Content marketing’s benefits are numerous — lead generation, improved SEO, and demonstration of thought leadership, just to name a few — but it is undeniably an investment.

Effective content marketing takes time, talent, and strategy, but it doesn’t have to entail a big spend. It is possible to drive meaningful results with a small budget. We asked content marketing experts to share their best cost-saving tips and tricks.

1. Recycle, repurpose, repeat

“Recycling and repurposing are two big pieces that will save lots of time and money when it comes to digital marketing,” says Penny Sansevieri, author, book marketing expert and CEO of Author Marketing Experts. She suggests finding multiple uses for every piece of content you invest in. “Let’s say you’ve started doing a lot of video via one of the new apps out there, such as Periscope. Take your video feed and have it transcribed. Sites like Fiverr can help you do this for under $20. Then take that and use it for a blog post. You can also pull the audio out of a video and recycle it as a podcast. This content can now be shared on multiple platforms in print, audio, and video.”

Infographics can also be used in multiple ways, making them another cost-effective form of custom content. For example, you can use the image as the basis of a blog article, press release, social media posts, or even marketing collateral for prospective clients.

1. A picture’s worth a thousand words but ideally costs $0
2. Content accompanied by intriguing images tends to garner more shares and higher engagement rates, but securing appropriate visuals can be time-consuming and costly. When using existing images, you also have to be mindful of copyright laws and citing appropriately. “Getting creative with the available free images and videos from www.pixabay.com is a huge expense saver because they are covered under the Creative Commons CC0, which means no attribution is required, and it is free even for commercial applications,” says Evin Charles Anderson, CEO of Waverley Knobs, a video and digital media company. He also suggests checking out www.canva.com for free images and templates you can use for blog articles, social media posts, and more.
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4. Help your content “get found”
5. You’ve created quality content that resonates with readers, now get your audience to come to you by improving your site’s SEO. James Rice, head of marketing at WikiJob, used SEO tactics to help his company grow its traffic by 36 percent last year, adding over a million unique visitors. Rice’s tactics included:

• Testing title tags for click-through rates until they found the best-performing versions.
• Making content more accessible and navigable “so Google’s bots could crawl more easily and understand our content categories.”
• Reviewing old content and enhancing it, often by making it longer or adding new keywords. (“As a consequence, many of those pages rose in rank on Google.”)
• Creating new content based on high-performing topics and gaps between demand and existing content.
• Building up WikiJob’s link profile by connecting with quality sites via tools such as Buzzstream.

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2. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
3. Cross-blogging, or guest blogging, can help you get your content in front of a new audience, free of charge. Identify partners who have a target group similar to yours, then, propose writing an article or providing some type of content that will demonstrate your thought leadership and provide true value for the business’s readers, advises Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation, a provider of online document filing services. “Cross-blogging is a great way to introduce your offer to customers who are in a certain mindset,” she says. For example, Sweeney’s customers are entrepreneurs, so she partners with businesses with similar clientele. She allows them to educate her audience about their offerings, while she gets the opportunity to use their platforms to showcase her expertise and services.
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5. Hitch your wagon to a star
6. “Combine two of the most popular online marketing strategies — content and influencers — for exceptional returns without having to spend big,” suggests David Mercer, an author, tech entrepreneur, and a contributor to SME Pals, a blog dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners thrive online. “Create great content and use it as part of your influencer marketing outreach campaign. Build relationships with targeted influencers who can put your content in front of potential customers based on the strength of the mutually beneficial relationship you build with them,” he says.

Influencer marketing is vital to Mediaplanet’s content distribution plans, and we don’t mind if you hitch a ride with us. For more information, contact us today.