Content Marketing

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of publishing content that helps to engage or entertain a prospect and then move them into the sales funnel. Content marketing isn’t necessarily new, however, over the last few years it has become more popular with all types of online marketers mostly because of the engagement it creates and the ROI that it generates for businesses of all sizes.
Kapost and Eloqua recently put together and published a study on the cost and ROI of content marketing in which they share some very eye opening statistics that should catch the attention of all types of marketers, online and offline. Content marketing, when executed over a long period of time (36+ months) yields three times as many leads, dollar for dollar, when compared to paid search. The reasoning for this is because once you have built your own audience and community, you don’t have to pay for it anymore and your ROI goes through the roof (as seen in the image below).

The problem for most businesses is, that content marketing is super expensive and it is really hard to justify the expense today for a return in three years. In the study mentioned above, it is estimated that in order to run a full fledged content marketing operation (in-house) that you are looking at a $12,000 expense per month for mid sized businesses and a $33,000 expense per month for large businesses. Depending on the scope of work, you can dramatically cut those costs by probably 40-50% by hiring an agency to help you with your content marketing efforts, however, it’s still a pretty penny to engage in this form of marketing.

From those who have chosen to engage in content marketing, there is no dispute that it was money well spent, however, since this form of marketing does require a pretty heavy “up-front” investment, it is often times very difficult to get buy-in from upper management/executive team or whomever the decision makers are. Because of this, I’ve pulled together some of the best in the industry to share with us what they feel should be key talking points when pitching an executive and trying to secure budget for such a strategy. There are some amazing ideas and concepts being shared here, so take good notes!