How do you create and manage a content budget and ROI?

1 Define your content objectives

Before investing money or resources into content creation and distribution, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish. To ensure success, make sure your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Ensure that they also align with your overall business or personal objectives. Additionally, decide how you will measure success. Common content objectives include increasing brand awareness and reach, generating leads and conversions, building trust and credibility, educating and informing an audience, and engaging and entertaining an audience.

2 Estimate your content costs

Once you have your content objectives, you need to estimate the cost of producing and distributing your content. This encompasses both direct and indirect costs, such as hiring content creators, investing in tools and software, promoting on different channels, maintaining and updating your content, and other related expenses. Content creation covers expenses related to writers, editors, designers, photographers, videographers, or other content creators. Content distribution includes costs associated with social media platforms, email marketing, paid ads, influencer marketing, or guest posting. Content management accounts for expenses related to hosting, domain, analytics, SEO, or content audit.

3 Set your content budget

When setting your content budget for a specific period, such as a month, quarter, or year, it’s important to consider your content objectives and costs. Your budget should reflect your priorities, expectations, and resources. There are various methods you can use to set your content budget, such as allocating a fixed or variable percentage of your revenue, researching how much your competitors or industry peers are spending on content and adjusting your budget accordingly, or calculating how much content you need to produce and distribute to reach desired outcomes and setting your budget accordingly.

5 Calculate your content ROI

To calculate your content ROI, you need to compare your content benefits with your content costs. You can use different formulas and methods to do this, such as Simple ROI, Content Attribution, and Content Scorecard. Simple ROI involves subtracting content costs from benefits and dividing the result by the costs. Content Attribution assigns a value to each piece of content based on its contribution to the customer journey and final conversion. Lastly, Content Scorecard is a holistic approach that includes both quantitative and qualitative measures of performance.