Content Planning and Budgets: Getting Ready for the Year Ahead

Way back around 200 BCE, the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus coined a phrase that would go on to have a wider, longer-lasting impact than any other single example of his works. What great insight did this ancient dramaturge see as a worthy envoy to carry his wisdom into the future? Just this:

“You have to spend money to make money.”

Leave that to stew for a couple of thousand years, and here we are, closing out another year by setting aside valuable holiday time to figure out how much money we need to spend so that we can make enough money to reach our quarterly goals.

I am, of course, talking about budgeting.

In digital marketing (and every other industry, for that matter), budgeting is a necessary evil crucial task that helps ensure a business’ financial stability. With the right budget, you gain a safety net for overspending and debt accumulation while also helping ensure that you have enough funds set aside to accomplish blah blah blah.

Look, you know what budgeting is, and you know why it’s important.

The thing is, budgeting in content marketing adds another layer of complexity because, along with getting a handle on your finances, you also need to plan out your content — and how you’re going to pay for it.

And that means making content planning a key consideration in your yearly budgets.

Just so that we’re all on the same page, a content plan is a comprehensive strategy that outlines how a company intends to use content to achieve its goals and effectively connect with its audience.

It’s a detailed plan (for lack of a better word; Thesaurus.com is currently down) that helps ensure that you’re providing the right content to the right users at the right stages of their customer journeys. And while the goal of good content should always be to educate, entertain, or inspire, content plans make it possible for you to get double duty out of your content by also aligning it directly to your business objectives.

To make this possible, content planning is typically divided into two subsections:

• Content strategy
  The content strategy is the underlying plan and set of procedures that define the organization's content goals, intended audience, messaging, and overall approach to content creation.
  
  

• Content calendar
  A content calendar is more of a schedule outlining when and what type of content needs to be created and published. It serves as a tactical tool for organizing and managing content production.

So, you have your strategy as a foundation of what needs to get done and how to do it, and you have the calendar outlining when it needs to get done and what form it should take. Nice and tidy… So, let's throw some budgeting into the mix.

Budgets play a major role in the development and execution of content plans — they provide the financial context that not only determines the feasibility of the plan but also influences how effective it will be as part of a larger content marketing strategy. As such, budgets impact content plans in a variety of ways. We’re talking about:

• Resource allocation
  A well-defined budget reserves funds for specific content-related activities (content creation, editing, design, promotion, etc.), dictating what resources are available. This, in turn, influences the quantity and quality of content that can be produced.
  
  

• Content types and formats
  The choice of content types must fit within budget constraints. For example, a larger budget may allow for the development of high-quality videos, interactive infographics, or in-depth research reports, while a tighter budget may limit content to blog posts or social media updates.
  
  

• Distribution and promotion
  In most cases, it’s not enough to just turn your content loose and hope it finds its way; distribution and promotion put it in front of the right people, and your budget determines how that’s going to happen. Social media advertising, paid search campaigns, email marketing, and other promotional activities — the budget sets the boundaries for reach and visibility, affecting your content’s impact on your target audience.
  
  

• Production costs
  Budgets likewise dictate how much can be spent creating each piece of content. Everything has its cost, and that includes expenses attached to research, writing, editing, graphic design, photography, and any other creative elements. All of these elements need to be accounted for. The right partner can be invaluable in helping you balance cost and effectiveness.
  
  

• Keyword research and SEO
  Who could have guessed we’d make it this far before bringing up SEO? Keyword research tools, SEO audits, and optimization strategies all require financial resources, and the budget influences the extent to which SEO can be integrated into the content plan.
  
  

• Measurement and analysis
  Budgets are also needed for analytics tools and software that track the performance of content, such as using Moz Pro to determine your SEO performance. These tools provide insights into how well the content plan is achieving its goals, helping businesses refine their strategies.
  
  

• Scalability and adaptability
  A well-structured budget enables businesses to increase or decrease their content production and promotion efforts based on changing circumstances or business needs. If the budget allows for flexibility, businesses can seize opportunities or pivot their content strategy as required.

In other words, the budget establishes the boundaries for what a content plan can achieve. Unfortunately, a budget is only as good as the information and planning that go into it. Which leads us to the obvious question:

Let’s just get this out of the way: Creating a content plan that is both fully aligned with company goals while also sitting firmly within budgetary limitations is a serious balancing act. It requires a strategic approach that takes into account the financial resources available while ensuring that the content strategy remains tightly focused not only on what is possible but also on what is ideal.

What resources are available? What can you do with those resources? What would you like to be able to do with those resources? How will applying those resources move the needle?

It’s an undeniably complex web of options and constraints, which is why it can be nice to have a little direction when it comes time to put the content plan together.

And would you look at that; here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get your content plan and budgets to where they need to be.

Step 1: Start from the top

Want to ensure that your content plan contributes to your business success? The first thing you need to do is define what “success” even is. Take the big-picture view of the coming year and determine, using reliable historical data and analytics-enhanced forecasting, what goals will help push your content marketing teams to reach new heights without also pushing them into early retirement.

Specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant — the objectives you select will form the foundation of your content plan.

What kind of goals are we talking about? That all depends on what you want your business to accomplish.

For example, do you want to bring in more sign-ups? Would you like to boost recurring revenue? Get more shares? Inspire increased engagement?

There are metrics associated with essentially any goal (or set of goals) you could prioritize, so figure out how you want to define “success” and then run with it.

Step 2: Answer the questions informing your content strategy

Yay! We got some goals! Well, settle down because now it’s time to dig into the depths of your content strategy. Specifically, consider how content plays a role in moving people down the content marketing funnel for your business and how it can contribute to achieving the goals you identified during the previous step.

This means asking questions such as:

• Are there any newly found knowledge gaps that your content can address?

• Are there pain points often addressed later in the customer journey that should be covered up front?

• Are there undersold features of your product or service that deserve more attention?

• What information do people need to know about how your industry has changed?

• Are there areas your competition is focusing on that you should also be competing in (but are not)?

This is obviously not an exhaustive index; your industry, market, audience, or any number of other variables may mean that your list of questions includes a few additions not covered here.

What’s important is that you’re taking a close look at your current content situation and making an honest assessment about where it may be falling short.

Step 3: Make a list of upcoming content needs

By this step, you should know where you want to get to and where you are currently. Now, it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to bridge that gap.

Based on the insights gained in the previous step, create a comprehensive list of the content pieces needed to help you reach your marketing and business goals. Each content piece should have a clear objective in contributing to the overall success of the coming year. To prioritize these content pieces effectively, assign a prioritization score ranging from 1 (low) to 3 (high) for each item on the list.

Just keep this in mind: While it can be tempting to mark everything as high-priority, having a list full of nothing but 3s won’t leave you much room to maneuver. That’s why it's advisable to maintain a balanced distribution of 1s, 2s, and 3s to ensure flexibility in the face of budget constraints.

Step 4: Calculate costs to produce and promote

Remember those costs we mentioned earlier? Here they come. Content creation and promotion come with a laundry list of expenses (several of which I mentioned earlier in this article; feel free to scroll up), which you will need to calculate before you can finalize any budgets.

I’m a word guy, so don’t expect me to get overly excited about the deeply numbers-heavy world of arithmetic involved in figuring out approximately how much it will cost to optimize your content strategy. What I will tell you is that calculating costs to produce content is different from calculating costs to promote it. Here’s how to do both:

• Calculating costs to produce
  Determine how much it will cost to create each piece of content on your list. Again, this needs to be a comprehensive assessment, adding up all of the expenses related to research, writing, design, external resources, etc. Ideally, many of the content elements will be within your team's bandwidth to handle themselves, but others may necessitate outsourcing or contracting specialized talent.
  
  

• Calculating costs to promote
  Content promotion is equally as important as production. Identify the budget required to get each piece out to where you want it on the digital stage. Consider expenses for social media advertising, paid search campaigns, email marketing, and any other promotional activities. The more you can put into publicity, the farther your content will go — provided the quality is on point.

Again, working with a professional marketing service (such as BASE Search Marketing) can go a long way toward making your calculations more accurate. Specific contracts for production and promotion services ensure that the numbers are definite and concrete for when you plug them into your budget.

With few exceptions, the cost should be $0 for things you can handle within the scope of your team's role/bandwidth; anything else must be priced out based on the outside vendors you'll use to fulfill.

Once these costs have all been pinned down within a reasonable margin of accuracy, you can finally calculate the total budget required to produce and promote all the content necessary to meet your business objectives for the year. Distribute this budget across Q1 – Q4 to provide clarity on the financial resources you need to achieve your objectives.

Step 5: Move Forward with the Budget

You’re in the home stretch, but don’t get premature. Your budget isn’t complete until you can reconcile your quarterly and yearly costs with the resources that are available. If the projected spend exceeds your budget, focus only on producing and promoting the content pieces with priority levels of 2s and 3s.

This strategic approach allows you to make informed decisions about which content elements are most critical for achieving your business goals within the limitations of the budget.

You thought we were done! Sorry. Not quite, but almost. Because while establishing a working content plan rooted in business objectives and budget constraints is what we’ve been focused on accomplishing, no plan remains viable forever.

It's equally important to remain flexible and responsive to changing circumstances. To make sure that your hard work continues to work for you, keep these considerations in mind:

• Regularly evaluate and adjust
  The business world is dynamic, and market conditions can change at the drop of a hat (or even when no hats are dropping, because that metaphor doesn't make any sense to me).
  
  With this instability in mind, it's crucial to revisit your content plan regularly — ideally on a monthly basis — to assess its effectiveness and adapt to any shifts in your business.

Use analytics and performance metrics to gauge the impact of your content, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. If you notice that certain content pieces are not yielding the expected results or if new opportunities arise, be prepared to modify your plan accordingly.

There’s no reward for sinking with the ship, so be ready to revise or build a better content plan when circumstances tell you to.

• Plan for future adjustments
  It doesn’t do much good to commit to flexibility if there’s nothing left in your budget to see it through. When new opportunities present themselves or existing content needs to be revised or replaced, go back to your prioritized list to see if there are any items worth revisiting. The 1s or 2s that you might have originally deferred can easily find new life — what was unfeasible in Q1 may become viable in Q2 or subsequent quarters. Prioritize these deferred items based on their relevance to current business objectives and their potential to contribute to your goals.
  
  To put it another way, never throw out an idea just because it's not the right fit right now. Be a hoarder of content ideas, and you’ll always have a deep well to draw from when you need something later on.
  
  

• Front-load for SEO success
  I’m probably not surprising anyone when I say that SEO is a central component of many content strategies. If SERP rankings are among your metrics of choice, you should try to front-load as much SEO-related content as possible while still adhering to budget constraints.
  
  Early investment in SEO-friendly content can yield long-term benefits by building your authority and establishing a strong online presence in your industry.

However, be certain that this front-loading aligns with your overall budget allocation strategy. Otherwise, you might fall into the trap of overspending in the initial stages.

It was true when Titus Maccius Plautus said it 2200 years ago, and it’s still true today: You have to spend money to make money. The good news is that, with the right approach to content planning and budgets, you can ensure that the money you invest in your content marketing strategy is well-defined, fully accounted for, and 100% aligned with helping you reach your goals.

Happy budgeting!