As a marketing manager, you have a lot of different jobs on your plate including, but certainly not limited to, learning a diverse product line, meeting prospects, attending trade shows and training sessions, producing proposals, and, oh yeah, you need to keep the website fresh with current and compelling content.
In today’s spotlight series, we’ll highlight the best ways to utilize a content writing service, i.e. a professional copywriter, to get a better ROI for your marketing activities, decrease what you’re currently spending to create this content in house, and help take a lot of stress of your marketing team.
Utilizing a Content Creator to Ratchet up ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is thrown out enough that you’d figure most people have a pretty good handle on the concept. But, truth is, most SMB companies out there just don’t have the time or resources to really look at how much the marketing activity cost relative to how much it produced. Digital marketing tools and apps are certainly making this easier, but for the majority of traditional activities, ROI tracking may be difficult.
Knowing this, it’s important for the savvy manager out there to have at least a basic cost/benefit understanding of an activity. This especially applies to activities you do in house versus having a contractor do the work. Focusing on copywriting, content creation, web page writing, blog postings, etc. the main thing to look at is time to completion. This time is generally not billable, meaning your marketing team’s time goes straight into your overhead. Once you’ve looked at all your overhead (building costs, benefits cost, non-billable time costs, etc. (we recommend reading: “Ideal Overhead Percentage” from smallbusiness.chron.com) you can develop a cost rate overhead multiplier. This is just total expenses/payroll expenses. Generally speaking, most employees will run at a 2.5-3X OH multiplier. This means if you pay someone $30.00 per hour, then they actually cost you somewhere between $75-$90 per hour.
Now that we understand OH multipliers, let’s look at a simple example. You’ve asked your marketing team to develop one blog post per week to add to the website. If it takes, say, six (6) total man hours to complete each blog and the average rate is $30.00/hr, then each blog is running you in the neighborhood of $450-$540 to complete, and that doesn’t even take into account the opportunity costs of those employees being engaged in something else.
On the other hand, with a copywriting service like ours you pay a flat per word fee of $0.25/word. With that, you get content executed by professional writers that’s crisp, clean, and relevant towards inspiring action. So, for a 750-word blog post, you’re looking at $187.
To compare, at least $450 in house or $187 for a freelance SEO writer. Pretty easy math!
Getting Started with Business Copywriting
Getting started couldn’t be easier, just fill out our contact form and we’ll be in touch to get started. You give us a topic or topics you like and we’ll do the rest – from researching the relevant news and information, incorporating links to your website and other authorities in your space, crafting compelling copy, and doing so consistently month after month or just one project at a time. We aren’t web designers, UIX experts, or a marketing agency. We are high-volume, seo copywriting specialists. Contact our team to get started today!
