How much does your in-house content marketing team cost? Most businesses only track the initial cost of content creation without considering additional expenses linked to content approval or promotion.
The return on investment is a popular way of measuring the success of your in-house content marketing team, but you can’t assess this KPI without knowing the true cost of your program. Too many businesses take an overly simplified approach to tracking costs and overlook expenses linked to approval, management and promotion.
How much does writing a blog post really cost?
On average, an employee costs 1.25-1.4 times their salary with costs like taxes, insurance, benefits and overhead expenses like office space.
With this average in mind, a member of your in-house content marketing team will have an average cost of about $40 an hour. So, if they spend two hours writing a 1,000-word blog post, your initial cost is $80.
Getting content ready for publication
Any content marketing professional will tell you that the approval process is time-consuming.
Additional team members will need to edit and review the content. Each round of edits should take a minimum of two hours. You should then count another hour spent on optimizing the blog post for SEO purposes.
If the blog post has to go through two rounds of edits and an hour of optimization, the total cost will be $280.
Publication and promotion
Once the content is ready for publication, another team member will need to spend approximately an hour on formatting and uploading it to your website.
Promotion efforts can then begin. This process entails identifying the most relevant channels and writing copy to get readers to click through to the content.
Promotion should take around 2.5 hours and cost $100. Between publication and promotion, count on spending $140, but keep in mind that there can be additional costs if you use paid channels to promote your content.
Ongoing expenses
Your content marketing team has to complete additional tasks to meet their goals, including researching new topics, creating editorial calendars and assigning tasks. Managing your program can take 2-3 hours each week, which will cost an average of $100.
Analyzing content after publication is crucial for the success of your program too. Tracking clicks, engagement and conversions will take two hours a week and cost $80.
Your marketing team will incur additional ongoing costs with monthly subscriptions to the different CMS or project management tools they use. These costs can vary depending on the vendors you choose and the number of users.
In-house content creation versus a managed content services provider
You should count on spending at least $680 per week using an in-house content marketing team to produce a weekly 1,000-word blog post. However, this $680-per-week cost assumes that a single person can effectively write, edit, produce and optimize content themselves.
In reality, it is nearly impossible to have an employee who can perform the entire content production cycle themselves and do it for about $35,000 per year ($680 X 52 weeks). Someone skilled in all those areas will command significantly more. More so, these calculations don’t even consider the overhead costs of hiring, training and maintaining such a person.
Outsourcing this process can significantly reduce your costs. A managed content services provider like Tempesta Media can act as an extension of your internal team, reduce ongoing costs and deliver a 1,000-word blog post for only $350.
As demonstrated above, assessing the true cost of an in-house content team often reveals that outsourcing this process would make more financial sense. Contact us to find out more about our affordable content solutions, or download our free 100 Mistakes e-book to discover common mistakes to avoid in your program.
