To be clear: Creating a content plan that is both fully aligned with company goals and within budget limits is a challenge serious Balancing act. It requires a strategic approach that takes into account the financial resources available while ensuring that the content strategy remains focused not only on what is possible, but also on what is Ideal.
What resources are available? What can you do with these resources? What would you How can do something with these resources? How will deploying these resources move the needle?
It’s undoubtedly a complex web of options and constraints, so it can be helpful to provide a little direction when it comes to putting together the content plan.
And would you look at that? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get your content plan and budgets where they need to be.
Step 1: Start from the top
Want to ensure your content plan contributes to your business success? First, you need to define what “success” actually is. Take a big picture look at the coming year and use reliable historical data and analytics-driven forecasts to determine which goals will help take your content marketing teams to new heights without forcing them into early retirement.
Specific, measurable, achievable and relevant – the goals you choose form the basis of your content plan.
What kind of goals are we talking about? It all depends on what you want to achieve with your business.
For example, do you want to get more signups? Do you want to increase recurring revenue? Get more shares? Encourage more engagement?
There are metrics associated with virtually every goal (or audience) that you can prioritize. So figure out how you want to define “success” and then do it.
Step 2: Answer the questions underlying your content strategy
Yay! We have some goals! Well, calm down because now it’s time to delve into the depth of your content strategy. Specifically, consider the role content plays in moving people through your company’s content marketing funnel and how it can help achieve the goals you identified in the previous step.
This means asking questions like:
-
Are there any newly discovered knowledge gaps that can be filled with your content?
-
Are there pain points that are often addressed later in the customer journey and that should be addressed in advance?
-
Are there undersold features of your product or service that deserve more attention?
-
What information do people need to know about how your industry has changed?
-
Are there areas that your competition is focused on that you should also be competing in (but aren’t)?
This is obviously not an exhaustive index; Your industry, market, audience, or a number of other variables may cause your list of questions to have some additions that are not covered here.
It is important that you take a close look at your current content situation and honestly assess where there may be deficiencies.
Step 3: Make a list of upcoming content requirements
Through this step you should know where you want to go and where you currently are. Now it’s just a matter of finding the best way to close this gap.
Based on the insights gained in the previous step, create a comprehensive list of the content you need to achieve your marketing and business goals. Each piece of content should have a clear goal to contribute to the overall success of the coming year. To effectively prioritize this content, assign each item in the list a prioritization score between 1 (low) and 3 (high).
Remember: Although it can be tempting to mark everything as high priorityWhen you have a roster full of threes, you don’t have much wiggle room. For this reason, it is advisable to maintain a balanced distribution of 1s, 2s and 3s to ensure flexibility given budget constraints.
Step 4: Calculate production and advertising costs
Remember those costs we mentioned earlier? Here you come. Content creation and promotion comes with a detailed list of expenses (some of which I mentioned earlier in this article; feel free to scroll up) that you need to calculate before you can set a budget.
I’m a word person, so don’t expect me to be overly interested in the deeply numbers-heavy world of arithmetic that comes with figuring out approximately how much it will cost to optimize your content strategy. What I’m going to tell you is how to calculate the cost to produce The content differs from calculating the costs to support financially It. Here’s how to do both:
-
Calculation of production costs
Determine how much it will cost to create each piece of content on your list. Again, this needs to be a comprehensive assessment, adding up all expenses related to research, writing, design, external resources, etc. Ideally, many of the content elements will be within the range that your team can handle themselves, but others may require outsourcing or contracting with specialized talent. -
Calculation of advertising costs
Content promotion is just as important as production. Determine the budget required to get each piece to the desired location on the digital stage. Consider spending on social media advertising, paid search campaigns, email marketing, and other promotional activities. The more you put into the public eye, the more widely distributed your content will become – assuming the quality is right.
Again, working with a professional marketing service provider (e.g. BASE Search Marketing) can go a long way in making your calculations more accurate. Specific contracts for production and advertising services ensure that the numbers are clear and concrete when you incorporate them into your budget.
With a few exceptions, the cost of things you can handle within the scope of your team’s role/bandwidth should be $0; Everything else must be calculated based on the third-party providers you use for fulfillment.
Once these costs have all been determined within a reasonable range of accuracy, you can finally calculate the total budget required to produce and promote all the content necessary to achieve your business goals for the year. Spread this budget over the first through fourth quarters to provide clarity about what financial resources you need to achieve your goals.
Step 5: Move forward with the budget
You’re on the home stretch, but don’t be too early. Your budget is not complete until you can balance your quarterly and annual costs with the resources available. If the planned expenses exceed your budget, focus only on producing and promoting the priority 2 and 3 content.
This strategic approach allows you to make informed decisions about which content elements are most important to achieving your business goals within budget.
