HOW TO FIND THE MONEY FOR CONTENT MARKETING

Sometimes it can be difficult for companies to carve out sufficient budget to fund new content marketing programs.

While overcoming this obstacle is often a tricky proposition, we can find this budget if we look in the right places.

CALCULATE THE COSTS OF UNUSED CONTENT

First, we need to have a solid understanding of your organization’s current content costs and utilization. Let’s start with calculating costs.

Step 1: Conduct an audit for a sample of the content your organization produces. 

Step 2: Apply the average costs in order to gain a sense for the size of the problem. When calculating this, keep in mind to include the costs of freelancers, salaries, technologies, etc.

For this example, let’s say your organization is creating 1200 pieces of content per year with an average cost of $200 each. Therefore, your organization is spending $240,000 on content every year.

Next, we need to understand how much of your organization’s content actually gets used. On average, 60-70% of content goes completely unused; and remember, content that gets created, but never used is 100% waste.

Based on this information, we can take the organizations current production costs and subtract the amount the amount that gets used to find how much money your organization is wasting on unused content. Then for this example, your organization is wasting between $144,00 and $168,000 on unused content each year. A planned content marketing strategy would provide a platform to share that unused content, reuse and repurpose it in different ways, extending its shelf-life and putting it to use.

BORROW BUDGET FROM UNDERPERFORMING DIGITAL ASSETS

The next place we can look for budget is from the opportunity costs of under-performing digital assets (ie: advertising).

We know customers are tuning out advertising. $1 spent on digital banner ads will under-perform $1 on content marketing in almost any category. Don’t believe it?

• The average click-through rate of display ads is 0.1% (DoubleClick)
• Only 8% of internet uses account for 85% of clicks on display ads (and some of them aren’t even humans) (comScore)
• About 50% of clicks on mobile ads are accidental (GoldSpot Media)

In fact, you’re more likely to be struck by lightening than click a banner ad.

APPROACH FLUSHED TEAMS WITH A PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITY

Advertising campaign landing pages are another traditionally expensive, yet underperforming digital asset to potentially borrow budget from. NewsCred’s Head of Strategy, Michael Brenner, explains how he approached this situation while he was looking for budget for his content initiative during his time as VP of Marketing at SAP.

“There was a team at SAP that had an enormous budget for advertising campaign landing pages. Those pages typically saw a 99.9% bounce rate, and any traffic that went there was paid. I asked to take a small percentage of that budget with the promise of driving a organic traffic to the site. It was a win-win for both of us.”

Approaching other teams with big budgets with the opportunity for partnership rather than a threat to steal is a great way to put your content marketing strategy to action, while also building internal champions within your organization. For Michael, once he was able to deliver the promised organic traffic, his program proved its value and was able to justify funding in its own right.