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How to Minimize the Cost of Content Marketing and Maximize the Benefits

CopySmiths August 13, 2021

Content marketing is the linchpin of any successful business with an online presence.

As such, there is an ever-expanding roster when it comes to diminishing your expenditure and harnessing your benefits so you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck.

Nowadays, it’s easy to minimize your content marketing costs. It’s getting easier every day. And doing so effectively can make the difference in giving you a competitive advantage in your medium.

Minimizing Your Costs: Two Key Resources

1. Tech Solutions

There’s a variety of software that can help you cover your bases, either for free or for a considerably lower cost than employees. For each of your needs, these are our top five suggested options.

Project Management

  • Akana
  • Basecamp
  • Smartsheet
  • Trello
  • Workday

When you use an app to manage workflow, you spare yourself the cost of having to hire a team to concatenate the different activities going on in your firm.

You also reduce your margin of error, which makes all the difference to interdependent tasks.

Internal Communication

  • Chanty
  • Discord
  • Google Chat
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Slack

These tools exist to prevent crossed wires and lost work. They integrate people, conversations, and chat boxes to tools and files.

From the get-go, the use of such an app saves you the cost of the time it takes to amass and distribute people and material.

Text Editing

  • Ginger
  • Grammarly
  • HemingwayApp
  • ProWriteAid
  • Turnitin

You’ll have a hard time keeping your SEO at its most powerful if your content is not up to par. The most cost-effective way to build quality control into your process is to use a text editing software.

Publishing

  • Amazon Kindle (ebooks)
  • Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok
  • Issuu
  • Medium
  • Wix

The online publishing world is becoming more sophisticated. What this means for you  is you can launch world-class media while incurring minimal costs, because online publishers are adapting to businesses’ content marketing needs in scope and offerings.

Analytics

  • Clicky
  • Google Analytics
  • Heap
  • Hootsuite
  • Woopra

These apps come in different flavors and levels of complexity – a great help when it comes to breaking your needs down into specifics.

Some are free while others have free versions, which are still quite potent when it comes to analyzing your traffic.

2. Strategy

Beyond content, you’re at the helm of an overarching marketing campaign. To make things happen, it’s important that you ground your vision in reality.

To this end, it’s all about reviewing what you’ve done and where you want to go.

Determine Upcoming Goals

What’s the next great accomplishment for you? How do they connect to the progress you’ve made thus far? What specific change do you want to see in sales, ROI, traffic, awareness, and brand perception?

Goals must be defined in tandem with timeframes.

Set up Time Cycles

Some of your executive decisions need flexibility, while others need consistency. Schedule regular and periodic progress reviews, using ubiquitous time markers – months, quarters, years — or more adaptive markers.

You’re generating content: make a conscious choice about your publishing cycle.

How often do you think you should, can you, and do you want to post content so you can best serve your audience, your brand, and your goal?

Compare the Prices of Different Types of Content and Plans

Take a look at a quick reference of prices ranges for different content types:
Blog posts: free to $2000 per post

  • Ebooks: free to $4500+
  • Slideshows: free to $500+
  • Infographics, charts, and media assets: free to $5000+
  • Video: free to $2000+
  • Promotion: free to $500+

Other content types to check out include case studies, webinars, podcasts, checklists, guest posts, live streams, and white papers.

Specifying a timeframe here helps too, because it allows you to save on, for example, blog posts. If you choose to buy them in a bundle, they can be published in a successive order throughout, say, the space of two years.

Choose Who’s Going to Create Content for You

Depending on what fits your needs, you might find the best choice is to hire a contractor (e.g. a freelancer), an ad agency, or you might want to assemble an in-house practice if you don’t have one.

The combination of choices you make, and maintaining the dynamic they create, can be enough to give you a competitive edge.

For instance, in productivity levels — which can be a defining factor when it comes to maximizing your content marketing benefits.

Maximizing Your Benefits

There are three things to do when it comes to redoubling your value.

1. Stick to a Marketing Plan

Make a plan. Start by considering plans that are tried and true.Plans that are tried and true are really just the processes that other businesses, ones that have been successful before you, have used.

Have a look at businesses that operate in your field. Find a plan you believe in and are confident in committing to.

See it through. Don’t lose sight of your goal. To this end, make sure your plan includes milestones.Our grand schemes are made of the everyday. And the everyday is made of small frustrations, surprises, contingencies, and lulls.

To make the everyday work for your vision, it’s crucial to track your progress through your pre-established timeframes.

2. Keep Rhythm

  • Publish content often
  • Publish content regularly

Google’s search engine analytics favor websites that produce content evaluated as engaging and useful on a regular basis and in short intervals (daily or in hourly time blocks).

3. Spread Your Content Through Social Media

Publish your copy on all your relevant media outlets.

Copy is all about content that can be printed repeatedly and distributed widely.

Using your business’ social media serves to bank your content so that consumers can learn about your brand in greater depth and use it as a reference.Consolidate your online presence.

You might have one completed blog article to share with the world; by posting it to your, say, five different social platforms, you’re giving one article five times the outlet while maintaining a united front for your brand.

Responsiveness: address public user questions and craft a sense of reliability.

Branding is key to customer adherence. You want to know your audience and how to communicate with them: effectively, consistently, and authentically.

If you have an audience, though, you’re providing a service, and, ultimately, a service is as strong as its reliability.

A tenet of reliability is responsiveness to customers, a feature that has also been duly shaped by modern times.

We see this in the form of social media accounts that are manned by writers who are prepared to answer and escalate pressing questions that are posted publicly or messaged privately.

Final Words

We’ve looked at a comprehensive maintenance plan to make sure you’re at the cutting edge when it comes to taking advantage of the resources at your disposal to cut costs and harness effortless momentum for your business.

Which insights, tools, or app use suggestions were most eye-opening? Which are you planning to apply? What do you want us to explore further? Let us know — and let us know your results in your upcoming cycles.

You’ve officially got what it takes. Now it’s time to get cracking.

Katrina McKinnon

CopySmiths

I'm Katrina McKinnon, founder of CopySmiths and Small Revolution. In my 20 years of experience, I have helped online businesses create high-performing content specifically on an eCommerce store's blog. Find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.