Businesses are investing time and money into content to market their products and services. And your B2B company is no different.
Step 1: How to Get a Better Content Marketing Proposal
If you’re looking for pricing to create content for your marketing efforts (whether that means website copy, case studies, enewsletters, white papers, blog posts, social media posts or other types of content), there are certain things you need to share with a copywriter or marketing partner to get the best proposal possible.
Tell me, does this scenario sound familiar?
You ask a copywriter to give you a proposal for a writing project. He provides a best case project estimate based on the info you shared with him during your discussion. You receive the proposal and react with “Well, it’s more than I expected,” or “It’s too much for us.”
How can you stop wasting time and ensure that the proposal you receive fits your needs? It’s simple – share your marketing needs & goals and your budget.
Step 2: Here’s Why You Need to Share Your Goals & Budget.
It may be time for us to think about the “how much does content cost” process in a new, more collaborative way.
“I Want a Boat.”
Say you decided you wanted a boat and you asked for a price based on that single piece of information. Any number of options would fit. You might want a canoe, a rowboat, a sport fishing boat, a commercial fishing boat, a speedboat, a pontoon boat, a power boat, a yacht, a cruise ship.
And – depending on your goals and budget – any of these options might be realistic.
Let’s be honest. If you were in the market for a rowboat, a 312-foot Dutch-registered mega yacht wouldn’t exactly be what you had in mind.
But how would the boat salesperson know what you expected without more than one piece of data?
This analogy adds some new perspective to that cost of the content project question, doesn’t it?
So when someone asks me, “how much does it cost to do … (insert name of your content project here)?”
The short answer?
“It depends. What are your marketing goals? How much do you want to spend?”
Bottom line:
It’s difficult to put together a proper program and budget without an idea of what you want to accomplish and your spending range.
I Know What You’re Thinking
You’re afraid that all I’m interested in is your budget so I can spend all of it.
I’m not. It’s not the way I think.
As someone who works with many different size companies to create content for a variety of marketing efforts – from copywriting to social media posts – this is an issue I run into far too often.
I can tell you that most sensible social media and content creation teams aren’t sitting around a conference table rubbing their hands together in gleeful contemplation of maxing out your budget.
Step 3: The Value You Get … When You Give
Content marketers (myself included) are all thinking very carefully about how we can best help your marketing efforts and maximize how your budget is spent in the areas that will move your business goals forward. We’re more interested in providing value and solving your marketing problems.
Realistic Budget Ranges Deliver Appropriate Proposals
The same “what size boat” principle applies to B2B copywriting, content marketing or social media marketing projects.
There are different levels of service offerings. We can accomplish a great deal at many different budget levels. It’s a matter of choosing the strategy, tools and content that best fit both your goals and available budget. So what we do need to understand is your realistic budget range in order to tailor an appropriate project scope that matches your allocated budget.
For example, if your company were to request a social media content & management package, I could just as easily put together a program quote ranging from a few to tens of thousands of dollars a year.
But you may need just the content to post on your blog, or you may need both blog and social media posts, or you may need someone to take the entire social media program – from content to management and reporting – off your hands.
Lacking any information about your requirements, expectations, budget (or budget range), and your goals, I would provide you a social media content and management proposal that I believe (based on my experience) to be the best solution for your business. That gap in critical information could mean that the proposal would not match your available marketing spend. It might appear to be the wrong fit for you – and end with you ignoring my proposal.
And more importantly, you would be no closer to having a solution to your pressing marketing challenge.
You have options. Open communication about your goals allows us to customize your project quote. If we have a clear idea about what you want to accomplish, we’re able to adjust that ‘best case project estimate’ I mentioned in the beginning of this article and create a realistic plan of action for you. This may mean putting one project before another to ensure the most important things get done first.
If you’d like to talk more about pricing for your B2B copy projects, give us a call at 610-504-0008 or contact us here.