While your content marketing budget will evolve and change over time, I’ve seen how you can establish a solid funding framework with these five best practices.
1. Pinpoint your target audience.
Don’t waste money on marketing to customers who aren’t interested in your product or service. While you may get the occasional unexpected conversion, I can tell you that the vast majority of prospective buyers outside your intended audience will either ignore your content or actively seek to disengage from it.
To prevent this from happening — and korea telegram data to find your funding sweet spot — I recommend ensuring you’ve pinpointed your target audience. Common customer factors can include demographics such as age, location, average income, and historic patterns of content interaction. This is always my first step.
At HubSpot, Milliken says her team’s writing focuses on specific personas. That laser focus on who the audience is makes sure the team’s content resonates with potential customers.
2. Calculate your current content marketing spend.
Next, I’ll calculate how much I should spend — but before I do that, I need to know how much I’m currently spending. It sounds simple enough, but I find this is a crucial first step.
This number includes money spent on creating social media posts, blogs, videos, and other content, along with any funds used for research and preparation. And don’t forget to include the cost of tracking content metrics as part of your larger budget.
Current spend provides a baseline for future content budgets. Even if your plan is to boost spending to increase your reach, knowing what you spend now helps you level set for new initiatives.
“I keep track of what I spend in multiple places,” Milliken comments. “I have a tracker that shows my team’s spend per month. Then, I put those numbers in Allocadia so leadership knows how much is spent on content marketing across programs.”
3. Define your strategic goals.
What’s the plan? If you don’t have one, don’t start spending that budget just yet.
While you could take a scattershot approach to content marketing, you’ll get out what you put in: Assets that occasionally hit the mark but mostly miss your target audience.
Instead of hoping for the best, I always the first thing that is important to find out is the demographics build a budget plan. Identify content areas that have seen significant growth over the past year, and prioritize those efforts. Even better? I drill down into why they’re working with surveys or focus groups.
For example, if you’re seeing great canada cell numbers returns on short-form videos, ask customers why they’re working so well. Sure, the smaller length plays a role, but what else stands out about the content? The visuals? The audio? The CTA? Play to your strengths to get the best return on your investment.
If you’re still developing and evolving your goals (and who isn’t!), HubSpot’s free content planning templates can also be a big help. And Content Hub, of course, is a great unified platform for creating and managing personalized content experiences across the customer journey.
