Content marketing is still relatively inexpensive, but its impact can last longer than most other marketing and advertising strategies. Publishing quality content extends your potential market reach, helps move consumers along the sales funnel, boosts your search engine rankings, and increases brand loyalty.
Unfortunately, marketing budgets are not unlimited, so you need to take advantage of every opportunity to maximize the impact of your content. Here are 10 ways to ensure you get as much value as possible out of your content marketing budget.
1. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
Trying to produce as much content as possible can actually devalue your overall content strategy. If your content doesn’t provide value to your readers, they’ll eventually look elsewhere for inspiration. Focus on creating fewer, higher-quality content pieces, rather than lots of average ones. Growth from content marketing comes from quality, not quantity.
2. Hire Specialists Writers
You may think that you’ll save money by doing it yourself, but outsourcing content to a professional freelance writer will provide you with better quality work in less time. To get more value from outsourcing content, choose to work with specialist writers who understand your industry; they’ll boost the quality of your content and the credibility of your brand.
3. Use a Content Marketing Platform
Using a content marketing platform will make it easier to assemble a content team and collaborate efficiently with expert writers. At Constant Content, we give you access to freelance writers that are experts across all industries.
To make your production process leaner, use our messaging system for easy collaboration with writers. Our editorial calendar and “My Projects” tool will also help you keep track of deadlines and even publish content directly to your preferred channels.
4. A/B Test Content
To maximize content value, you need to know what works. For this, you need to test. Test your landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and blog posts. And don’t forget to analyze your headlines, calls-to-action, forms, and social media content.
For example, send two versions of a blog title to a live audience on Twitter. Show one headline to 50 percent of your followers and the second headline to the other 50 percent. Then see which headline gets more clicks.
You should also test data like time spent on landing pages, which you can find in Google Analytics. If you use WordPress, there are plugins specifically built for A/B testing blog post headlines. Social media platforms also have tools to test your content performance.
5. Repurpose Your Best Materials
Another way to lower your content creation costs is to reinvent or reuse past content. You could transform a popular post into a different format to reach a new audience. For example, turn a blog post into a video, or an old white paper into an email marketing series. Repurposing existing content requires no new research, so it cuts down creation time considerably.
6. Harness User-Generated Content
Encourage your customers and followers to submit their own content. You could ask customers for reviews, photos, advice, or just entertaining content based around your brand or company values. Any user-generated content you receive is not only free, it’s a great way to engage your user base and build brand awareness.
7. Use Free Distribution Channels
Paid advertising can be an effective part of your content marketing activity, but only if you have the resources to track the results and implement effective follow-up campaigns.
Using free platforms like social media will give a quick boost to any content you create. Also, remember to take advantage of email, industry magazines, and social bookmarking sites like Reddit; they’re all powerful channels to distribute your content at no extra cost.
8. Create More Evergreen Content
Any content that has the potential to remain relevant for years to come is classed as “evergreen.” Because this type of content adds value to your entire content archive, it ultimately gives you a greater return on your initial investment. It may take longer to create evergreen content, so it’s in your best interest to promote it more often over a longer period of time.
9. Update Old Content
Similar to repurposing content, updating content is another way to give your content strategy an instant boost. If you’re involved in a fast-paced industry, it’s especially important to revisit past content to make sure it’s not outdated. Instead of creating a new post from scratch, simply tweak your original content to make it relevant and up to date.
10. Create Multifunctional Content
To maximize the value of each piece of content, make sure it achieves multiple goals. For example, a how-to blog post that includes a clear call-to-action to register for a free product trial fulfills three goals:
1. It gives useful information to potential and current customers.
2. It can be used as a landing page to attract web traffic from search engines.
3. It can increase conversions, encouraging readers to sign up to the free trial.
The Bottom Line
Unlike some traditional marketing strategies, content marketing doesn’t have to rely on big production and huge budgets. These 10 strategies will help you cut costs, while still achieving multiple marketing goals. Even if you have a limited budget, you can still extend content reach and durability, and enjoy a higher return on your content marketing investment.
Do you need quality content to support your content marketing? Constant Content connects you with thousands of professional writers able to create articles, ebooks, product descriptions and other assets to tell your brand story, drive SEO and win sales.