Effective content marketing budget distribution

If you are a small to medium sized business (SMB) owner, effective web design, and effective marketing online, will no doubt be important to your company. As part of this you should seriously consider content marketing, for all it’s many advantages and benefits. And if you already use content marketing, you’ll know that a content marketing budget is necessary to keep on top of targets and make a real difference to your success online. But how should this budget be divided? And how can you establish an effective way to share the budget across the complex range of content marketing tasks? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and web marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and content marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester. As a result, we have produced this guide to effective content marketing budget distribution.

Content marketing strategy areas

Content marketing, when it is to be effective, will need to cover three different strategy areas. These are:

• content ideation- establishing the topics to cover and the goals of the content
• content creation- creating the various types of content needed
• content analysis- evaluating the performance of the content to inform future content goals

And these areas should be cyclical, with the content analysis fueling the content ideation process.

Effective content marketing budget distribution

So, how should you divide your budget over these three areas? Well, this will be different for every company, as there are several things to consider, including:

• Do you need to outsource, and what for? You might be an SMB that can effectively create content ideas, but need to outsource for the content creation, or you might need to outsource for the content analysis. Clearly, areas that you need to outsource will be the priority for your budget, as in general it will cost more.
• Do you need to pay subscription fees? Some companies will have subscription fees associated with the content marketing strategy including licencing for images and visual content like infographics, software for content creation, and even analytics too. So for any area where you need to pay a subscription fee, this will need to be allocated additional funds from the budget.

Beyond these two factors, your content marketing budget should focus on:

1. Creation- 50%
2. Analysis- 35%
3. Ideation- 15%

Content creation the content marketing budget

From a well written, informative article, to a podcast, or a professional video, producing the content often takes the most time, and ends up eating the largest portion of your content marketing budget. It’s important though that you do not skimp or rush this stage of the process, as it’s absolutely crucial that any content you create is professional and high quality. After all, it will be associated with your brand, permanently.

Content analysis and the content marketing budget

Analyzing the content produced, and effectively evaluating the performance of the content is crucial to content development. Without data collected from content, it can be impossible to plan a content marketing strategy that will actually help your company grow and develop. You need to really understand what your users are doing when they land on your page, where they have been referred from, and where they go after reading. That’s why content analysis needs a healthy budget to succeed.

For more information or for professional web design and web marketing support, get in touch with the team today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.