Content marketing is essential if you want to rank your business website at the top of search results, reach more customers, and earn more revenue online. However, it takes a lot of work, patience, and consistency. And, it can be expensive. Of course, you can do some of the content marketing work yourself, but your time has value as well. Fortunately, this article is going to show you how you can do effective content marketing with a smaller budget than what many businesses manage to do- without sacrificing results.
The good news is that businesses using content marketing see six times more conversions.
That’s why most assignment writing services are using it to promote their services to interested people worldwide.
Before we get into the real meat of this article, let’s get a rough picture of the cost of content marketing.
How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?
When talking of the real cost of content marketing we mean the following:
- Content research cost
- Content marketing strategy
- Content development cost
- Content optimization cost
- Content promotion cost
If you’re thinking of adopting effective content marketing into your marketing strategy for the first time you need to know the cost. You should invest around 25-30% of your marketing budget.
To put it into perspective, content marketing can cost somewhere from $5,000 – $50,000 per month. And this depends on your resources, business size, and goals as well as your marketing budget.
Read this article for a complete breakdown of the cost you’ll incur for strategy, content creation, and promotion.
Read on to learn how to do content marketing on a small budget.
Tips to Make Content Marketing Work if You Have a Small Budget
Let’s learn how to do effective content marketing at affordable prices.
Do a Simple Content Audit
Note: If your website or blog is still new, skip this.
First things first. Before you do anything else, find your bearing by conducting a simple content audit.
If you have an active website or blog that has been online for a while, you should do a content audit to know the type of content you have and how useful it is.
This includes identifying content to keep, update, or get rid of from your site.
There is no need of having 100 blog posts or hundreds of videos that add no value to your site.
You can do this by creating a simple spreadsheet via Google Sheets.
In your spreadsheet, list all URLs, page titles, etc with columns that define the action to be taken.
For instance, you could have columns with actions like Remove, Keep, Update, Merge alongside each URL or page title of your content.
If you have a large website with hundreds of thousands of URLs, you can use a free desktop or online website crawler to speed up the process of generating all the URLs on your domain.
When auditing your content, keep what’s relevant to your readers and remove outdated content that’s no longer relevant.
Use Moz’s guide on how to perform an effective content marketing audit appropriately.
Think Quality Not Quantity
All too often marketers see successful bloggers publishing content on their site 3 or 4 times a week and think that they should also do the same.
As stated earlier, effective content marketing involves a lot of work.
Unless you’re posting mediocre content, with a small budget, it’s not possible to compete with successful bloggers.
If your marketing budget is small, you should focus on content quality instead of quantity.
Studies suggest that quantity of content is essential when it comes to driving web traffic. On the other hand, content quality does matter when it comes to increasing search visibility and conversions.
What is quality content?
What is quality content is a million-dollar question that many marketers struggle to answer.
Quality content helps to attract more visitors, lower bounce rate, and increase conversions.
Your users are the determining factor when it comes to quality content.
Given that users have a different intent, it can be difficult to create the right content for everyone.
Don’t worry yet. There are a few pointers to help you create well-thought-out, readable, and attractive content for all types of users.
According to expert content marketers at custom essay, quality content should be:
- Written for readers, not for yourself.
- Trustworthy.
- Up to date.
- Readable and engaging.
- Answering users’ search intent.
- Well-researched, comprehensive, and includes expertise on the subject.
In a nutshell, quality content should add value to your target readers.
That’s why it’s better to publish one high-quality content per month than 30 mediocre ones.
You can copy what Brian Dean of Backlinko does.
Even though his site is successful, he focuses on posting amazing blog posts. It’s clear that he has an effective content marketing strategy.
When working on a tight budget, remember the 80/20 rule that states that 80% of the value of your content comes from 20% of the hard work you put into creating it.
Capitalize on the Most Cost-Efficient Types of Content
When it comes to the content to publish, you have more options than you can imagine.
The good news is that you can use any combination of the type of content to attract the results you want.
However, not all types of content are equal.
Besides, different pieces of content cost differently and can produce different results in terms of shares, traffic, and subscribers.
You want to focus on the type of content that’s within your budget.
To help you identify which types of content are within your budget, follow these three steps:
Find out the cost of different types of content
The most popular types of content are eBooks, blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, animations, tools, slideshows, stock photo collections, etc.
All these types of content have varying costs.
To figure out the cost of each type of content, use the tips below:
- Get quotes from different freelancers that specialize in the type of content you intend to produce. At least 3 freelancers are enough.
- Figure out the time it would take to produce the content yourself, then multiply that by your hourly rate. Assuming you could take 3 hours to create a 1000-word blog post, and your hourly rate is $30/hr. then it could cost you around $90 to have a complete blog post.
- Use other public sources.
You can get estimates for most types of content on the internet.
Study the performance of your competitors’ content
If you’re an experienced content creator, you can spy on your competitors’ content to learn how it’s performing.
In that case, you’ll need to study the following metrics:
- Comments.
- Backlinks.
- Traffic.
- Email subscribers.
- Social shares.
Evaluate the performance of each type of content and choose the best.
Up to this stage, you have figured out the cost of each type of content and the performance based on your competitors’ research.
In the end, you should settle with the types of content with the best performance that’s also much more cost-effective.
Get Creative
According to essay writing services, one of the cost-effective ways to create high-quality content is to get creative.
This works like charm if you already have tons of content on your site.
Instead of producing fresh content, you can repurpose the content you already have on your site.
Repurposing content means changing your existing content into a different form.
For instance, you can turn a blog post into an infographic or podcast.
The good thing about repurposing content is that a lot of work is already done.
This helps to cut your content creation time and costs.
Besides, content repurposing helps to expose your content to a new audience.
Accept Guest Posts
Who said it’s impossible to get free content?
Of course, you could hire freelance writers at affordable prices but what if we told you that you can get free content from amazing creators?
Yes, it’s possible when you accept guest posts on your site.
You have to be extremely careful when accepting guest posts because you might end up publishing mediocre content on your site.
Also, remember that guest posting is a win-win situation.
That means that someone contributing content to your site should also benefit- either expose their content to a new audience or build a strong online presence.
To find amazing guest-posters, you can create a page on your site with your guest post guidelines or reach out to potential guest posters manually.
Use Cost-Effective Promotion Channel
As stated earlier, effective content marketing encompasses all the processes from research to content development and promotion.
When it comes to content promotion, you take advantage of the most affordable channels.
Make maximum use of your email list.
There is a reason why successful online marketers recommend the creation of an email list from the onset.
It helps you collect the email addresses of people interested in your content.
These are the people you’ll want to email your new content before you share it with other users on the internet.
Because your subscribers already like and appreciate your content, you get free promotion when they share your content with their friends and families.
Reach out to past sharers
You’ll need to be extra keen when people share your content so that you know past sharers.
People who shared your past content are likely to share your new one.
This is simple to do.
Look at your previous posts on social media to see people who shared them, then reach out to them via a direct message informing them of your new content.
Effective Content Marketing Is Possible!
Effective content marketing is about quality, not quantity, and this can leave a dent in your marketing budget.
However, it doesn’t have to.
With the tips shared above, you can do content marketing even with your small budget.
Experiment with at least 3 of these tips, and you should be able to notice a reduction in the cost of your content marketing.
Good luck!
