How much should you spend on creating content?

The division of budgets between working and non-working spend has to be a balancing act – but that’s not to say marketers shouldn’t keep challenging themselves to produce high quality content more efficiently, and ensure that it’s backed with the distribution budgets it deserves. And Percolate’s research provides a benchmark to aim for. The companies that reported having the best balance between working and non-working spend devoted around 24% of budgets to creating advertising and content, whereas others spent 40% doing so on average.

Percolate’s report suggests that burgeoning non-working spend is becoming an issue for many marketers – but that content marketing is more often part of the solution than part of the problem. Of all the marketers it surveyed, only around 18% said they spent too much producing content – significantly less than for other marketing activities.

In contrast, over a third of marketers felt that non-working spend was eating up too much budget for search advertising or traditional media advertising. And when it came to online display ads, specifically, almost half felt non-working spend was too high.

The fact that investing in content is valued by marketers is great news – but it’s still the case that producing content more efficiently and getting more value from it once it exists will ensure you have more working spend available to maximise its impact.

So how do you go about doing that? How can you keep content production costs to that ideal 24% of budget? There were five key themes to emerge from our discussion:

It’s vital to look for efficiencies in the right places – and not set about cutting costs arbitrarily. Significantly, the best performing companies   didn’t achieve it by cutting their creative agencies’ budgets – or by appointing a bigger roster of agencies so that they could beat their suppliers down on price. They focused instead on creating better internal creative processes and workflows, and leveraging technology and systems to help.

• Part of the advantage of such an approach is the ability it provides for keeping a close eye on the balance between working and non-working spend. It goes back to the simple adage: if you track something, you can improve it. Tracking the proportion of your spend that goes towards promoting and distributing content will give you early warning if production costs are getting too high – and help to ensure your strategy is on course for a positive ROI.
• Just as important is cultivating a balanced content mix. Incorporating user-generated content, for example, can help to stretch your non-working budget and demonstrate authenticity. So too will delivering a regular stream of “middleweight” content (as Harry Wake of Group SJR, another of LinkedIn’s content partners, puts it) rather than relying solely on expensive “heavyweight” white papers and research reports.
• Making core, expert content available in a range of different forms, such as videos or infographics, has a huge role to play in increasing efficiency. It ensures that you get maximum value from any major piece of content that you invest in, providing you with several months’ worth of content to distribute rather than an asset for just one campaign.
• Optimising your approach to distributing content is just as important as producing that content more efficiently. This is why, on LinkedIn, we encourage marketers to test different targeting approaches for their content campaigns – and optimise their spend around the approach that delivers most effectively against their objectives.

However, as my colleague Nico Lutkins argued in her blog post last week, the best inbound marketers know that the most effective content strategies are those that set aside a sufficient amount of budget for distributing the content they create. The more efficient you can become at both content creation and content distribution, the more effectively they will work together.

LinkedIn’s Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing is packed with insights for getting maximum value out of your content investment – and creating the right distribution strategy to go with it. Featuring contributions from top content marketers like Ann Handley, Doug Kessler and Joe Pulizzi it’s available for free download here.