Content Strategy & My Budget

Choosing a content strategy that suits my budget

• Choosing the right content strategy for your company can be complicated. This is especially true, given that companies, by their very nature must each yield to the inevitable laws of business preservation. They need to make sales to survive, and according to them, your capital is invariably best invested with them. The more the merrier too, and the more quickly, the better.
• Impartial advice is something rare in the world of commerce, and in particular, the murky world of Internet anonymity. This makes the process of finding a partner to provide your e-Commerce solutions a difficult task. Quite literally, it’s hard to know whom to trust, and whom to avoid.
• Alarm bells should ring each time somebody insists they know where your money is best invested, and rightly so, especially when they are promoting it. In the business world it’s highly important to make your own decisions during planning and implementing the content strategy for your business to follow.

Factors to consider when choosing your content strategy.

What products are you offering to consumers? Are they seasonal? Are they permanently available? How competitive are your markets? All of these factors and more must of course be taken into account when planning your content strategy. One thing for certain in business is that whatever you do, you will have costs. Of course, the ideal situation for businesses is to minimise, or even better, eliminate as much as possible ongoing costs and overheads, therefore making optimal use of business capital.

One content strategy by which to reduce one’s ongoing costs is to invest in optimised content, which to some may sound much easier said than done, granted. Surely there are plenty of online retailers who would love to have high quality optimised unique content product descriptions on their site right away, but the prospect of investing in a complete unique content package, however, doesn’t sit well with the finance department. True, investing in an optimised text almost invariably means a higher up front cost than a paid click. Although it may be stating the obvious, it must be said that paid traffic involves continually rising costs, whereas text optimisation, although a larger initial investment, represents a form of marketing requiring little or no subsequent maintenance, save the costs of hosting.

If your cost per click budget is £1,000 per month, this of course adds up to the princely sum of £12,000 per annum. Accepting that although potentially attractive, it is impractical for companies to invest their entire yearly budget into professional text optimisation. Especially in one transaction, this could cause major cash flow concerns, and given the beginnings of this text, it would also be hypocritical. What we at Textprovider recommend for retailers aiming to substantially reduce or eliminate their cost per click expenses through text optimisation, is to invest one third of their monthly budget for paid traffic in unique content, as a first step in the transition. After a couple of months, this fraction could be extended to one half of the monthly advertising budget, and so on.

This way, the smart online retailer can switch from paid traffic to higher levels of organic traffic, and from potentially rising monthly costs to virtually no costs at all, without upsetting company cash flow.

So for which products is it worth investing in text optimisation? All of them? Well, it would be dishonest to say so. At Textprovider, we suggest online retailers to identify the products in their company that are permanently, and temporarily available. For products with very short life cycles, such as Vuvuzelas, it would be a potentially risky content strategy to commission a professionally optimised text for the sake of one month’s sales. For such products, a cost per click campaign may be undoubtedly the best option.

For the sake of example, think of an SEO text costing £20, focusing on a keyword with a cost per click of roughly £1. After attracting just 20 visits, it can be said that the text has matured, or amortised. Through entirely organic means, it has brought in the same level of traffic as would a paid campaign. Future visits are gained at no further costs, such are the benefits of a good unique content strategy for your site. We at Textprovider are experienced in helping retailers to switch from paid traffic to organic traffic, so just pick up the phone for more information about how we can help you. Remember also that a good content strategy may also include multi channel marketing, such as SEO video.