Fascinating article from David Meerman Scott on the way marketers value content creation. In it, he posits that because content lasts and has a durable impact on your marketing efforts, it’s a mistake to view content creation exclusively in terms of the expense associated with its production. Content creation (and its associated cost) should likely instead be viewed in terms of what the equivalent alternate, perishable forms of marketing (outbound campaigns, pay-per-click advertising, etc) might cost.
Case in point, his AdWords Value Equivalency:
The way to calculate this is to figure out how much you would have to pay for the Google AdWords equivalent of a particular search term that you rank highly for in the natural search results because of the content you have created. Then figure out how often that phrase is searched on and calculate a value for a year (or ten years or in perpetuity).
He’s so right. As soon as your organizational efforts shift gears from outbound marketing to inbound marketing, content creation innately becomes value creation. That’s how we view corporate video production, and business video in general as part of your content strategy, at Rewatchable. It’s easy to justify the cost of ‘pillar’ videos – elevator pitches, customer testimonials, product demos, explainer videos, etc, because they’re durable and build credibility. The harder – but equally important – internal sell are the ‘soft’ videos around events, the video blog posts, the feature demos, the training and support videos. A traditional marketing department views those as sunk costs, while an inbound marketing department views them as an opportunity to drive more top-of-funnel prospects into the sales channel by making that content compelling and share-worthy. When you view every piece of content in terms of its lasting value (or even as savings against alternative expenses), it starts to seem crazy not to fully invest in their quality.
Is your organization stuck viewing content creation as an expense? Have you changed your organization’s line of thinking? Let us know in the comments section, we’d love to hear your story.