What are the Hidden Costs of Content Marketing?
When you calculate cost of content marketing, you consider labor and promotion and miss the tools that you need in content creation and optimization. Content marketing involves writing but for writing, you need topics and also you need publishing the content in different platforms.
Here’s the list of necessary tools that you need buying for your content marketing.
 1# Auditing content
Optimization could be for search engine spiders but content is created for viewers.There should be a data-backed strategy for content marketing. The data will show how your content is reviewed and rated by targeted audiences. It will help in refining your content and fine tuning the strategy to meet the business goal.
Google Analytics is a great tool but it could fall short of your expectation. But it can improve results when used with other tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, Bizible and TrackMaven. Google Analytics will fill the gaps left by these tools.
2# Research
Content research is a must for writing marketing content and for research you need some tools. I’ve classified content research into three broad categories for your convenience.
Competitor research: Check what topics your competitors are writing on; read their topics and also go through the format of content to get ideas.
Topic research: It includes researching keywords; scanning social media pages; reading industry related publication and doing everything that can in anyway help find relevant content topics.
Researching published content: You need reading interview of industry captains and experts; paid articles; poll data; attending webinars and visiting forums.
There are tools for every search and luckily not all tools are paid but you still set budget for buying research tools.
3# Project management
Content marketing involves scheduling content, sharing documents, editing and commenting on the published content. Using a project management tools can help streamline the content management job. You will need a tool to collaborate with your team. You will need a tool even when you are working alone.
Google Calendar and Google Drive are great tools for project management. They are free and they can be used for creating an editorial calendar and also to share files.
4# Content optimization
Following are the tools that can help in optimizing content
- Content discovery tools that can curate third-party content for your needs
- Ideation tools will help organize research work and find new ideas for writing content
- Editing tools that can check grammar and sentence structuring and make corrections
- Promotion tools to schedule your content for publishing and promotion
- Since most of the tools have free versions for basic users, you need not worrying about cost of the tools but you should also be ready to buy paid versions of the tools.
5# Design
Do you know that more than 80% of online marketers use visuals in their content and they use tools to create appealing visuals? You can’t deny value of these tools in creating quality content as you will want to follow the trends. Visuals would make your content more appealing and interactive.
Conclusion
Content marketing has evolved and reached at the level where you need to be serious about the content published on the web. Or it can be said that the marketers have become more result oriented. The marketers want the content to play a crucial role in digital marketing and it is possible only when the content marketing is taken seriously and done in a planned manner.