Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the most useful assets a company can incorporate into their marketing strategy. Unfortunately, the content marketing price of getting started can often deter businesses from maximizing their ROI.
On average, businesses working with full-service content marketing agencies spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per month. For small businesses, this price point far exceeds initial marketing budgets.
Luckily, there are alternative solutions for more affordable strategies.
Several factors influence the cost of a content strategy, including who you work with, the types of content you focus on, and your overall content velocity. In this guide, we will take a look at the cost of various strategies and what affects them to help you get the best content marketing price to reach your goals.
How Much Does Content Marketing Cost
As mentioned, the average business will spend between $5,000 and $10,000 monthly. But this is just the average. In practice, the average price of quality content marketing can range from $500 per month for budget strategies to $50,000 for Fortune 500 enterprises.
Still, most businesses can find quality content marketing services between $1,000 and $25,000 depending on your industry and where you are on your content marketing journey.
Importance of content marketing in business
Now that we have a base understanding of the investment quality content marketing requires, you may be asking yourself if it is even worth it.
The answer is a resounding yes.
Sure, content marketing may require a larger initial investment compared to traditional advertising, but it is nothing compared to what you receive in return. The benefits content marketing provides your business include:
- Improved online visibility to boost brand awareness.
- Increased lead generation.
- Lead nurturing to establish your brand as a trusted expert.
- Loyalty development in existing customers/clients.
- Reduced customer support costs.
When all is said and done, these benefits culminate in an impressive 13x increase in ROI for businesses that use content marketing compared to companies that don’t. So, even companies without a massive marketing budget should allocate some of their resources to enacting a content marketing strategy for their long-term goals.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways you can initiate content marketing at an affordable rate that fits your budget.
Factors Affecting Content Marketing Cost
Since every content marketer boasts unique experiences, processes, and tactics, there is no one price fits all when shopping for content marketing services. Here are a few factors to consider when comparing the value of a content marketing provider to their proposed rate.
Scope of content services
The first and most important thing that influences the cost of content marketing is the scope of the project. Like any service, marketers will charge higher rates for the more work you require.
Many content marketing agencies, including Kurt’sCopy, build their rates on a per piece of content basis. For example, strategies requiring two blog posts per week will cost twice as much as those requiring weekly publications.
These cost structures are the same across all forms of content, be it blogs, social media posts, or video content.
Goals and targets
Many businesses may cut costs by reducing their publication velocity. This can work but comes at the expense of lowering your realistic ROI targets.
As such, goals like brand awareness or sales can affect the cost of content marketing campaigns.
For example, strategies with the aim of improving brand awareness focus on volume content to reach wide audiences. Say that, on average, each piece of content you publish attracts 100 monthly views. The more frequently you publish, the quicker you will reach your predetermined goals.
Meanwhile, if your goal is to leverage existing traffic to boost sales, you can often do so through fewer persuasive sales pages. This form of copywriting tends to be more expensive per piece but requires less content in the long run.
Content marketing team and expertise
Who you hire to create your content is a huge factor in how much you will pay. The most common content marketing teams include freelancers, in-house staff, or agencies.
If you are just getting started, you likely aren’t going to hire in-house staff right away. Instead, freelancers or agencies are the best method to tap into years of experience without committing to a full-time salary.
With agencies, you tap into the full expertise of a specialized team. This often consists of a designated content strategist, a content writer, and an editor/designer. The benefit is a collaborative creation process that results in high-quality content. The drawback is that it is often more expensive.
With freelancers, one person handles the entire content creation process, from strategy curation to publication and promotion. The best part is they can often do it all for much cheaper, with freelancers typically charging between $1,000 and $10,000 per month for content marketing services.
Due to their flexibility, freelancers can offer content writing at a variety of price points depending on their specialization and experience, with most charging between $1,000 and $10,000 per month for content marketing services.
Content marketing tools and software
Content marketing tools are the backbone of any marketer’s strategy. Be it for keyword research, graphic design, or content optimization, every marketer has a toolbox of software they use.
While these tools provide additional value to the end product, they also come with their own additional costs. Top-of-the-line software can cost thousands of dollars a year for content marketers. These prices are often reflected in the rates they charge. Some of the most common content marketing software include:
- All-in-one tools (Semrush, Ahrefs)
- Keyword research tools (KeySearch)
- Content optimization tools (SurferSEO, Fraser)
- Video creation software (Adobe Premier Pro, Capcut)
- Graphic design software (Canva, Adobe Express)
Before hiring anyone, you should always inquire about which tools they use to ensure you pay the appropriate rates for the resources they use.
Industry and target audience
Technical industries may require content creators with specialized knowledge. This often comes with increased costs.
Effect content marketing is all about establishing yourself as a knowledgeable authority in your industry. While some industries can be researched, others require firsthand technical knowledge.
Finance, healthcare, engineering, legal, real estate, and education are the more common industries that require higher content marketing prices, as those equipped to create content around the topics typically have specialized training.
Content quality
As with everything, you get what you pay for when it comes to content marketing. If you want to cut corners and go with the cheapest option, the quality of the content you receive won’t be there.
Many businesses go this route, often paying minimum wage or lower rates. You may get a subpar creator willing to work for this rate, but the incentive to put in the work to produce quality content isn’t there. In the end, the final product will be rushed, poorly edited, and lack the polish that comes with specialized content marketing tools and expertise.
When it comes to content marketing, quality trumps quantity. So, if you need to cut costs to fit your budget, compromise by focusing on fewer high-quality pieces per month instead of a bunch of low-quality posts.
Content Marketing Cost By the Service
Effective content marketing happens over several stages. They include:
- Developing a strategy
- Creating the content
- Promoting and distributing the content
- Monitoring content performance and making adjustments
A full-service content marketing agency or freelancer will handle all these stages for you.
However, most marketers also offer these as standalone services, and businesses looking to expand their budget may find it more affordable to handle some of the work in-house while outsourcing more comprehensive processes.
Here is a quick look at some of these standalone services and how they will affect the overall cost of your content marketing campaign.
Content marketing strategy and planning services
The backbone of a content marketing campaign is the strategy itself.
It may seem simple to throw a few blog topics onto a Google Sheet and hand it off to a content writer, but this is an ineffective way to reach your target audience. It’s simply guesswork. You don’t know if your topics target actual queries your audience is searching for.
At Kurt’sCopy, we create comprehensive content marketing strategies using advanced market, competitor, and keyword research. Each strategy includes:
- Three months of content ideas
- Full list of primary and secondary keywords
- Detailed outlines of the purpose and goal of each piece of content
- Links to detailed content briefs to distribute to writers
Considering how much research goes into creating a content calendar, we charge just under half of our full-service rate for strategy creation, with prices starting at $100 per piece of content.
Content creation
One way businesses cut costs in their content marketing campaign is by creating a strategy themselves and handing it offer to a content creator. In this scenario, you only have to pay for the creation process.
However, each content medium comes with its own rates. There are several forms of content to choose from, with the most comprehensive strategies incorporating blog posts, website content, social media content, and videos.
Here is a brief breakdown of the most common forms of marketing content and the average prices you can expect to pay.
| Type of Content | Example | Average Costs |
|---|---|---|
Blog posts and articles | 1,000-word SEO-optimized blog post | $100 – $500 per post |
Guides and ebooks | 5,000-word lead magnet ebook | $500 – $2,500 per ebook |
Copywriting and editing | Website landing page, sales copy | $50 – $1,000 per page |
Design and visual content | Infographics, branding visuals | $100 – $1,500 per project |
Social Media Content | Social media post with caption and image | $20 – $150 per post |
Video creation and production | 30-second promotional video | $70– $150+ per minute of video |
Content promotion and distribution
Many agencies include content promotion and distribution as part of their content marketing packages.
At Kurt’sCopy, SEO is standard across all of our content marketing strategies. However, social media marketing and email marketing channels are available as optional add-ons. This way, we provide promotion and distribution channels that fit any marketing budget.
Content analytics and optimization
With search engines constantly changing their SEO standards, an effective content marketing strategy requires continual monitoring and updates to maintain rankings.
This is why most content marketers include analytics and optimizations within their service packages.
At Kurt’sCopy, we track how each piece of content performs, with regular content audits being a common component of our content marketing services.
Through these analytics, we identify and execute opportunities for content re-optimization, an important step for maintaining high search rankings and traffic from existing content.
Content Marketing Pricing Models
Content marketing agencies employ a variety of pricing models depending on their services and expertise. The price model used can often play an important role in the overall costs. Here is a quick look at the most common content marketing models agencies and freelancers employ.
Per word pricing
Used most often by content writers, per-word pricing is exactly as it sounds: you pay a set rate for each word included in the content.
This pricing model is straightforward but comes with some notable drawbacks.
The most crucial is the writer’s incentive to word stuff. When paid per word, writing as many words as possible is in the writer’s best interest. This often results in the piece of content being fluffed up and bloated.
Still, if you go this route, expect to pay anywhere from $0.10 per word to $0.25 per word for a professional content writer.
Hourly rate pricing
An hourly pricing model is commonly found among freelance content marketers (particularly those on UpWork) offering end-to-end services.
Like per-word pricing, it is pretty straightforward, but it also comes with drawbacks for both the client and the writer. This is because an hourly pricing model leaves too much room for dispute.
A writer may require more time to write a piece of content, while the client may believe they are purposely taking their time to increase their profits.
In the end, both sides may be right, and it just leaves a sour taste in everybody’s mouths.
Nevertheless, those looking to employ the hourly rate pricing model can expect to pay between $40 and $150 an hour for a professional content marketer, depending on their experience.
Monthly retainer pricing
One of the most common pricing models used by content marketers, and the one favoured by our agency, is the monthly retainer pricing.
This pricing model gives the most flexibility to the client and marketer alike. By paying for the services by the month, a client can cancel or change their service at any time, without leaving the marketer without pay for all the hard work they already put in.
Additionally, a monthly retainer doesn’t put pressure on the marketer to complete any task within a set number of hours. While there are still deadlines, they are less strenuous, allowing the marketer to put in the work required to produce high-quality content without the fear of working up the bill.
Project-based charges
The final pricing model used by content marketers is project-based charges. This is where clients pay for an entire service outright.
We occasionally employ this pricing model but typically prefer monthly retainers. This is because while the model is a great way to secure long-term commitments and potentially offer budgeted rates, it also limits the client’s ability to cancel or change the service.
At Kurt’sCopy, we aim to preserve full transparency and freedom so that our clients have complete control over their strategies, and project-based chargers tend to limit this flexibility.
Content Marketing Budget Allocation: Is It Worth It?
77% of businesses say they are satisfied with the ROI they receive from their content marketing strategy. And when you consider the long-term value, the boost to brand awareness, and the increase in ROI, content marketing is well worth the investment to grow and scale your business.
The only question that remains is how much should you invest.
Businesses typically allocate 10% – 50% of their overall marketing budget to content marketing, with most tending to be between 25%-35% on average.
What you choose to allocate is ultimately down to your marketing goals. Once you know how many pages of content you plan to create, you should be able to estimate your costs and work them into your budget accurately.
Kurt’sCopy: Choosing the Right Content Marketing Agency
Getting the most value for your marketing budget starts with choosing the right experts. At Kurt’sCopy, we tap into six years of marketing experience and industry-standard tools to deliver expert content strategies for all marketing budgets.
With a comprehensive content calendar and optional distribution add-ons, we offer a variety of strategies at various price points to ensure you receive the support you need.
Send us a message today for a free consultation.
Kurt Norris is the founder of Kurt’sCopy, where he helps B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, and local businesses craft compelling content and SEO strategies that deliver measurable results. With over six years of experience, Kurt specializes in creating data-driven campaigns that drive traffic, increase conversions, and establish brand authority.
