Focus on Profitable Content Types
Ideally, you might want to publish content in a variety of formats to appeal to the largest audience possible. However, your tight budget means that you have to be more selective in your activities.
Find out what types of content resonate the most with your website visitors and focus on those to maximize your ROI. To do this, use a combination of analytics and trial and error data. Also, monitor your competitors to see what content formats they use.
As part of the process, calculate the time and money you must spend to create each type of content. When you find a format that consistently gets results that justifies its cost, stick with it. Such a focus will help you avoid wasting your resources while maximizing profitability.
Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
Do you have to publish a certain amount of content during a period of time? Such a practice may keep your website fresh, but it can lead to low-quality, “thin” content that fails to impress your visitors.
As a general rule, quality matters more than quantity. Still, you need to avoid over optimizing your content to control costs. After you reach a minimum quality level, additional efforts will have diminishing returns.
Your limited budget means that you can’t afford to insist on total perfection. Using the 80/20 standard as a rule of thumb, the majority of your quality will come from a minimal amount of work.
Improve Your Efficiency
You may sometimes feel as though your limited resources will prohibit you from achieving the growth your business deserves. Rather than becoming discouraged, look for ways to do more with what you have.
For instance, you can save a lot of time by grouping similar tasks from multiple projects in batches that you complete in a single sitting. Rather than researching a topic for just one blog post, prepare a couple dozen topics before exiting your research mode.
Other ways to improve efficiency include outsourcing work to freelancers, repurposing outdated content, and optimizing your processes. Also, cloud-based software for time and project management can also help you work smarter rather than harder.
Take a Holistic Approach
Rather than focusing only on online marketing channels, create a wholesome marketing strategy that includes both online and offline tactics. By extending your reach via traditional methods, you can reduce your overall expenditures while increasing your ROI.
Try ordering business cards and passing them out at community events. Also, remember that printed media such as billboards, magazines and newspapers can help you achieve your goals. Other tactics, such as giving free public lectures at libraries and schools cost you nothing while establishing yourself as an industry and community leader.
By incorporating multiple channels in your strategy, you can create a synergy that extends the usefulness of your limited funds. For example, your printed business cards, books and flyers should include your URL and can boost your website traffic.
Utilize Free Content
Content creation takes time and, therefore, it costs money. However, you can find ways to get content for free that can dramatically extend the usefulness of your budget. Start by providing guest-blogging opportunities.
Rather than paying cash for content, you compensate your guest bloggers by giving them access to your audience. On the other hand, they can increase the authority of your brand while exposing it to some of their loyal followers.
To increase your access to free content, publish a page on your website that announces guest-blogging opportunities. Be sure to specify available topics and outline your quality requirements.
Always Deliver Value
You might feel pressured to reduce your quality standards in order to accommodate your small budget. Such an approach may reduce your production costs, but hurt you in other ways. To begin with, poor-quality content may not meet the needs of your shoppers and customers. Additionally, poor content can also damage your page rank in search engine results.
Instead, if you emphasize quality over quantity, you can create content that meets the real-world needs of your audience. As time passes, people will begin to trust your site and brand to get the information they need.
In the end, your readers will begin to regard your brand as the natural choice when they get ready to buy. So, emphasize quality and see your content marketing budget accomplish more than you ever thought possible.
Build Content Libraries
Rather than discarding your research after using it, archive it on a shared folder on your server. As you build your content library, you will have tons of videos, articles, illustrations, templates and snippets at your fingertips.
After a while, you will have a huge repository of all the factual and creative content that covers all the topics you cover. Rather than designing and creating all your content from scratch, use items from your content library as building blocks.
In other words, you retain the value of your work by extending its usefulness well into the future. Meanwhile, you gain additional cost savings by speeding your content creation processes.
In summary, by taking an intentional approach, you can rock your content marketing operation. While emphasizing creativity, quality and efficiency, you can publish the content you need to grow your business without going broke.
Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today's business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88
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