How and Why You Should Increase Your Content Marketing Budget

If you work in marketing, it can be tough to convince executives to put more money into the content marketing budget. Even if you're calling the shots, it may be difficult to know where to allocate funds to ensure successful content marketing can happen. Increase your budget by learning where to spend money and how to explain the value of content marketing to anyone interested.

Cody

Textbroker Marketing and Communications

Traditional advertising is no longer as effective as it used to be. Television commercials are becoming increasingly obsolete, and even digital ads can be blocked or skimmed over. Content marketing, however, is growing at a remarkable speed. Content marketing manages to deliver the perfect combination of value and advertising, creating a win-win situation for businesses and for their audience.

Understanding the Value of Content Marketing

No business wants to put money into an industry that won’t net them results. Often, the hardest part of increasing your content marketing budget is explaining to others why that budget matters so much. The value of content marketing is enormous, but it may not be immediately visible.

People living in the United States can see as many as 5,000 ads per day. 5,000! That is an astronomical number, but few people can remember seeing that many ads at any given time. That’s because as a society, we’re getting better and better at avoiding and tuning out those ads. So, how exactly can a business get noticed and have their marketing campaigns be seen? Content marketing is the answer.

Since content marketing provides true value to an audience, they will seek it out organically. By answering a question, providing information or creating entertainment, your content can add value to the lives of others. That, in turn, will increase your brand recognition and create a relationship between business and client.

Put Your Money Where Your Leads Are

Lead generation is a primary goal for businesses and websites of all sizes. If you have something to sell or a message to spread, then turning traffic into leads is a challenge. Traditional marketing campaigns target a wide range of people, but your marketing attempts might be ignored by the people who don’t want to see them. Content marketing, on the other hand, reaches precisely the people who are already curious or looking for related information.

In the United States, a staggering 72 percent of B2B companies say that content marketing has increased the number of their quality leads. Most businesses are willing to pay a significant amount per quality lead because each lead can become a lifelong customer with repeat business. As you push for an increase in the budget for content marketing, remind others of the direct correlation between content marketing and an increase in quality leads.

Weed Out Underperforming Content With A/B Testing

Not every piece of content you create will necessarily go viral. A/B testing is a critical step to ensure that every piece of your budget is being used to its full potential. A/B testing compares two pieces of content with some differences, highlighting which one works best and results in more leads, traffic and engagement. This lets you remove underperforming content, writers or campaigns while putting more of your budget into the strategies that truly work.

Showcase Your ROI

ROI is return on investment, or what your business gains on each dollar spent in the budget. In order to see the true value of content marketing, it is important to determine an accurate ROI for your content marketing expenditures. This is where analytics are crucial. Make sure you’re tracking everything from click-through rates in the CTAs of your content to the number of leads that are generated from each campaign. All of this data can reveal exactly how big of a return your company is getting from its content marketing expenses.

Maximize Content Distribution

One mistake that many businesses make is allocating budget to the creation of content but not spending any money on distribution. It is certainly true that your content can be found organically through online searches, and that may result in a lot of your traffic. However, you should also be finding alternative ways to distribute the content you work so hard to create.

Social media is the obvious choice, particularly because it is so easy to do and costs very little. Sharing content across social media platforms exposes your audience to your brand routinely, and you can adjust the captions or the format to best capture your targeted readers. You can also establish an email marketing strategy, sharing your content that way. To maximize your investment in content marketing, make sure you’re following through and ensuring that distribution is as widespread as possible.

Remain Consistent

It is common for businesses to inject capital into their content marketing strategies at regular intervals. This might happen once a month or twice a year, and it can cause some imbalance to consistency. The best and most effective way to engage an audience is through regular content. If you release lots of content at once and then wait weeks until more content is released, you’ll lose your audience and be penalized by search engine algorithms. Even if your budget is inconsistent, do what you can to release your content at regular intervals throughout the week, month and year.

29 Percent of Marketing Budgets Are Spent on Content Marketing

Among B2B companies in North America, nearly one-third of the marketing budget goes specifically toward content marketing. This number is only growing, creating an enormous content marketing industry. The content you create is searchable and won’t go away, meaning that the best time to start creating and publishing content is right away. The more money you can allocate to content marketing today, the better the results will be today, tomorrow and months or years into the future.

The success of content marketing is largely dependent on budget. The most successful content on the web is often the content that has been carefully created, curated and distributed according to best practices. Quality content stands out, and readers will be able to spot the content that holds true value.

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