Content Marketing Economics – Part I: Production and Distribution. Economics is the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Production You can spend a lot on content, or you can spend almost nothing. Let’s look at three typical assets you might produce: a blog post, a nice infographic, and an in-depth survey. Sure, you can post it on your blog, but do you have the audience? Ultimately, determining how to spend that $10,000 comes down to consumption. There are three considerations: cost, reach, and ownership. Just like a physical good, you have production costs, and you have distribution costs. Next is reach. Building your own audience organically takes time you might not have.
English majors certainly have a leg up in the content marketing world, what with their trove of literary references and practiced writing flow. But how about Econ majors? It struck me recently there’s an important parallel with economics that can really help your content marketing execution.
Economics is the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Content marketing fits neatly into this context. It’s not about amassing a stockpile of assets, as some do, but creating a system of production and distribution that gets the job done at the right price.
We’ll take a look at content marketing through an economists lens, first covering production and distribution, and then moving on to consumption and profitability. Of course, when you create content, you need to begin with the ultimate consumer in mind, but I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to consider how you can reach your audience before getting too concerned with measuring the outcome.
Production
You can spend a lot on content, or you can spend almost nothing. For ease of comparison, we’ll consider your content marketing team’s salaries a fixed cost, and focus on the variable cost of paying writers, graphic artists, or analysts to produce various assets.
Let’s look at three typical assets you might produce: a blog post, a nice infographic, and an in-depth survey. Hiring a freelancer to write a short blog post costs in the neighborhood of $500. A professionally done infographic can set you back $5000. Hiring a specialist research firm to write and conduct a survey, including paying for the research panel, can easily cost $50,000. I’m using round numbers that are in the ballpark of what I have seen available on the market to make the math easy for all you English majors. You can certainly pay less or more.
Three different assets, each an order of magnitude difference in the price tag. How do you decide where to spend your money? You could have ten blogs for each infographic, and a hundred for each study!
Obviously, if you are budget constrained, you stick to blogging. But if you have $10,000, how should you spend it? It’s actually too early to answer that question, because…
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