Content Marketing on a Budget

Content is King! A statement that originally comes from an essay by Bill Gates in 1996, but has now also found its justification in B2B marketing: Content marketing involves distributing content to expand your business’s audience, boost your brand awareness and ultimately generate new leads. It is essential that your business adopt a content marketing plan in order to remain competitive. Research indicates that 69% of successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.

What if you do not have the budget to implement a content marketing strategy? It has been demonstrated that a lack of budget is the biggest challenge for most CMOs. Hence, it is often the case that marketers have great ideas for their content marketing but no budget to support it.

We have some good news!

No budget, No worries! Luckily there are many ways to develop effective content without breaking the bank. Read on to discover our top tips on how to produce a successful content marketing strategy on a tight budget…

 

Big Content, Small Budget: Top Tips

1. Refine, Recycle, Repurpose 

Perhaps the most effective and easy way to distribute content without spending is to repurpose your old material. Almost 90% of B2B marketers say that repurposing existing content is more effective than producing new content in terms of time, costs, and results. This repurposing process involves using your existing content material to either refine it, transform it into a different format or reposting it onto a new variety of channels. Some different content formats are:

  • Whitepaper 
  • Video
  • Podcast
  • E-Book
  • Infographic 
  • Webinar
  • Guest Post

 A great starting point is to create a downloadable guide, whitepaper or e-book using your old articles and blog posts that relate to a particular topic. 

Overall, updating, modifying and converting your old content is better than starting from scratch every time. This will help you to save money and make the most of your resources.

 

2. Quality over Quantity 

 One source of wasted budget is the failure to maximise the success of each piece of content you produce. Every single piece of content that you deliver should add as much value as possible. For instance, it would be more beneficial for your brand to produce one piece of content that holds high value, than produce ten different pieces that all lack quality. Focusing your time, effort and resources towards producing high quality content will boost its success. It will allow you to stay relevant and interesting to your existing audience, engage with new viewers and hence, generate new potential leads. 

How can you ensure quality within your content? Firstly, spend your time on aspects that will bring results instead of wasting time on the parts that will not add value to your content. Do your research. What ‘quality content’ means will be unique to your brand and your audience. Figure out what your customers are interested in and what the latest B2B trends are and make sure your content revolves around this. Lastly, be consistent and reliable. In order, to build up a sustainable audience you need to produce relatively consistent content and keep it relevant. After all, your customers will only read/view your content if it is interesting to them!

 

3. Concentrate on your High Performing Content

It is very important to monitor the results of each piece of content that you release. How?  You can measure the success of each content piece by collecting data and observing the analytics that they produce. In turn this will allow you to make performance comparisons between different types of content, different content topics and different distribution channels. This information can guide your next move within your content strategy. For instance, if you notice a particular topic is getting more engagement from your audience than another, focus more on that topic. Or perhaps LinkedIn is the channel that drives the most traffic to your website. Therefore, it will be important to spend more time and effort on this platform into the future. 

 

4. Seed Your Old Content into Your New Content

When producing new content it is important to try and mention or link back to previous content that may be relevant. Relating your different pieces of content together will allow you to direct your viewers to other pieces of content on your website that they may be interested in. This may boost the chances of them becoming a potential lead especially if they come across a piece of content that resonates directly with their business needs. Additionally this technique will increase your SEO.

 

5. Distribute Your Content Effectively

So once you have your content created, how do you promote it without breaking your budget? The key here is to use your social media platforms efficiently. By making use of the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Xing to repost your content and using relevant hashtags you will be able to reach a much larger audience. Using your social channels to promote your content will drive new and existing viewers onto your website without having to spend on external advertising. 

Are You Ready to do More With Less?

Content marketing can often seem daunting due to its high cost. However, there are ways to keep the spending down. If you put our tips and suggestions into practice, you can still implement an effective strategy for marketing your content with a limited budget. Good luck!

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