You are budget-conscious. We all are. You have to be to keep your business competitive. If you’re thinking about investing in some quality content to serve as rocket fuel for your marketing strategy, and the price tag is giving you a little heartburn, here’s something to keep in mind—if you create and use that content in the right way, the cost can amount to what you might call “pennies per persuasion.”
Long Live Content
When I say “the right way,” the first thing I’m talking about is creating content that isn’t just good, it’s grrrrrreat! (Forgive me for channeling Tony the Tiger there.) Visually appealing. Intellectually engaging. And always aimed at helping your prospects and customers. Content developed with these attributes in mind is very likely to have a powerful impact on your audience.
Once you’ve produced that awesome material, find ways to disseminate it for free. And, really, these days it’s harder to find places to disseminate if for a fee. Almost all the options that come immediately to mind are zero cost: post it on your website, link to it from your blog, include it in a tweet or a Facebook post, upload it to SlideShare, etc.
The Key is “Evergreen”
Backtracking a bit to the content creation stage… In order to get the most value for your content marketing dollar, you want to create pieces that are “evergreen.” This is a term you’ll hear marketing folks toss around to mean that an item can be used indefinitely without appearing dated. Evergreen items…
- Do not indicate or refer to dates.
- Avoid references to specific events that can be dated.
- Use very general terms if referring to timeframes at all (recently, not long ago, back when, etc.).
- Ideally cover concepts that have a very long shelf life (content marketing vs. the latest Google algorithm change).
Back to Budget
So, imagine you’ve generated this highly influential, thoroughly evergreen piece of content, and the cost was $500. That might feel like a pretty good chunk o’ change as you write the check. But let’s say you promote the heck out of the thing and very quickly it influences 100 people to engage further with you. We’ll call those engagements leads and now say that the project has cost you $5 per lead. That’s got a nicer ring to it!
Well, like we said, the thing is evergreen so you continue to make it available to people. Soon it has generated 500 leads. Now we’re talking about $1 per lead. (You see where this is going.)
$500 / 1,000 leads = 50 cents per lead.
At 1,000 leads generated, that lump sum of $500 feels much better as 50 cents per lead. And that’s without considering the fact that many of those leads will have turned into sales, covering the content creation cost many times over.
So… As you ponder your content marketing strategy, evaluate the money involved with an eye toward lifetime cost. You’ll likely be very happy with the math.
