EMBiz: What Brands Should Pay For Digital Content Marketing
What Brands Should Pay For Digital Content Marketing
Cody Owens
How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?
Hi, Cody here with Elevate My Brand. And today I'm going to answer the question (sort of) of, "How much does content marketing cost?" Now, the reason why I say "sort of" is because any marketing agency or marketer that tells you that they can give you a number without really diving into what your brand and your market is, is lying to you—or they're a wizard from the future. I don't really think those exist, so they're lying, but we're not gonna lie to you.
Content marketing cost range
Content marketing is really dependent upon your brand, your market and your audience. So we can't give you an exact number. You really need to work with an agency or a marketer to figure out the data and let the data inform how much you need to spend on your content marketing needs. However, I can tell you that in 2023 a survey by brands showed that they spent anywhere from $1,000 to more than $50,000 per month on content marketing agencies. That is a wide range and some pretty big numbers. So you need to know how much you're going to spend and if it's worth it to you. Make sure that any content marketing conversation bakes in there what your return on investment is going to be and how you're going to measure that. So, look at the data and decide what you want to focus on and how much content you're going to need.
Determining content marketing costs
Two things will influence the quantity and the quality. Those are going to influence how much your content marketing costs. Let's start with quality. Your quality is going to be determined by your audience and, really, your brand identity. If the quality needs are really high, because you're in sort of an upscale industry or you have a high-quality product, then you're clearly going to want a little bit more content and make sure that that content is high quality to match the product or service or brand.
Two things go into that: how broad or how niche you are. If you're extremely broad, then you can bring in any sort of content marketer or writer. But if you're extremely niche and very technical, then you may have to have someone with more expertise to create that content and also the technical aspect of how much education is required for your product. Are you going to have to create a lot of content? Is it going to have to be specific? Really, really detailed and focused so you get really good quality of content? If so, then your content marketing costs are going to be a little bit higher than average. Probably.
Then, we'll talk about quantity of content. Obviously, the more content, the more spend there. It's going to be largely determined by your market. If you do your competitive analysis and you see that all of your competitors are pumping out lots of great content all the time to be competitive, you're probably going to have to do the exact same thing, or at the very least, find what your unique selling proposition is (or your USP) and where you want to focus your content so that you can do less content but focused on a specific direction. A couple of considerations there:
What are your competitor's blog post cadence? How much thought leadership content are they pushing out there? Do you need to match that? Et cetera?
What is your social media frequency?
What are the market trends and shifts like in your industry? If there are a lot of new innovations and inventions in your industry, things you really need to keep up with, then you're going to need more quantity of content. You're probably going to have to change your website pretty frequently, etc.
And then the last piece there is educational content. Going back to how specific you are, how niche you are, how technical you are, are you going to have to constantly put out more content to teach your audience? If so, you're going to have to have a higher quantity of content, which again means higher costs at the end of the day.
The takeaway here is you need to know what your success metric is. What is the purpose of this content? What do you drive into? What's that conversion? And then you need to quantify how much is that success metric worth to you and then work backwards from there. If what our conversion is, is going to equal this net profit to us, then we can work backwards and say we need to get $100 in sales. What is that worth? And if we can convert, using this content, how much are we willing to pay for that content?
So, it's very much a mathematical conversation, but it's definitely something I advise talking to your content marketer or a marketing agency like Elevate My Brand about so that we can dive into your metrics and your market and tell you how much you actually need to spend on content marketing.