15 Tips To Reduce Content Marketing Costs

 Content Marketing: Getting More From Your Budget

reduce content marketing costsDo you want to reduce content marketing costs?

Did you know that you can get more from your existing content marketing budget?

All you have to do is minimize your content marketing expense in the following 2 ways.

  1. Eliminate duplicate information and communications efforts across your company. This reduces your need for content-related resources.
  2. Make existing information more effective by re-imagining it as quality content. By doing this, each piece of content drives more people to open, consume and act, driving improved results. As a result, you get more for your content marketing dollar.

 Warby Parker re-imagined their boring Annual Report into a great piece of quality content. It became an interactive 365-day story that worked as more than just an annual report and drove PR as well.

Corporate Communications as Content Marketing: Warby Parker Annual report

Corporate Communications as Content Marketing: Warby Parker Annual report

Corporate Communications Re-envisioned as Content Marketing - One Day at Warby Parker

Corporate Communications Re-envisioned as Content Marketing – One Day at Warby Parker

15 Tips to reduce content marketing costs

Here are 15 tips to help reduce content marketing costs by eliminating duplicate efforts and creating quality content. Bear in mind that you don’t need to follow every one to get more bang for your content marketing budget.

Audit all of your organization’s content and communications.

  • Perform your content audit across your company including every piece of content and communications. This extends beyond the marketing, PR and communications departments. It includes product, sales, customer service, human resources, investor relations (if relevant) and any other customer-facing area. Determine what content works, what needs improvement, and what needs to be eliminated.
  • Catalog your content to keep track of it. Where appropriate note what needs to be improved, where there are gaps that need to be filled, and where new content is needed.
  • Assess total corporate content-related resources. This means aggregating expenditures across your firm. Include related personnel and budget beyond just the outsourced content and production expenses.

Create an overall content creation schedule.

Build an over-arching content calendar for all of your company’s communications.

  • Start by laying out your marketing editorial calendar. This is a combination of your regular content creation and ongoing marketing to support your promotional calendar.
  • Plan for the content that needs to be updated or created based on your content audit. The objective is to ensure that you schedule resources to craft this information.
  • Add in other ongoing content that’s created outside of the marketing department. To maximize your content marketing budget, create only a single piece of content for each topic. Rather than create boring product information and related marketing or sales documentation, create one piece of quality content.

Transform every communication into content marketing.

Here’s where the real content marketing savings magic occurs. The goal is to eliminate the corporate-speak and transform each piece of information into quality content people want to consume.

  • Speak human. Skip the jargon and impersonal language and address your audience in the second person. Your content needs to sound like a real person.
  • Make your communications easy to consume. Keep your information from looking too intimidating. Use bolding, outlining and short paragraphs and lists.
  • Incorporate visuals to explain your information. Images are easier to understand and digest.
  • Optimize content for search and social media. The objective is to make your information findable. Link to other related information where appropriate.
  • Assess how content needs to be altered for different platforms. To reduce content expense, create all similar content at the same time. But make sure that it’s contextually relevant for each platform.
  • Incorporate one or more calls-to-action (CTA). Where appropriate include a CTA. When you do so, make sure that there’s a way to track your content results.
  • Track content creation costs. Provide the means to enable employees, freelance support and distributors to keep a record of their time and outside costs. Bear in mind that many businesses underestimate how much content costs when it’s created by headcount.

Spread your content across your company and platforms.

  • Maximize communications distribution. Set up a process to ensure you reach the largest audience possible for each piece of content.
  • Measure the results. Assess how well each piece of content does against your goals. Also, determine how much your content costs to create in total. If your content marketing costs are higher than you expected, examine where there are differences. There’s a good chance that this is attributable to not having measured your real costs in the past.

To reduce content marketing costs, it’s critical to eliminate duplicate efforts and improve the quality of each piece of content. As a result, you should be able to get more people to open, consume, share and act on your content. Done well this also translates to more existing customers seeing your content.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Heidi CohenHeidi Cohen is the President of Riverside Marketing Strategies.
You can find Heidi on FacebookTwitter and LinkedIn.

 

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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/howardlake/8443408303/

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