Investing in content marketing strategy and services is a great way to ensure that your brand is in solid shape for 2024.
We’re getting closer to the end of the year – and if your marketing team already has a budget allocated for the full fiscal year, you may find yourself with a surplus of unspent funds.
Maybe some initiatives ended up not being a go, your ad campaigns didn’t max out, or you opted against sponsoring a trade show. Whatever the case, your marketing team has an extra budget to work with – but if you don’t spend it soon, you’ll lose out on that budget altogether.
Want to spend it in a sustainable way that leads to actionable results and increased brand awareness?
Don’t go on a technology spending spree just because you can, or buy tickets to pricey conferences that are barely related to your industry.
Instead, if you want to make the most of your remaining marketing budget, investing in content marketing is a crucial tactic for managing your spend sustainably.
Here are four effective ways to do that.
As we get to the end of the year, you’ll have better visibility into metrics around how well your current content strategy is working. Are your content assets driving engagement and lead generation? Are you getting visitors in through organic SEO and social traffic, or are you having to pay for them all? Are your email marketing open and click-through rates beating their benchmarks? How frequently are site visitors converting?
If you’re ready to get the answers to these questions, and ensure you’re putting your marketing dollars to good use in 2024, it’s a great time to invest in a content strategy audit.
The project can be as large in scope as you need it to be – in some cases, we’ve mapped out every page of a client’s website to see which pages should be deleted, merged, or revamped to fit a revised information architecture and improve the user experience.
In other cases, we’ve focused on identifying and expanding on the most popular existing blog posts, improving their SEO rankings and leveraging them in marketing campaigns that will bring in new audiences. Or, if you’ve revamped your messaging, you may need to realign your existing marketing assets with your new guidelines.
In any case, investing in an external audit will help you see how aligned your current assets are with your target metrics, giving you the visibility to build a solid marketing strategy for the year to come.
Other projects may focus solely on content marketing initiatives, where we’ll conduct competitor research, persona research, and SEO research to build an optimized content strategy that connects with the right audiences – then create a game plan, editorial calendar, social media strategy, and digital marketing plan that will help you get from point A to point B.
If you want to kick next year off with actionable insights that will move the needle with your target audience, this is a great time to focus on a content audit for an optimized strategy you can put into practice in 2024.
As far as content creation goes, in-depth reports that involve proprietary research can be game-changers for boosting brand awareness. By positioning your brand as an authoritative source within your industry, you’ll see your brand get backlinks from many new publications and external websites, and will develop a reputation as a thought leader in your space. You can also use the report as a valuable lead-generating asset, inviting your readers to download the report from a gated landing page to get access to all of your data.
If your brand generates a lot of data that you can share publicly, that’s a great place to start. You might also conduct surveys of your customers, or even use an external survey company like SurveyMonkey to target the number and demographics of respondents you need to conduct a high-quality survey. Paired with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government sources, you can offer unique insights on your industry that will resonate not just with your own target audience, but with media publications that cover your industry – exposing your brand to a large pool of new potential customers.
Plan to use your end-of-year marketing budget for survey data collection if needed, plus a team to write and design the report if you don’t have the in-house resources to complete it quickly. You’ll also want to budget for PR support to promote the report to a curated list of industry leaders for the best chance at gaining widespread visibility.
Don’t try to launch the report before the end of the year if you can avoid it, or you’ll be competing with all the holiday noise – but by putting a plan in motion to publish and promote an original research report in 2024, you’ll have budgeted wisely for a valuable asset that will deliver real business impact.
As you review your end-of-year metrics, you’ll be able to see which content marketing assets — including webinars, ebooks, and blog posts — were your greatest hits, as far as your target audience is concerned.
Don’t just celebrate your KPIs — there’s still time to build on them. You can use your leftover marketing dollars to help you capitalize on your content marketing successes.
Look for opportunities to repurpose some of your most popular content by spinning it off into new formats. Did you get a great response to an expert-led webinar in Q2? Work with your marketing team or agency to create a series of bylined blog posts on the expert’s behalf, connecting to themes discussed in the webinar. Or, if you saw great download numbers for a podcast episode last month, follow up with a longform blog post that includes a round-up of quotes connected to the topic.
You can also create social media marketing assets, including hero graphics and block quotes, that can be easily shared from any of your content pieces — helping you promote your content marketing assets across a variety of social media platforms to engage with more members of your target audience.
While organic social media marketing is important, using some of your remaining digital marketing budget to promote your content marketing campaigns across paid distribution channels can also help you expand your audience. Make sure that you know where your target audience is spending their time online, and pay attention to benchmarks around average CPC to ensure that you’re optimizing your marketing budget effectively.
Today’s marketing teams are being asked to do more with less, so making the case for content creation support can help you offload a lot of the work that’s on your plate so that you can focus on supporting the business at a higher strategic level. By choosing the right content marketing agency to partner with, you’ll be able to trust that your brand’s voice and messaging is being well-represented, resulting in a streamlined editorial process that won’t drag you away from other priorities.
If you’re not ready to commit to a full year’s retainer with a content marketing agency, consider using your unspent marketing budget to purchase a block of credits that you can use towards future work.
Here at Eucalypt, we’ve shifted to a credit-based pricing model that breaks down common deliverables into credit counts, so that you know how much each type of content will cost, with no surprises. This also means that we don’t need to map out a specific scope of work when we start working with you: If you’ve purchased 500 credits, you may initially think that you want to spend it all on blog content. If it later turns out that you need to revamp your web copy and put some of your marketing dollars towards that, it’s no problem. We work in an agile manner and can shift priorities based on your needs, with no rescoping necessary.
Purchasing credits upfront means that you can use them through the year as needed, with no requirement to commit to a certain volume of work each month. If you don’t have a solid digital marketing strategy in place yet, this approach gives you plenty of lead time to work out how you want to spend the credits. And once you’ve run through them, it’s no problem: You can either shift to a content marketing retainer or purchase another block of credits.
Ready to allocate your leftover marketing spend? Get in touch for expert support with building your action plan.
Kathryn Hawkins is principal and chief content strategist of Eucalypt Media. She has worked as a freelance journalist for media publications and managed inbound marketing and content strategy for corporate and nonprofit clients for more than 16 years.
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