How Much Should You Invest in Content Marketing?

Author: Jayson DeMers / Source: Entrepreneur

Content marketing is a powerful marketing strategy for attracting new traffic, building your brand’s reputation and earning more sales and conversions. But even though you aren’t paying for elements like ad placement or expensive resources, you’ll still be paying for the strategy you use, in terms of the labor and the time you personally invest.

Some entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest anything at all until they know a particular strategy will work, which leads to a perpetual cycle of non-investment. Others don’t know how much is appropriate to invest, and therefore can’t make a budgetary decision on whether or not to move forward.

So, how much, exactly, should you be investing in content marketing?

Potential payoff

First, take a look at the potential payoff of a content marketing campaign for your business in terms of total ROI (return on investment). It’s hard to gauge this precisely, but you can calculate, in general, the payoffs of content marketing across several different dimensions:

• Brand visibility and reputation. Publishing content in various locations will expose more people to your brand. Your readers will also see you as more of an authority, which could drive increased sales and conversion rates. This is hard to measure, but is still an important consideration.
• Inbound traffic attraction. Depending on what you do with your finished content, you can attract new traffic through SEO, inbound links, social media, email marketing or other channels.
• Customer retention. Customers who like your content will stay on your site longer and visit more frequently, which will affect conversions and retention.
• Direct conversion potential. In the body of your content, you can offer more direct conversion opportunities, which can increase your conversion rate.

With all these potential routes to success, you can shift your investment to favor the tactics that are most beneficial to your business; for example, if you have a great conversion rate but lousy incoming traffic, you can use…

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