Even companies with the biggest pockets want to get the most out of their content marketing budget. We all want to not only spend money wisely but make as much return as we can. This is even more important to small businesses because they are on more limited budgets. I’ve worked with clients that had as little as $150 a month to spend and clients that could spend about $3,000 a month on efforts. Neither is considered a large budget at all. Most marketers stay away from these clients but I embrace them. I love making a difference for ‘the little guy’ and it’s taught me a lot, over the years, at how to get the most bang for your buck. It never occurred to me to share these in an article before but better late than never.

How To Maximize Your Content Marketing Budget

Step #1 – Plan

Set Goals

The very first step in planning anything is to set goals. What do you want to accomplish? This will help you determine the type of Online Writing Style you should plan to use for each specific goal/strategy.

Design Your Strategy

How will you use that writing style to accomplish the said goal? Will you need a Click Funnel plan or just a new landing page with SEO Content? This is where you will outline the basic design of what this campaign will look like.

Step #2 – Research

Look At Past Results

What has worked for you in the past? What improvements can you make to previous campaigns to increase success? Are there things you wanted to do that weren’t a good fit for a previous campaign that may be ideal now?

Look at Your Competitors

What are your competitors doing well? Where can they make improvements that you can capitalize on? If you can find inspiration here do it, just don’t blatantly copy anything.

Look at Your Audience

Who are your customers and what do they want to see, hear, feel, and experience? Your best source for predicting future behavior will come from your existing client base.

Look at The Experts

We all have those marketers we follow and learn from. Look to them for inspiration and ideas. Do your research on the market, your target audience, etc. Gather as much data as you can that may help boost your success on each campaign.

Step #3- Implement

Just Do It

As Sara Severson says “do the damn thing”. Take all the research you learned from step 2 and apply it to your goals and strategy from step 1. Make any tweaks necessary and start your campaign(s).

Repurpose

Always keep in mind that content ideas can be repurposed. In the 5+ years of writing blogs for my own freelancing agency, I’ve written about the same topics many times over. But the keywords, content, structure, and messaging is very different in each piece. If there are certain specific phrases or topics that have shown in your research to be valuable, focus on those. If you can use the same printed copy with slight tweaks for multiple events, do so. If you have a good strategy for a specific purpose that can be copy / pasted without losing its’ efficacy than continue to use it.

Step #4 – Analysis

Track & Measure

Marketing is useless if you aren’t tracking results. You can’t reasonably asses your content marketing budget, or even make one, if you don’t know how profitable it is. Keep track of your results, even if you aren’t doing it at a high level.

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Do you have any tips on maximizing your content marketing budget that you want to share with my audience or with me? Any thoughts on what I shared here? It’s pretty brief, intentionally, so if you need to dive into any of it deeper, don’t hesitate to Summon Obi-Wan and we’ll chat. I’d love to connect on LinkedIn as well, where you can find more content like this.