6 Dos and Don’ts of Budgeting for Content Marketing

Are you looking for new ways to engage your audiences and to improve the exposure of your brand and services with your audience? Do you want to save time and money as you market your very best content to your clients and potential customers? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then it may be time for you to brush up on your content marketing skills.

Follow our guide of the six top tips you need to know for creating an effective and efficient content marketing strategy. It will save you and your company time and money while also producing the kind of results that really do benefit your bottom line. Here’s how to develop a new and creative content marketing strategy:

Tip #1: DO Strategize It pays to have a strategy for your content marketing, and so make sure you are either budgeting money to hire someone to help you create that content strategy, or you are planning in enough time to build a strategy that makes the most sense for your client, business or brand. Not every piece of content is going to work for a particular medium. For example, graphics are going to work better on social media and the web. Emails and e-books serve a different purpose. Each piece of content should be geared for the various sectors of the audience you are trying to reach and engage with around the product or service. If you take time to plan up front, your content has a better chance of succeeding once you let it out into the World Wide Web.

Tip #2: DON'T Promote on a Single Platform The beauty of a great content marketing strategy is that it covers multiple platforms -- from blogs to websites to social media and more. Make sure that you are not promoting your content in only one place. You'll get a higher return on your investment (ROI) if you allow your content to stretch across many different platforms. You'll expose different audiences to your product or service, and over time you can get clues about what these different audiences find appealing or annoying about the things you are marketing.

Tip #3: DO Think About CTAs In the content marketing world, your CTA -- or call to action -- is one of the most important parts of great messaging. You want a CTA to be strong and clear, so your readers know exactly what you want them to do. So do think about those messages and make sure they are in every piece of content. If you have difficulty coming up with CTAs, think about the top three things you want your clients to do after reading your content. Do you want them to sign up for an email newsletter? Do you want them to buy a product? Do you want them to take advantage of a free 30-day trial? These questions can inform what your CTA really is. If you are struggling with writing, your CTAs, consider hiring a writer. That leads us to Tip #4.

Tip #4: DON'T Try to Do It Alone In the grand scheme of things, your content is going to fail if great writing isn't behind it. So if you're not a great content writer, then hire someone to write your messages. That writer can tweak your CTAs, emails and social media posts so that they are engaging and create interest around your product or service.

Tip #5: DON'T Over-promise Best of all, a good writer is going to check to make sure you are not promising your future clients more than you actually can offer. You quickly lose credibility if someone clicks on your social media post link and is disappointed with what he or she sees after clicking through. And remember: Anything that you publish onto the web will probably stay on the web in one form or another regardless of what you do to try to remove it—digital content, after all, can’t be fed through office shredders. If you're going to use a content marketing gimmick, make sure it is clever, inoffensive, and gives the reader some sense of value and satisfaction.

Tip #6: DO a Keyword Search Part of the success of a content marketing strategy is to make sure you know as much about your audience as possible. So do some keyword searches to find out what people are searching for related to your product or service. It's quite enlightening to see the questions or keyword strings people come up with. Also, budget for a SEO (search engine optimization) professional to consult with you and help you determine which keywords may work the best for your content marketing campaign. The more information you have, the better you will be prepared to execute your marketing plan with success. So don't skip the keyword search.

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Lindsey Patterson, a freelance writer who specializes in technology and the latest social trends, specifically involving social media. She is currently a social media advisor.