You’ve heard content marketing is inexpensive, but how inexpensive is it?
If you’ve heard of content marketing, you’ve also heard about its greatest strength; it’s relatively inexpensive to start and manage an ongoing campaign. You won’t be paying costs for advertising, all your investments will continue paying off long after you’ve made them, and the power of your campaign should scale exponentially the more you put into it.
But how much should you be paying for a content marketing campaign in the first place?
Content Marketing Costs
First, let’s break down what you’re actually paying for. You won’t be paying fees and overhead costs, like you would for an ad campaign. Instead, you’ll mostly be paying for labor, including:
- Content creation, including both written content development and visual content design.
- Content placement, including onsite and offsite publications.
- Search optimization, which adds another layer of effort to the work.
- Syndication and promotion, which can include additional costs if you use ads to promote your work, but otherwise includes syndication on social media.
You Get What You Pay For
If you look hard enough, you’ll find content marketers running the full spectrum of the content pay scale, from freelancers writing articles for $5 each to content agencies charging $10,0000 or more for a month of work.
In content marketing, quality is everything; one well-written post is worth more than 10 decent posts, and even if you “save” money by investing in lower-quality material, all the money you do invest could end up wasted.
Does that mean you should always go with the most expensive option? Not necessarily, but it means you should try to find a balance, and choose a content provider that most closely aligns with your budget and goals.
We’re still left with the question: how much should a content marketing campaign cost? That depends on how much content you want to produce, how fast you want to see results, and how much you’re willing to spend, but generally, you’ll want to pay at least a few thousand dollars a month. Work with a reputable agency or a freelancer with a history of provable results; the real key here isn’t how much you pay, but what kind of ROI you can get.
