Cut content marketing costs without reducing quality

Content marketing is an important factor of an SEO strategy for any business. It’s a great way to have more content to share on social media, while also driving traffic to your website. However, sometimes the cost of content marketing just isn’t worth it. However, it’s not a part of your strategy that you can cut out completely.

So what are the best ways to cut content marketing costs, without necessarily reducing quality?

Outsourcing

One of the first things you could do when considering cutting costs is outsourcing. After all, this can save your business time, and you can focus your energy on other areas of the business. However, this strategy can often be risky. Outsourced providers may be cheaper, but you may notice a decline in quality of work. This runs the risk of damaging your business’ reputation, as well as cause a decrease in social engagement, traffic flow and conversions. If you are going to consider outsourcing, ensure the company is producing work that is of high quality.

Analytics

If you’re going to be producing content, you want to know whether or not it’s attracting an audience and driving traffic. After all, there is no point investing time in content marketing if you’re not getting any results.

You can use Google Analytics to track what progress your content marketing strategy is making. Google Analytics is a free service which gives you access to troves of data. Using this, you can get an understanding of your customers demographics, behaviour and how they’re accessing your site, to name a few. You can then tell what causes conversions and sales, and what ideas work and what doesn’t. This way, you can improve what content you’re producing, while also increasing conversions and sales.

Free content distribution

If you’re wanting to drive traffic to your website, but don’t want to pay for ads, what else can you consider? One of your options is social media. After all, most platforms are completely free to sign up for and use. Sharing your content on social media means you can not only drive more traffic but also build a larger following on your social media categories.

You can also consider writing guest posts. Contact people in the same or similar niche as your business and offer to write a guest post for their website. It’s important to establish early that you would like this post to have a link back to your website. Often businesses do not want these links on their website, or will make it a ‘no-follow’ link. If websites won’t include a link or will make it a no follow, don’t waste your time writing the guest post.

When looking for people to contact, consider those who are influential and have authority in your niche. Also keep in mind a website’s Domain Authority and Page Authority. Developed by Moz, this is a score on a 100 point scale that will predict how well a site will rank on search engines. Download the Moz Bar before you start contacting people for guest posts. If a website has a low DA or PA - particularly below 10 - then the site may not be legitimate, does not have much traffic flowing to it and is probably not worth writing a guest post for.  

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t receive many replies. Chances are popular websites receive lots of emails about guest posts, and simply do not have the time or resources to reply to everyone.   

Use Free Tools

There are tools you can use to help improve your productivity and your content marketing strategy. If you can complete work faster and to a higher quality, then there’s no reason not to use these tools.

Tools that will make your life easier include:

• Grammarly: as you can probably guess by the name, this tool checks the grammar of your posts and will give suggestions. You’ll never publish a blog with mistakes again.
• Trello: if you’ve got a content marketing team, then Trello is a must have. This helps you to organize publishing schedules for your content. You can make different boards and add team members.
• Buffer: if you don’t want to spend time manually sharing your content on social media, then this is the tool for you. Using Buffer, you can queue all the content you’re wanting to share and schedule them for predetermined times throughout the day. This saves you forgetting to manually post to your social media accounts, and allows you to schedule posts for when you’re out of the office.
• Canva: everybody knows that content marketing is about more than just written content. You have to consider the visual element as well. That’s where Canva comes in. This is an easy graphic tool that everyone can use. You don’t need to be a professional at Photoshop to understand this tool. Canva is sure to help you create graphics to make your social media posts stand out.

Repurpose your old content    

If you’re strapped for time or out of content ideas, sometimes, the best solution is to look at your old content. After all, your older content is generally the most popular. As content gets older, it gains more views, shares and comments, which causes it to have a stronger authority, and then gain more traffic. So why not take advantage of your most popular posts and repurpose them?

If you’re going to consider repurposing your content, make sure that there is something new and interesting to add to the content. Don’t just republish something you have already published.

You can consider repurposing your old content by making infographics, ebooks, podcasts or even videos. You can even just add new updates to an old post and repost it. Just avoid having duplicate content on your blog.

Following these tips, you will be able to continue to produce high-quality content and increase traffic flow, while also cutting back on your content marketing costs.