3 Ways to Reduce Your Content Marketing Costs

3 Ways to Reduce Your Content Marketing Costs:from Business 2 Community by Rachel Foster
Content marketing budgets have been steadily increasing. The B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report stated that 60% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget this year.
Although these budget increases show that more marketers are seeing the value of using content to attract and engage customers, businesses are still keeping a close eye on where their dollars are going.
Here are three ways to reduce your content marketing costs without sacrificing quality or quantity:
1. Assign your team members to their strongest tasks – and only their strongest tasks
When project deadlines and budgets are tight, you don’t want to bog down your content marketing team with tasks that are outside their areas of expertise. For example, don’t ask a researcher to write a final draft of a report – give the researcher’s draft to a professional writer or editor. Don’t make your highest-paid team member source images for your blog, as your free images may end up costing you a lot. And never let a non-techie near the back end of your website or blog – unless you want to deal with downtime and pay a developer to fix the mess. This isn’t to say that you won’t work with multi-talented people! But when your team members devote their time to their most productive tasks, you can save on contracts, get things done faster and deal with less hassle.
2. Repurpose your content
One of the great things about content marketing is that it allows you to expand your audience by sharing content across different channels. Repurposing an existing piece of content for different platforms can help you save money and increase your ROI. For ideas on how to repurpose your content, read How to Double Your B2B Content Without Doubling Your Workload
3. Fill your content marketing toolbox with free tools
While you don’t want to skimp on content development, there are a number of free or low-cost tools that will help you distribute your content, monitor its performance and increase your conversions. The Content Marketing Institute ran an article that lists 47 Essential Social Media Tools for Content Marketers. Be sure to check it out if you want to make your content management easier.
As with any marketing endeavour, you should also spend a lot of time planning your content strategy. If you don’t have a road map that outlines where you want to go and how you will get there, you will inevitably overspend or waste time on projects that don’t increase your ROI.
What about you? How are you saving on content marketing? Feel free to share your ideas below.