How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?

Content marketing has been a high-return focus for many businesses, and the push for it over the last couple of years reflects how consumers want to gain information.

If you aren't on the content marketing bandwagon already, it's time to start investing.

Understanding Your Overall Marketing Cost

How Much Do Businesses Spend on Content Marketing?

The average company budgets between 7% and 10% of business revenue for marketing. Of course, depending on the size and needs of your business, that percentage may be higher or lower.

Marketing is all about earning visibility for your products and services. Marketing costs scale with the size of your business. The more annual revenue you pull in, the more you can dedicate to marketing and the more customers you attract. It's a beautiful cycle.

Marketing itself is a blanket term, and there are many types of marketing, but they usually fall into either traditional or digital marketing. Content marketing, in turn, is a specific type of digital marketing.

Several ongoing trends make digital marketing costs worthwhile: the boom of search algorithms, the rise of internet browsing, and the value of the internet as the center and hub of much of our culture. It's no wonder the average spending for digital marketing is growing by more than 14%--the internet has become the place where we work, play, and learn.

Not to say that traditional marketing isn't effective, but traditional methods such as newspaper, TV, and billboard advertisements tend to have:

• Higher costs
• Smaller reach
• Less engagement
• Fewer means of tracking and analyzing results

For businesses with smaller budgets, digital marketing delivers the most bang for your buck. If your business has deeper pockets, creating a complementary blend of digital and traditional marketing brings out great results.

The next question is, "How much does digital marketing cost?" Digital marketing tends to account for up to 80% of total marketing budgets. Content creation is a big part of this investment, in both time and dollars!

How Much Should Content Marketing Cost to Create?

Content marketing can cost up to 62% less than traditional marketing. It's one of the most cost-effective methods to connect to your audience.

Content writing, which includes articles, blogs, and other written material, is a solid, go-to choice when it comes to content marketing. You can manage content creation yourself, but with the variety of content creators available, many businesses prefer to outsource their content writing.

Content writing services pricing varies depending on who you go to. Each business makes its own determinations on things like how much to charge for writing web content versus how much to charge for Instagram content creation. Some types of content take more time and skill to create than others, but in all cases you can benefit from collaborating with experts. This is especially true if you’re new to content marketing!

Still looking for a firm number of what content should cost in 2022? Many marketers spend up to 40% of their marketing budget on content marketing, including content creation. It may be a better approach to set your budget and work backwards.

Content Pricing Strategy - Developing Your Template

As you create your content marketing budget, go over your content strategy with our free content marketing strategy report to determine what you should be spending your time and money on.

With the report, you can use consumer insights to analyze the content pricing models of marketing firms and the new product pricing strategies best for your business.

How Much Does a Content Strategy Cost?

The cost of executing on your content strategy includes both dollars and the expense of your time. When you don’t have dollars, you will probably spend more of your own time, while a higher budget lets more problems be handled by staff or outsourced to marketing vendors.

The cost of content marketing strategy also changes depending on the type of content you envision. You need to decide how much you want to invest into things like:

• Long-form articles
• Blog articles
• Social media content
• E-books and guides
• Advertisement copy

After you decide what you'd like to include in your content strategy, give each a percentage of your budget so you know how much you're investing in each content type. Use a marketing budget template to help you, and remember to analyze the revenue that your current content is generating so you can create a successful marketing budget breakdown.

Small Business Marketing Budget Example

A few years ago, there was a CMO survey on the average marketing budget by industry. In regards to the percentage of the total budget spent on marketing:

• Consumer services: 15%
• Construction: 13%
• Education: 11%
• Retail wholesale: 10%
• Healthcare: 10%
• Manufacturing: 8%

Those numbers might have changed slightly since then, but it's good to keep in mind your industry when determining how much of your budget should go to marketing.

Control Content Marketing Costs and Prove ROI with DemandJump

DemandJump is an incredible free tool to take some of the sting out of your content marketing costs. Our platform analyzes the behavior of your customers online to reveal exactly what content they are looking for. This enables you to answer their questions, address their concerns, and ultimately win more business. Using our free Topics Summaries helps you see every search related to your main topic, as well as where your competitors are outranking you. We even give you recommendations about what to do next!

As your content climbs the search results to page one, it will be easier than ever to prove to yourself and decision-makers that your content marketing spend is worth it.

Are you ready to see your investment in content marketing pay off through page-one search rankings? Then look no further than DemandJump.