No business owner can afford to ignore the value of online marketing—and in 2017, having a smart online marketing campaign means having quality content. If you are going to effectively promote your company online, you’ll need to be able to provide your customers with a reason to seek out your website, your social media pages, and your blog. This raises the question, however, of just how much you need to invest in your content marketing efforts.
What Other Companies Are Doing
How much time, money, and resources should your company be dedicating to its content marketing campaign? If you want to get a better sense of what your answer to this question should be, you might want to begin by looking at recent industry trends.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, the average company today spends about 28% of its total marketing budget on content marketing. The same study also found a discernable trend: the more of its budget the average company dedicates to content marketing, the more likely it is to consider its online marketing campaign effective. Just more than half of companies surveyed reported that they planned to increase the amount of their budget devoted to content marketing efforts.
In a more recent study, the Content Marketing Institute also learned that:
- 62% of companies surveyed said they felt that their content marketing campaigns were more successful this year than they were in the previous year, with 17% considering their campaigns “much more successful.”
- 85% of companies surveyed attributed their boost in success over the previous year to higher quality content.
- 72% of companies surveyed said that their success was due in part to changing or developing their overall content marketing strategy.
- 53% of companies surveyed said that making their content marketing campaigns a higher priority was a strong factor in their success.
The trends are clear, and they are easy to define. Content marketing has moved to the center of most businesses’ online promotional strategies, and smart online marketing has become inseparable from good, high-quality content creation. If you want to keep up with your competition and thrive within your industry, you should be spending a significant percentage of your company’s resources on generating great content.
Developing a Budget for Your Content Marketing Campaign
Every company’s content marketing needs are going to be different, which means that there’s no one-size-fits-all budget for your company. It may be helpful, however, to break down the average company’s online marketing budget. According to Snap Agency, in 2016, the average company spent:
- $4,995 on its social media budget.
- $2,468 on its email marketing budget.
- $8,237 on its mobile marketing budget.
- $27,600 on its display advertising budget.
- $33,319 on its search marketing budget.
While the social media budget may not be the highest number on this list, that isn’t reflective of its relative importance—in fact, from 2011 to 2016, social media spending rose more sharply than any of the other individual budgets. With the audience for platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn growing every year, social media represents a built-in audience that has tremendous potential for marketing.
Your own company’s budget doesn’t have to match this one, of course. The most valuable lesson that should be drawn from this sample budget is that all five of these critical marketing areas are worthy of your time and resources. If one of these categories is missing from your online marketing strategy, it’s time to fill that gap.
How Offering Content to Your Clients Can Benefit Both of You
If you don’t want your company to be left behind by these marketing trends, it’s essential that you take the time to make sure that you have first-rate content. Your content concerns, however, don’t end with your own company’s content. If you have clients of your own, providing them with the content they need for their own online presences can benefit you and your clients alike.
- Your clients may not have the time or ability to create their own content. This is particularly true in regard to blogs, which present the ongoing challenge of coming up with fresh, original, and relevant content.
- The high-quality content you offer to your clients can be optimized to help them improve their online visibility.
- You can also help your clients develop a smart content marketing strategy to ensure that they get the results they want.
- Content creation can benefit your company by helping you strengthen your ties with your existing clients and giving you a new service that you can use to broaden your client base.
This, of course, creates a new challenge for you—that of creating strong content on a regular basis. You can simplify the process by relying on a professional content creation company. At Pennington Creative, we specialize in developing outstanding content for a wide range of different industries. Our experienced content creators can provide you with everything from email newsletters to fully researched eGuides. If you’d like to find out more, contact us today to set up a discovery call.
