Content Marketing Cost

You can create and market content for free. Writing a blog post, sending emails or opening accounts, and posting on social media doesn't cost anything. The tools you need for collecting and analyzing data are either available for free or have some kind of free trial period. However, the premium versions are much more powerful than the free ones and can save you a lot of time. Here is a discussion of what tools Content Marketers use, what they do, and what they cost.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing relies on content created with a specific audience in mind and designed to appeal to the interests or problems of that audience. This could be blog posts, articles, reports, ebooks, videos, podcasts, or other media. The content builds and supports a relationship with the audience through social media, email, or websites.

Content doesn’t push a product, service, or brand. It focuses on what the audience is interested in, and Content Marketers learn that through data analytics. The content is relevant and valuable to the audience and rarely mentions the brand or product. Relevant content tells consumers a relatable story and gives them a sense of belonging to a group.

Read more about what content marketing is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with Content Marketing?

Content marketing helps you connect with your audience, improve brand loyalty, generate leads, and increase sales. Unlike traditional marketing, which makes a direct pitch for products, content marketing is based on storytelling and rarely mentions a brand or sales. The content appeals to readers by helping them with a problem or issue. 

The first step in content marketing is to determine your audience and what they care about using Google Analytics and social media analytics tools. Once you know your audience’s interests, you can begin to draft content that addresses those needs. This helps build a relationship with your readers, which is crucial to improving brand loyalty. 

Although content rarely mentions the brand or product, relevant content tells a story that consumers relate to best. It gives them a sense of belonging to a group. Content marketing creates more customers than traditional marketing, and these customers are also more loyal. They feel connected to the company or brand and are more likely to buy again. This connection develops through storytelling that resonates with followers.

Content marketing also generates more leads than traditional marketing. Consumers prefer to learn about companies and products through articles and blog posts rather than advertising. Finally, content marketing costs less than traditional marketing and leads to higher conversion rates.

In-Depth Review of the Cost

The practice of content marketing doesn’t cost anything. You can create your own content, post links on social media, and send emails for free. Where the cost of content marketing comes in are the tools you choose to use. Many tools available for keyword research, data analytics, and publishing can make your job as a Content Marketer much easier. Some tools are more complicated and challenging to learn, and this is where signing up for a class can save you time when you are learning content marketing.

Keyword Research

Some keyword research and SEO tools have free trials or less powerful versions you can use for nothing, but this can be a false economy. Keyword research and SEO are crucial parts of content marketing, and skimping here is not a good idea.

SEMRush

Digital marketing depends upon driving organic traffic to your website, and SEO helps you do that. SEMRush is a powerful SEO tool to help you with content marketing, market research, advertising, and social media marketing. SEMRush offers a seven-day free trial, and after that, there are three levels: Pro for $119.95 monthly, Guru at $229.95 monthly, and Business for $449.95 monthly. 

Moz

Moz is another SEO tool that performs similar functions. Moz offers a less powerful free version and a pro version. After a 30-day free trial, you can purchase Moz at four levels: Standard for $99/month, Medium for $179/month, Large for $299/month, and Premium for $599/month. There is a 20 percent discount if you pay for a year upfront.

Data Analytics

While data analytics tools like Google Analytics and platform-specific tools for social media are free to use, they can be challenging to learn. The cost could be signing up for a class to help you understand these tools better.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is the internet's most widely used analytics program. GA identifies problems with your web pages so you can improve performance and improve sales. You can use GA to track website visitors, collect data on what they do there, and get numerous reports on users and their actions. Google Analytics can be complicated to learn, but it is free to use.

Publishing and Scheduling

Here are some tools to make content creation and scheduling much easier.

Grammarly

You want to make sure your content is not only relevant, interesting, and engaging, but it should also be free of grammatical and punctuation errors. Grammarly is a free online writing assistant that can help you avoid grammar and punctuation mistakes and set the right tone and vocabulary level for your audience. Grammarly can also check your content for plagiarism. Content Creators often choose the premium version, which offers more guidance on readability and style, plus collaboration features. You can pay for premium in one of three ways. The most economical is a yearly subscription at $144; next is quarterly for $60, and monthly at $30.

HootSuite

HootSuite helps you plan content and schedule posts on social media. You can monitor and manage comments and messages, promote organic content, manage paid ads, and collect data across your social media channels. After a 30-day free trial, HootSuite costs $49 monthly for the Professional level, $129 monthly for the Team package, and $739 per month for a Business account.

Why Learn Content Marketing?

If you have a small business, learning content marketing can help you build a relationship with your customers, leading to brand loyalty and higher sales. This depends upon creating and promoting high-quality content your audience can relate to and get something from. This is because a correctly targeted audience will generate more sales than a broader, more general audience for a much lower cost. Broadcast and print advertising are much more expensive than pay-per-click ads, and organic or earned advertising through content marketing is essentially free.

You can also learn content marketing to change to a new career. If you have strong communication and writing skills, good organization abilities, an understanding of meeting deadlines, and the talent to create content of different types that maintains a brand message, you have a good chance of establishing a successful content marketing career.

Read more about why you should learn content marketing. 

Free Introductory Content Marketing Course Online 

Maybe you aren’t sure what content marketing is all about or if it is for you. You can take some free courses and tutorials to find out. Check out Noble Desktop’s free seminar, The Pillars of Digital Marketing Success, to learn about content marketing and other digital marketing topics.

There are many free video courses to give you an idea of how content marketing works. Udemy offers Content Marketing 101: A Free Guide for Beginners and Pros. Hubspot has the Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2022, and many free tutorials are available on YouTube to get you started.

Read about more free content marketing videos and online tutorials.

Learn Content Marketing with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

You can learn content marketing with hands-on classes at Noble Desktop. Taught by expert instructors, class sizes are small and give you ample opportunity to interact with the instructor and the other students. If you want to learn more about content marketing, sign up for Noble's Content Marketing Bootcamp. This course covers an introduction to content marketing and techniques for content creation and promotion, including how to measure the success of your content marketing.

If you want to go a step further, try Noble's Digital Marketing Certificate course. It covers email marketing, SEO, Google Analytics and Google Ads, and all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn Marketing. You also get a Streaming for Social Media course and a portfolio class. If you want, you can retake any class for free for up to a year. To find out more about content marketing and change careers, visit Noble Desktop's digital marketing page.