How to Make Content Production More Cost-Effective

Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective means of drawing traffic to your business’s website. It costs next to nothing to produce — just a good idea and some time sweating over your keyboard — and once it’s posted, it can generate traffic and leads for the rest of your site’s life.

Compared to traditional methods, like print ads, direct mail, and billboards, content is more cost-effective, longer-lasting, and much more targeted to your audience. And considering that the average B2B customer completes 57% of their purchasing decision before even contacting a sales rep, consumers are definitely looking for information about your company.

Couldn’t get any better, right? Believe it or not, it could.

These four strategies are designed to increase the ROI of your content marketing initiatives.

1. Produce new content consistently

Content marketing shows drastically increasing rates of return the longer you work with it. Kind of like compounding interest in a bank account, content strategies that last over a year yield greater ROI in terms of traffic and leads. Also like a bank account, you get the best results if you keep adding to your content on a regular basis.

To make sure your “bank account” constantly has a fresh supply of funds, it’s best to produce content based on a schedule created far in advance. That way, you can work ahead when you have the time and maintain a healthy work schedule without feeling bogged down. Plus, when you stick to your schedule, you can add content to your site at a reasonable pace.

For example, we publish new blog posts 3-4 times per week to make sure that our content is always fresh. A consistent publishing strategy attracts a regular flow of traffic, and also provides your business with fresh content to share to your social accounts. It can take about a year to start really seeing returns from your content strategy, but if you continue to produce unique and insightful content, the results will speak for themselves.

2. Balance evergreen and timely content

Content comes in two flavors: evergreen and time-sensitive. Evergreen content — like this post — discusses topics that probably won’t drastically change. Time-sensitive content is often related to industry news or upcoming events.

Both styles serve important functions, and balancing them is a valuable part of any content marketing strategy. Evergreen content is more prone to deliver long-term traffic and leads to your business since it is relevant and accurate for a long time. On the other hand, time-sensitive content shows readers that you’re up-to-date on industry news while providing fresh additions to your site.

If you balance both kinds of content throughout a steady production schedule (and stick to it), you’ll see your ROI increase in the long haul.

3. Repurpose successful content to a new format

Repurposing content is a genius way to save time and maximize your reach. Basically, you tweak your popular content into a new format to multiply the size of your potential audience. While it may seem redundant, repurposing content can show different sides to your ideas while updating your site with “new” additions.

It also explores your topics from other angles and in more depth. Plus, the content you create the second time around might catch more attention or more shares on social media! Repurposing content doesn’t have to be a chore, though.

In fact, it can be one of the easiest ways to save time and money when you’re working with content. For example, you can:

• Rewrite press releases in a conversational format and publish them as blog posts
• Turn internal company presentations into public SlideShares
• Compile your best-performing content into an ebook
• Transcribe a video into text so search engines and users can read it
• Take the audio from a video and turn it into a podcast

This is just a brief list, and there are many other options depending on the types of content you already have. The point is to get you thinking about what new formats could complement your current strategy. Tailoring your content to different forms and outlets that resonate with your target market can help drive traffic and conversions for years to come.

4. Promote previous posts via social media

If previous content is still relevant, push it back into the limelight with a tweet or Facebook post. Both options only take seconds, and as long as the information is still accurate, it can still help readers who missed it the first time around. On top of that, if you can tie evergreen blog posts or articles into something timely, you run the chance to draw even more site visitors.

Evergreen content is extremely valuable to the success of a marketing strategy, and promoting it a second time can really maximize its returns. This may not be news to some since social media is an integral part of any content strategy, but a lot of social media marketers only focus on promoting new content and let the old stuff go, effectively transforming each post into an online flash in the pan. But that’s no way to work!

If you spent time creating content, you need to make sure people actually see it. That’s why whenever we publish a new post on our blog, we use the Power Scheduler feature on the Buffer extension to pre-schedule it to post on Twitter at least twice in the future. This increases the chances that followers who miss a post on the day we publish it will go back and read it, and also introduces our newer followers to past content.

And by scheduling it all in advance, we never have to worry about going back and figuring out which posts to share. Content is one of the most efficient additions to any Internet marketing strategy, and using these four techniques can make it even more cost-effective for your business. By producing consistent, high-quality content and maximizing its exposure, you can quality leads without much more effort.

After all, the smarter you work, the easier your work becomes.