How Much Do You Need to Budget for Content Marketing in the Tech Sector?
Whether your brand is new or you’re already well-established in the market, you still need to have good brand awareness. Your customers need to know who you are and what you represent. What consumers think of you and your overall brand could make or break your business.
That’s where content marketing comes in. Content marketing helps you reach your target audience and grow it over time by building better conversations and establishing trust. It also helps you take your marketing efforts to the next level as you focus on growing your company over time.
There are many ways for you to reach your audience, but the Content Marketing Institute has found that content marketing has a strong ROI. In fact, content marketing generates around three times more leads than outbound marketing efforts. You’ll also spend around 62% less on content marketing compared to outbound marketing options.
Content marketing is an essential part of business, so you do need to budget for it. How much? Here are a few things to consider.
What’s a Typical Content Marketing Budget for Tech Companies?
To get started, remember that you have to have a general marketing budget first. You’ll be looking at spending around 9.6% of your company’s overall budget on marketing if you are offering B2B products, 9% if you offer B2B services, 19.5% if you offer B2C products, and 17.7% if you offer B2C services.
Interestingly, Gartner found in its 2022 survey that marketing budgets are relatively stable across all industries, ranging from 6.4 to 9.5% of company revenue. Tech companies stand out because they tend to spend around 10.1% of company revenue, which is a little higher than most other industries.
Once you know your company’s basic budget, you have to break down the marketing budget into categories. Digital marketing is just one aspect of marketing that you need to allocate funds for.
Marketers generally suggest allocating around 25 to 30% of your overall marketing budget directly to content marketing. For example, if you have set aside a marketing budget of $50,000, you’ll want to set aside around $12,500 to $15,000 for the quarter or year, depending on how you run your budget.
Companies Between $1 and $5 Million May Spend More
A survey completed by Kiwi Creative determined that the amount of money spent by B2B tech companies depends on their size. Companies in the highest revenue bracket, which is $50 million or more annually, may not need to spend as much for digital marketing as smaller companies in the $1 to $5 million bracket. It was found that the larger companies spend anywhere from $501 to $1,000 a month on average while smaller companies tended to spend between $2,500 to $5,000.
Additionally, within those brackets, tech consulting companies tended to spend the least, either choosing not to spend anything on content marketing or opting to spend under $250. On the other end of the spectrum, SaaS companies spent the most on paid digital advertising at around $5,000 or more monthly.
Here are a few real-world examples of what some well-known SaaS companies spend on marketing.
Salesforce: 46% of revenue goes to sales and marketing
MindBody: 39% of revenue goes to sales and marketing
Bottomline Technologies: 21.8% of revenue on sales and marketing
Here are some examples of the average spend by successful tech companies:
Google: 11.9% of revenue goes back into sales and marketing
Intel: 11.9% of all revenue goes back into sales and marketing
Microsoft: 15% of all revenue returns to sales and marketing
If you’re still building your brand, the extra spend on content marketing could make a big difference for you. By putting in the extra effort with content marketing at this stage, you’re setting yourself up for success, potentially making it possible to reduce your spending as your company continues to grow.
Build Your Brand Up With Digital Marketing
With digital marketing, you have the opportunity to reach new customers, create positive interactions and conversations with them, and boost your brand’s growth. As a tech company, you do need to set aside up to a third of your marketing budget for digital marketing, and then you will need to split that further into ad campaigns, blog content, email outreach, and more.
Your content marketing strategy can make a big difference in the success of your business, helping you move forward and grow over time. With the right outreach and information for your customer base, you’ll see a true change in the support your company receives.
Whether your company is in the $1 to $5 million or $500 million bracket, digital marketing can have an impact on your branding and how you’re perceived by your target audience.
At Comma, we can help you build up the content your customers want to see, boosting customers’ trust in your company. To learn more, contact us.