Content marketing is difficult to put a value on. But, with 62% of marketers increasing their budgets to improve their content marketing success in 2020, ideating a successful content strategy is of the utmost importance. Use these tips to discover how you can work with a small budget and still deliver outstanding results for your clients.
Finding your bearings
What’s your budget?
Before even thinking about the ideation of your content strategy, you need to know exactly how much budget you have. From this point, you can begin to separate this budget into different sections in order to be able to spot where and how you can save those pennies.
What’s your direction?
You need to establish exactly which direction you want to take your content strategy in. Get your whole team in a room, and start mapping out everyone’s ideas on a whiteboard. By brainstorming and creating a visual mindmap this way, you will be able to see which areas of your strategy need more TLC than others.
Existing resources
Throughout the brainstorming process, you will also be able to look around the room and pinpoint exactly which members of your team have existing resources which you can utilise. Whether someone is a whizz on Photoshop, or someone else has an analytical mind – there will be hidden skills you can make use of to avoid outsourcing staff (which can be expensive).
Focus on cost-efficiency and start with a blog
Starting your content strategy off with a blog is a great way to produce interesting and relevant content without breaking the bank. If you have talented copywriters in your team, this will be a breeze and you can wave goodbye to writer’s block.
The end to end process of writing a blog should take no more than 3-4 hours, including research and copyediting. This is a core component and a quick, easy, and cheap way to attract new visitors to your client’s site with relevant and engaging content.
However, in order for the blog to succeed, it needs to be up to date with content at least once a week. Consumers will get bored quickly if they are not supplied with consistent content – this decrease in attention span results from a number of factors, but most significantly from the increase in smartphone use and shift to mobile content consumption. So, make sure to stay on top of this.
Industry news
To rank well organically for trends in your client’s field, it’s crucial to stay up to date with what’s going on in that industry. Lucky for you, this is super easy to do and doesn’t cost a penny. There are thousands of newsletters and news sites which are updated every single day with the latest news. Put 15 minutes into your calendar every morning to read these. You can then jump on writing copy about these hot topics before everyone else.
Creative assets
You may not have a huge amount of experience with graphic/creative design, but you’d be surprised what you can create on simple graphic design websites, such as Canva. You can try a free subscription and see how you get on, but it might be worth investing a portion of your budget into this – especially as Canva Pro is around $13 a month.
Sites like this are also super handy when it comes to presenting your performance reports back to your clients. A more visual aesthetic is easier to translate, rather than just a load of text on a page.
Analyse performance metrics
With access to certain analytical platforms (Google Analytics is great if you have access), you will be able to track and record performance in quantitative form. Create a spreadsheet and cross analyse results against each other. The main metrics you should look at are:
- Scroll depth
- Time on page
- Pageviews
- Returning visitors
The metrics above will give you insight into what is working and what isn’t. So, instead of wasting your budget trialling various types and styles of content, you can see in black and white what is performing well and what isn’t.
What are your competitors doing?
It’s also worth reviewing your direct competitors’ content in order to see how you compare to them. You won’t be able to see specific performance metrics in granular detail, but you will be able to gauge what is working well based on ranking in the SERPs. You can then reflect on these and look and adjusting your content to ensure the popularity and interest is always excelling.
Recycle your content
Creating content that you can then reuse is a great way to repurpose your content and in turn, save those coins. This doesn’t rule out the fact that you have to create unique content in order to gain traffic, but it’s good to think about how you can transform these in future to save money.
Quality over quantity
Your content will inform and engage your consumers, so it always has to be of high quality. One poorly written piece of content can seriously affect your client reputation and potentially lose loyal consumers.
Whilst it is important to stay consistent with regular uploads, this does not mean the quality of these uploads should be compromised at any cost. There are no rules to say you have to spend a lot of money in order to create quality content – it’s about understanding the entire process of why you are creating content, not about how much money you throw at it.
Content marketing is here to stay
Over the years, the interest in content marketing has steeply risen. Search statistics show it more popular now than it ever has been, so it’s never been more important to focus your efforts on devising the perfect content strategy.
Use the existing skills of your team to work around the issue of your budget without sacrificing the quality of your work. As cliche as it sounds, with a small budget, you need to work smarter, not harder.
To find out more and to speak to one of the content team, get in touch.
