribution

Running a pilot content program is a great foundation for building the intelligence and metrics needed to really understand the potential for content marketing in your business. Longer-term content strategies may focus on slow-burn activities like SEO, but to help build these initial insights, it’s useful to start with a content pilot supported by an active outreach program, which could look like this:

• Have a single, measurable goal, such as driving prospects to a targeted landing page, in order to test response rates and engagement levels.
• Determine the target audience and leverage your existing persona targets if possible.
• Create assets based on customer stages: awareness, consideration and purchase. This allows you to target audiences based on previous interactions with your content, moving them gently through the purchase funnel.
• Choose the appropriate distribution channel, for example:

   – LinkedIn (B2B).

   – Facebook (B2C).

   – Search (either).

• Create alternative versions of landing pages and ad copy for split testing.
• Assign a budget relative to the larger marketing budget, and product/service value.
• Determine a follow-up process for prospects who click through to read content.
• Run the campaign, including different combinations of assets, to begin to generate initial engagement metrics.
• Follow up prospects with further assets, to progress them through the purchase funnel.
• Determine the point at which there needs to be human intervention.
• Conduct a post-mortem review of data generated to benchmark results vs other demand-generation programs, for example, how did your content marketing stack up cost- and results-wise against your television or brochure campaign?
• Assign a more comprehensive budget appropriate to the results generated from the pilot program.

How much should I spend?

One of the biggest obstacles in adopting content marketing is the question of cash. So how much should you spend on content? Let’s take a look.

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report, most businesses allocate 28 per cent of their total marketing budget on content. The most effective B2B marketers allocate 42-46 per cent of their budget on average, while the least effective allocate about 15 per cent or less.

In Australia, these figures don’t differ much. Australian marketers allocate an average of 30 per cent of their total marketing budget on content marketing. But it’s worth noting that small businesses (with less than a hundred employees) are allocating more of their marketing budget on content than compared to large companies with over a thousand employees.

It’s also important to note that more than half of these businesses are planning on increasing their content marketing spend in 2017.

While there is no set percentage for what your organisation should spend on content marketing, especially at the start, a good way to arrive at a figure is to work backwards from your ROI goal. These steps can help you arrive at a dollar value to invest in content:

• Evaluate what your audience wants to see. If you’re a B2C business for example, your goals might be to connect with your audience on as large a scale as possible, including on your blog, social media and paid media. Budget for these channels accordingly.
• Work out how much it would cost to get each piece of content created.
• Work out the cost of distribution.

Some compelling cases of content marketing in action

While the work involved in setting up and maintaining content’s long-cycle approach may not initially seem worth the potential returns, it helps to take a look at a couple of examples of effective content programs:

NewsCred

NewsCred developed a series of content assets, and over a two-month period trialled 20 sponsored updates through LinkedIn. You can view the full case study here.

Results

The campaign produced measurable and immediate returns, including:

• 288 net new followers.
• For every $1000 spent on Sponsored Updates, 71 names were acquired.
• Cost per name (CPN) through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates was 20 per cent less than CPN through native advertising, and 75 per cent less than CPN through Google AdWords.

Key takeaways

The results for NewsCred were unequivocal:

• Content marketing yields higher quality and value leads than Google AdWords.
• Cost per lead for content marketing, unlike AdWords, decreases over time, resulting in an increasing ROI over time.

There are many great B2C cases too, including arguably the most famous example:

Dollar Shave Club

Taking the seemingly mundane topic of men’s grooming and creating a product selling for barely a dollar a week doesn’t immediately lend itself to a great content story.

In 2012, however, Dollar Shave Club created its now legendary launch video which went viral, and has been viewed over 23 million times.

The success of the video helped the company grow to $152 million in annual revenue in just three years, and undergo a $1 billion acquisition by Unilever in July this year.

 

The main takeaway: Pilot, experiment with and amend how much you spend

Content marketing is a process, not an instant solution. It begins by defining the strategic reasons for running a content program, aligned with the needs of the business and the customers’ interests. It requires resources, experimentation, optimisation and continual improvement. If you take away anything from this article, make it this:

• Have a content strategy. It will help you answer the tactical questions that form the basis of your content plan.
• Run a pilot program. Testing what works and where is the only way to gauge what portion of your budget and efforts should be directed towards content marketing, as opposed to traditional marketing.
• Have a distribution strategy – and budget for it. Plenty of marketers fail to design a comprehensive strategy for amplifying their content and/or they don’t allocate enough budget for it. Your content marketing will fail if no one sees it, so consider the channels you’re going to push your content through, and set aside enough money to experiment with.

Got questions?

Wondering where to get started with content? Tweet me, inmail me, email me or just comment below!

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This post originally appeared on the King Content Blog