How Big Should Your Content Marketing Budget Be?

Content marketing is definitely a necessity for your business if you want to reach customers. The amount you allocate to that function will influence the scalability of your overall content reach. The larger the budget, the wider the reach.

Of course, most businesses need to control their spending, so the amount they allocate to marketing overall needs to be weighed against the benefits and outcome. You need to understand your content marketing goals and the activities needed to accomplish those goals.

To help you in deciding how much to allocate to your content marketing budget, we’ve included some information here on what to include and some samples of budgets you can use.

What Your Content Marketing Budget Should Include

There are a number of activities that may be included in content marketing, some of which may overlap into other marketing areas, in which case the allocations can be applied to multiple budget areas.

The following activities are considered a necessity by most successful businesses as budget items needed for content marketing. For those tasks that require labor hours, the amount budgeted will differ, depending on whether company employees are performing the job, or it is outsourced.

• Writing and Editing. Writing web copy and blogs is a large segment of content marketing. The draft products should be proofread by another party for accuracy and compliance to editorial guidelines.
• Emailing and/or uploading the completed content takes time, as does double-checking to ensure it appears as expected.
• Tools and Software. There are tools that may not be mandatory, but are helpful in measuring metrics and performance of your content.
• Graphic Design. Premium content requires a dedicated and talented designer to make it look professional.
• Content Strategy. Creating, managing and monitoring the performance of your content marketing strategy is necessary to ensure its effectiveness and a good ROI is achieved.

3 Sample Content Marketing Budgets

Nobody can dictate exactly how much you should spend on content marketing. Every company’s situation is different, so you’ll need to determine what the best decision for you is.

To help you in this quest, we’ve listed three simple budget examples that represent companies of different sizes and funding.

1.     Shoestring Self-Starter: $1,000/month + 20 Employee Hours

This budget is representative of a start-up or one-person business. The $1,000 dollar figure is for tools, and paid media content promotion. Examples of these include email management tools, SEO measurement tools and content publication applications.

The labor hours include 15 hours writing the content and 5 hours managing and publishing that content. This presumes you or another employee has the time and talent to write web content, blogs, promotional emails, newsletters, etc.

You can substitute the money allocated for tools for paying someone else to write, edit, and publish content, or schedule social media posts.

2.     Growing Small Business: $5,000 per Month

You’ll notice there are no labor hours allocated in this budget example, because the $5,000 allocated is to pay someone else to do the work. All but $1,000 of it goes toward an outside party or full-time employee(s) to do the writing, editing, publishing, etc.

The remaining $1,000 can be spent on tools, graphic design and content promotion; i.e., social media posts and retargeting ads.

3.     More Ambitious Small or Growing Medium Business: $15,000 per Month

This budget amount is substantial and can be divided up in several ways. Some examples of allocating the $15,000 would be:

• $4,000 per month in-house content writer and content marketing specialist
• $8,000 – $10,000 per month on peripheral marketing employees along with agency support, graphic design, and/or video production capabilities
• $500 per month on content tools as well as graphic design assets and misc. Expenses
• $1,000 – $2,500 on content promotion — still 3/4 paid social

This budget allows you to employ talented and experienced employees to perform the copywriting, marketing oversight and overall content management. You also have alternatives to pay outside resources to complete content marketing tasks where you don’t have inside talent, or don’t need full-time support.

You’ll be able to afford additional promotional talent, like video production and professional graphic design. You can purchase more sophisticated marketing and design tools.

The Fuel of SEO Is Content

Without relevant content that addresses the pain points of your target market, rankings are temporary and customers will look to your competitors to have their questions answered. So your content marketing strategy is extremely important to keeping you in the top of the Search Engine results.

Of course, the amount you allocate to your content marketing budget is your call. But remember, you get what you pay for. Don’t skimp on that area of your business.

Hopefully, you now have a clearer idea of what your content budget can be, and if not, we’re here to help! Contact Colorado Springs SEO for Growth to learn how we can help!