Every marketer is struggling to determine what is the optimal mix within their marketing program. The optimal mix includes content marketing, advertising, email, pay per click, social, and other forms of marketing.
How do you create your content budget?
You need to first define what kind of company you have and the types of products and services that you offer. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on B2B companies. Additionally, we will also be focusing on companies that sell their products primarily off line but are still high ticket purchases. In this instance, the way that sales occur is primarily offline. However, the leads and research are conducted online.
So in trying to determine how to create that budget you have to measure the difference between your branding budget and your direct response budget. So the first way to allocate your marketing budget is the split between those two.
Success metrics for branding and direct response
Branding often gets maligned within the industry as being unaccountable when in fact, branding is quite accountable if it’s structured correctly. Structure your branding budget around the metrics used So in setting up to measure success.
Examples of branding success measures include website visitors, number of people who reviewed articles, and more awareness metrics like that. The direct response budget is measured much more clearly – the number of leads that are generated.
Email registrations and ultimately sales that result from a marketing channel are the core to qualifying a successful budget.
“Best practices include allocating approximately one third of your budget towards branding (or top of funnel activities) and two thirds of your budget between mid to bottom funnel activities for for direct response marketing,” says Michael Marchese, Tempesta Media’s Founder & CEO.
Start by determining where content marketing fits within your marketing budget.
Content marketing is actually a very robust and flexible tool. It can be used both within your branding budget as well as your direct response budget. How content varies depends on the type of content that’s created.
