There’s a notion that content marketing is good value, because when compared with other marketing strategies, it’s easier on the pocket. While this may be true, it still costs money, and you should be wary of compromising the quality of your content marketing by going for the rock-bottom cheapest option. The success of your digital marketing strategy rests largely on how much you’re willing to invest, whether that’s through in-house personnel or on professional copywriting services that will boost the quality of your content.
Trying to save money with your digital marketing strategy is risky, but there are a few helpful tips that will help you create a winning strategy and save you some money in the process. Here they are:
1. Put more effort into content promotion
It’s a mistake to expend more energy thinking how to develop new ideas at the expense of good content promotion. The standard line is that good content will sell itself, but ideally you should be spending less time on content creation and more time on content promotion.
Post links to your blog on all of your social media channels, mention friends and allies who can retweet and share to their pages to help you reach a wider audience. Replying to comments under your posts will help keep the conversation going, and will increase the chances of more notifications on followers’ feeds. You can also pay for ads to reach an audience beyond your friends and followers on your accounts.
2. Invite guest writers
You can save money on content marketing by inviting writers from outside your blog who are open to being guests on your blog to write content for you. You will be amazed at the number of writers with good ideas who can supply you with good content for your blog if you give them the opportunity. These writers will cost you less or may even take exposure as payment enough, although you may have to do a lot of editing. You stand the chance of discovering and forging new relationships with writers with great potential.
3. Consider crowdsourcing
If inviting guest writers is not for you, you may benefit from sourcing ideas or articles from team members if you feel that’s a route you want to explore. You can ask for ideas for unexplored areas in your industry which you can research or gain a broader view of subjects you may consider exploring now or in the future. Some members of your team are likely to have ideas for articles that will be of interest to your readers.
4. Create a series
Developing content for your digital marketing campaign is not easy. You have to take care of every aspect from selecting your topic, research, writing, editing, publishing and promotion.
Creating a series, bi-monthly, or once a month will help, saving you money and stress. You can develop the outline and general direction of the series, then focus on each article from one to the next. You can also make use of various examples of real-life case studies to help your readers develop a good understanding of the subject matter.
You also benefit from having your readers follow each article in your series which encourages the chances of more frequent visits to your page.
5. Interviews
Interviews are an effective way of amplifying your content on a budget. With technological advancements, setting up equipment for an interview is not as hard as it used to be.
Interviews allow people in your network to share their knowledge with your readers. You can prepare questions for your guest without the usual amount of time spent with other forms of content development. It is easy to transcribe your video interviews to audio or in written form for your audience. Partnering with an influential blogger can also boost your reach using the profile of your guest.
If you have a good relationship with people in the same industry as you, you can use the interviews to link your blog page to theirs for greater reach of your work and gain new followers as a result.
6. Refresh and revamp old articles
It’s OK to reuse content you have used before. Try revamping successful articles from a year or more ago, adapting them to today’s knowledge about the subject, and publish them again. Sometimes, a big news event can make that article relevant again, and you can just plug in your links to the article in conversations on your official or private social media channels and gain new followers as a result.
A few paragraphs added here, another title changed there, and your article may be good enough to use again. You should keep valuable keywords in the revamped product and be sure not to change the URL you published the article to previously.
7. Present your content in different ways
Depending on the industry you develop content for and how much information each article conveys, you could consider using graphs, charts or other visual representations to refresh an old article or create something different. Coming up with new ways of presenting your content makes it easier for them to be read and analysed by your audience.
Culling a few lines from your original articles in a series can be used to create a summary article as well, which will save you money for new research or paid content.
The essence of these tips is not to substitute putting in the work to develop high-quality content. But as long as you are focused on giving the best to your audience, responding to their feedback on your content, and not on getting away with shoddy content marketing, you will not fall into bad habits that hamper your growth.
As long as cutting costs is the objective, you can discover new ways to do so without lowering the standard you have set for your content marketing strategy.
