Originally published on TangibleWords.com By Alysha Dominico.
Is the communications budget the first thing to get chopped up during your organization’s budgeting process? Everyone may agree that communication is key to success—in theory—but have a hard time allocating cold hard cash to the concept of paying for content marketing help. Maybe you could use another staff person or some new equipment, but will funding these line items have the same effect on your organization as well planned content? We know it can be difficult to explain how investment in content marketing actually frees up resources to help fulfill other needs in the organization.
Here’s some good reasons to find funds for content marketing from different budget areas.
Content Marketing Benefits The Whole Organization: Get Other Departments To Kick In Funds
Content marketing is an integral to your communication plan because it focuses your messages and gives you a plan to follow whether it’s your website, social media or printed documents.
Strategic communication involves the entire organizations. When your company has a good reputation you make more sales, ship more products, take more calls—keeping staff busy and generating revenue. This means you keep departments active and you can legitimately ask for money from other relevant departmental budgets.
Here’s 5 Common Budget Areas That Can Fund Your Content Marketing Needs:
- Your Website. It’s the most frequented source of information for your clients or potential customers. Content Marketing in the form of Information Architecture means you can focus on the content you’re creating based on a plan for how your online content can better serve your customers. Saves you time struggling with what to promote and where, plus it will make users act on their website visits;
- Your Sales & Social Media Marketing. We love SMM, but do we know if we’re doing it right? Your sales force may be better suited to one on one customer service rather than deciding which tweet and Facebook post is going to generate more business. Content Marketing can help you use social media as an effective sales tool.
- Your Marketing & Public Relations. OK, you know your business language and you talk the company line to customers every day…and they get it, right? Maybe not. When you get comfortable with your messages and your unique business-speak you can be leaving out a big part of your consumer base because they’re just not sure what the heck you’re selling. Use clear language in your marketing to get your message understood (…psst this is Content Marketing too)
- Your Media Presence. So to make your story interesting, you have to have a hook. The hook not only applies to your potential customers but also to media types who will give you free publicity if the story is good. You can make your story good with Content Marketing.
- Your Content Marketing Knowledge. The best laid content marketing plans can fall slip through the cracks if you can’t maintain your communication momentum. Sustain your content marketing strategy in-house, make sure you and your staff know how to use the tools (like WordPress or LinkedIn and Twitter) long after you’ve gone live. Staff training on website content creation, social media and even business blogging, is, you guessed it, content marketing.
Start your next budget meeting armed with these examples and talk to your colleagues about how content marketing really is an organization-wide financial responsibility and benefit.
Here’s Another Significant Way Investing In Content Marketing Can Save You Money Long Term
You may have heard the phrase “content is king”. And, even though any content you create for your business is beneficial to you, Pillar Content gives you the best bang for your buck. Why? Pillar content is how we describe the content you can use over and over again because it is so relevant to the key ideas your communicating regularly that you can reference it any time from any medium.
Stockpiling pillar content saves you time because once you’ve created it you don’t have to keep coming up with new angles. Pillar content stays relevant and you can use it to complement new content without having to rewrite the message. And, yes, a good content marketing plan can help you create this valuable resource too.
Still wondering why you should go through the effort to budget for content marketing? Find out where your money goes when you outsource to professional copywriters.