Planning season is over content marketers. Did you remember to budget for everything? Let me ask you this, are you about to break out the bold boxing gloves to go a few rounds with leadership, finance, or the higher-ups that hold the keys to loosening up the budget for something you may have not thought of this year? If so, here’s a little help. We put together a new guide entitled ‘How To Write A Content Marketing Budget (And Actually Get It Approved).’   It addresses this issue whether it’s budgeting season or if you’re needing to justify a technology ask after budgets have already been set. So here’s a quick snapshot of some of the topics discussed in the guide.

Table of Contents

• Aligning with Leadership
• Focusing on the Right Metrics
• Reporting on Content ROI

If you want more budget, you’ve got to show that marketing is in lock-step with company goals and KPIs by speaking the language of the business. When it comes to a content strategy we can absolutely plan out an entire year but if you’re like me and done this before, you know that those plans are fluid at best. You have to account for change whether it’s a shift in the market, your organization, or personnel. One sure-fire way to keep your strategy on point and rationalized by those who scrutinize is keeping your finger on the pulse on if your content strategy just plain works. So start small, measure, report, grow, rinse and repeat.  

Aligning with Leadership

Consistent and targeted metrics are how revenue marketing leaders like CMOs and CROs communicate their intentions to the rest of the department—they’re also the feedback look that reports back success (or failure) to their bosses.

That level of leadership, while they may like to see it,   doesn’t need reporting such as clicks, page views, and likes. Instead, they’ll be looking at leads, opportunities, pipeline and close/won marketing contribution to the business. In short, ROI or in this case, content marketing ROI. That’s why when asking for additional budget, having all levels of marketing aligned to the goals that matter, improve your quest to earn more budget.  

Focusing on the Right Metrics

Inevitably, the budgets will need to change to encourage stronger performance in the areas of content you intend to focus on. This may involve adjusting which metrics you measure or

developing more competencies or sophistication in measuring content metrics that matter. As you see these new data-driven improvements, your team should be opting into more meaningful metrics such as ‘true engagement’ used to measure just how valuable your content, as a channel is performing. Therefore getting buy-in for your strategy and budget goes hand in hand with your company’s KPIs to track progress against those goals.

Reporting on Content ROI

Content-specific analytics tools are specifically designed for content marketers and content-driven businesses to track their efforts. For example, at Parse.ly, we leverage two content-team-specific features to measure and track content marketing ROI more accurately: linear attribution models and content-specific conversion categories. Simply put, a tool like Google Analytics wasn’t built for content marketing teams. That’s why marketers have to jump through tons of hoops and custom dimensions just to get some sense of content ROI.

Instead, marketers should turn to an analytics solution that’s designed for content marketing from the ground up. With Parse.ly, you can more accurately and meaningfully define content marketing ROI and rely on that data to make content strategy decisions and improve your content’s performance.

Talk to us today to explore what further actionable insights you can surface about your content right away and in the off chance you just need a little guidance on where to start, download the new guide; ‘How To Write A Content Marketing Budget (And Actually Get It Approved).’