4 things to consider before starting a Content Marketing campaign
Considering a content marketing campaign? Read this first:
If you’re considering starting a content marketing campaign, there are a range of questions you have to ask yourself. Setting up a blog is easy. Creating and curating content, sharing content across social media platforms, and boosting posts to reach a larger social audience are the time/money aspects of a campaign.
Content marketing budgets can vary dramatically from one organisation to another depending on your objectives, internal resourcing capabilities and the nature of the audience you’re targeting.
Unless you started a blog at the dawn of the internet, forget about developing a strong organic audience within a few months. With the rise of social media newsfeed content consumption, and the continued rise of pay to play, boosting posts with ad spend to direct content to a wider audience is now an integral part of any strategy. Because of this, it’s critical to include expected paid media spends in your budget for short and long-term returns.
Elizabeth Owens, BDM at KingContent recently shared a post about why Content Marketing campaigns often fall apart. Expectations and budget are two one of the reasons she outlined.
4 Things to consider when planning your content marketing strategy
1. How much do you need to outsource?
- Do you have internal content producers, editors and designers?
- Do they have time to be allocated to this program?
- Will you have to outsource content creation? Further reading: 1001 Content Ideas
2. How much content do you need to publish per week/month/quarter to achieve your objectives?
- More content will require a larger budget
- Further reading: The benefits of Content curation and creation
3. Who will manage distribution of the content across your website, social media and email marketing channels?
- Managing multiple social media platforms does take time and energy and is a resource that must be invested in
- Further reading: Social Media – are you guilty of set and forget?
4. What’s your Social spend?
- If you want more eyeballs, unfortunately you have to play to pay:
- Technology platform fees eg Hootsuite
- Resource time required eg platform management
- Paid media fees eg Facebook advertisting spend.
Time is Money. Whether it’s yours or an external service provider’s time being used to enable a Content Marketing strategy, it is still money. Content marketing needs focus, strategy, time and a budget.
Cheers,
Sam