It is fairly obvious that content marketing is essentially the use of content to market your business. Yet, a strikingly large proportion of businesses fail to establish a marketing roadmap for their content, and view it merely as a blogging exercise. This explains why more than 2 million blog posts get published every single day and still nearly a quarter of businesses aren’t sure how much it costs.
How much does your content cost?
The return on investment (ROI) on any marketing campaign is typically improved by either increasing your returns or minimizing your investments. This strategy may not however work with content marketing. This is because lowering your content marketing investment would contribute towards lowering your content quality. This can not only impact your returns from this specific marketing channel but can also bring your brand equity down.
The first step towards establishing a high ROI content marketing strategy is knowing how much your content costs. This is not only inclusive of the investments required to research and publish your content, but also marketing it. The content publishing cost depends on the industry you are catering to, and the average length of your content. The marketing costs can depend on your distribution channels, advertising expenses and so on. Typically, your publishing cost should be under 20% of the overall content marketing expense.
Identifying marketing channels
The success of a content marketing campaign depends on how well you market your content. No matter how well researched your content is, it may fail to reach your audience if you have not spent money or resources promoting it. The right marketing channel depends on the kind of content you publish. Video content, including “how-to” demonstrations are inherently viral in nature and are great candidates for social media promotion. It is a good idea to spend a few dollars on advertising initially to help your content gain social traction.
Long form research pieces are great from an SEO perspective. Marketers must look at both on-page and off-page SEO factors that can influence ranking. The objective here is to get your articles rank on top of Google search for relevant keywords and converting the targeted visitors to your site into qualified leads for your business.
In short, pick a channel that will bring in the most targeted customers for your business and build content that will work for this channel. Once this is done, publish the best content that you can get with 20% of your marketing budget and spend the rest promoting this content.
Conversion optimization
Content marketing serves to fulfill two key marketing metrics – improving brand equity or increasing the targeted visitor count. Having said this, the success of any marketing campaign hinges on its ability to generate qualified leads who can convert into paying customers. In essence, the ROI of your content marketing campaign depends on its ability to generate qualified leads. Optimizing your pages for conversion could thus contribute towards higher ROI for your content. There are a couple of ways to do this.
Lead Magnets: A lead magnet is essentially any form of content, tool or downloadable that a marketer can use to turn an anonymous visitor into a qualified prospect. A popular strategy is to publish ebooks on industry related topics and offer this to targeted visitors who come to your website from your promotion channels like Google Search or Facebook. You may also promote a free tool or an upcoming industry webinar to your visitors and capture the email address of those interested in signing up. Alternately, you may hide certain sections of your content to be viewed upon signup. This works for industry related survey reports or consumer studies.
Pair-up Strategy: The pair-up strategy is a popular conversion optimization strategy among eCommerce businesses. In this case, every sales page of your business is ‘paired up’ with an extremely targeted content piece. This way, your content serves as a gateway to drive targeted visitors from your promotion channels to the sales pages. This strategy is especially useful when it is difficult or expensive to directly promote your sales pages. For instance, if you are in the business of financing small business projects, you could write elaborate content pieces advising small businesses on their funding challenges and channel these targeted visitors to your sales page advertising your in-house financing services.
Content marketing can be an extremely lucrative strategy for all kinds of businesses. However, most businesses make the mistake of assuming that a blog on their business website is sufficient to start drawing in targeted visitors. That does not work and unless there is a comprehensive roadmap and budget allocation for your content creation and marketing efforts, the ROI from content marketing is expected to remain low.