Does your marketing team build a content budget based on the cost of developing your content? If so, you are not alone. What most people do not know is that the true value of content is not the cost of its creation, rather, it is the value of the outcome it is designed to affect. For instance, if a content marketing campaign is designed to generate more qualified leads, the value of the content relates to the value of the additional qualified leads that will be generated. This becomes the basis for building a budget for that campaign.
Mapping content to its expected revenue impact enables accurate content budgeting. Expert, Matt Heinz, states that, ?Working back from impact enables you to think not only about how much something costs, but also what it is worth?. Mapping content also provides guidance for adjusting budget spend in real time, which makes it easier to modify content strategy mid-campaign to address underperforming parts of the strategy or improve overall outcomes. Having this kind of budget flexibility allows for a more agile content marketing strategy.
To find out how prevalent spending reallocations are in marketing programs, we asked marketing professionals the following question:
Do you adjust your budget as your campaign progresses?
- All the time
- Never
- Often
- Rarely
- Sometimes
One hundred twenty-three respondents answered in this way:
Only a small percentage of respondents routinely adjust budgeting, yet inflexible budgets can result in increased opportunity cost because there is an opportunity cost to not cutting off budget on things that are not working. There is also an opportunity cost to not increasing funding on things that are working and can scale. By building budgets based on outcome value, marketers have more flexibility to make mid-stream adjustments to improve content performance.
You can find out more about what the marketing experts have to say about budgeting by reading our eBook 7 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI.