No matter the industry or company size, Gartner’s most recent “CMO Spend and Strategy Survey” reveals that 75% of Chief Marketing Officers face increased pressure this year to simply “do more with less.” That statistic reaches across different industries, company sizes and revenue. But from one company to the next, “doing more with less” looks a little different. It could mean:
- Producing less content—in terms of quantity or quality
- Hiring freelancers—who are perceived as cheaper than agency / in-house
- Dabbling with AI—which some say can replace writers entirely
- Saddling in-house writers—who simply can’t do it all for the organization
- Pulling SMEs away from their work—who may not have the skills or bandwidth
If you’re a content or marketing executive, you know there’s nothing “simple” about optimizing for efficiency. Like Odysseus passing between Scylla and Charybdis, the waters ahead are ever uncertain, and every decision carries its own set of dangers.
But it’s worth exploring. In this article, we’ll take a look at:
- Statistics and trends that illuminate the 2023-2024 content marketing landscape
- Strategies for consuming less resources in the creation of content (as listed above), and
- A new mindset that enables industry leaders to free themselves up and truly do more.
In the end, you’ll walk away with the knowledge, perspective, and confidence to choose which content procurement strategy will deliver the greatest rewards—for the least amount of risk. Like any investment, that’s the most realistic outcome we can hope to achieve.
This is what ‘less’ looks like for content marketers in 2023
Content is the lifeblood of any organization: it’s how we present B2B deals and close them; it’s how new products and services debut to the public; it’s how customers get re-engaged and remain loyal; it’s how a business springs to life and makes its impact. That said, how might a CMO interpret “less” in today’s climate?
You pen and publish less content.
True story: One of our former copywriting clients left just as ChatGPT hit the market—so I figured their lone in-house writer would be editing AI-penned articles. But when I checked the website a few months later, it was a static content graveyard of the last articles we’d written for them. For some reason, the idea of ending all content production had never occurred to me.
After doing a little digging, I found Parse.ly—a content data analytics platform that intentionally pressed the pause button on all new content for a month just to see what would happen. Surprisingly, blog traffic held up: the old content still had legs! The total bummer, though? “All of our other lead forms—such as demo requests, pricing forms, and product information forms—all dropped precipitously,” they reported. As a B2B company, this was huge for them. When they resumed content in May, leads climbed back up. As sure as June sells ice cream and September sells pumpkin spice lattes, content creates that perfect climate for prospecting.
For this reason, a July 2022 Statista survey found 50% of B2B businesses planned to increase spending on content marketing through 2023—despite economic uncertainties.
You lower your content quality standards.
Something we’ve heard before: “We don’t really need A+ content—B+ content’ll do.”
It’s a shocking statement. For us, A+ content forms a human connection, moves a mindset, and achieves two-way interaction at scale—even if your busy reader merely scans or skims. In a crowded marketplace, why would you want anything less?
By comparison, B-grade content raises more questions than it answers, invites disengagement, and turns off prospects with jargon or fluff. There’s no payoff: as site visits go up, so do bounce rates. The leads that come in are the wrong leads, drawn in by the wrong story.
You take a gamble on the freelance marketplace.
The B+ content argument is often code for: “We’re just going to hire some freelancers.”
Certainly, there are thousands of A+ freelancers out there… if you can find them… and keep them. The first two MarketSmiths writers were freelancers, in fact. Company founder Jean Tang liked them so much she offered to pay full-time salaries to keep them. In the early years, she tried the freelance procurement method—and, like many other companies, wasted thousands of dollars in the process because…
Here’s the dirty little secret… Freelancers aren’t cheap!
On Upwork, you’ll find hourly rates for midrange freelance strategists for $100, writers for $75, and editors for $85—which means even a bare bones basic team will cost $260/hour, or the equivalent of a $540,800 annual salary. Even if you just hired the writer, the full-time salary would come out to $156,000—and that’s not even for expert-level experience.
As the saying goes, “If you think hiring good freelance writers is expensive, wait until you hire cheap ones.” All too often, freelancers have limited bandwidth, limited versatility, and require copious amounts of handholding, editing, rewriting. Buyer beware: once you take this ride, the merry go-round of vetting, hiring, and wasted productivity is dizzyingly endless.
You take an even bigger gamble on AI-generated, human-edited copy.
To say ChatGPT made a splash when it debuted in March of this year is a gross understatement. The leading large language model amassed 1 million curious technophiles within the first five days—and 100 million within the first few months. The allure of a freebie content generator is irresistible when faced with the pressure to do more with less.
Heck, journalists and content producers were some of the first ones to take it for a spin!
What we found was not so surprising: AI is an amazing tool, but there are many caveats: repetition, cliches, lack of fresh perspective, and confused distortions of reality to name a few. Ultimately, effective marketing must channel human empathy to connect with human audiences.
Given that 76% of people surveyed believe generative AI will help their companies cut costs, we’re convinced that AI-human collaboration will be the future of writing. In fact, tests of human-managed AI content have found it performs 53% better in search and reduces production time by 90%, potentially saving companies $100,000 over five years.
Putting all your eggs into the AI basket is a risky gamble, considering Google has been pretty clear that the experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of human-powered storytelling will be the clear winners in future algorithm updates. And most AI models are pay-to-play, so it’s hard to say how long free versions will exist before costs escalate. With operational expenses of $700,000 a day, experts predict bankruptcy by 2024 for OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company.
You get tied up in the boondoggle of managing in-house content teams.
Even though 39% of B2B marketers are seeing “increased growth targets” this year, 38% are dealing with reduced budgets and 40% reduced staff—as roles and job responsibilities consolidate. We’ve seen some of the best and brightest working horses lose their jobs this year, and the employees that remain often feel they’re fighting a losing battle.
The resulting in-house picture for enterprise content marketers isn’t pretty:
- Silos: 64% say “cross-departmental communication” is a challenge.
- Strategy: 62% have trouble creating content that appeals to different buyer stages.
- Modernization: 41% have trouble integrating new technology to the workflow.
- Inaccessibility: 38% can’t access subject matter experts to create content.
- Messaging: 37% struggle to differentiate their products and services from competitors.
- Inconsistency: 37% can’t achieve consistency with messaging across channels.
Similarly, Forrester found “content needs are expanding faster than capabilities” for 41% of marketing professionals surveyed this year. Challenges to align people, processes, and technologies to meet rising customer expectations compromise the ability of content leaders to achieve key goals. When these challenges go unresolved, nearly half of brands surveyed say they struggle to create cohesive customer experiences and face go-to-market delays.
Read: emphasis on “with less”—rather than “do more.”
Downsizing isn’t always the problem. Sometimes there’s not enough budget to staff appropriately; 71% of CMOs lack sufficient budget to fully execute their 2023 strategies. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 46% of B2B companies surveyed task “one person” or group with every type of content their organization produces.
No wonder 80% of marketers say trying to do more with less has left them feeling “burned out,” marketing departments experience double-digit turnover, and the average tenure for a CMO dropped from 4 years in 2014 to 3.5 years in 2023.
You find hidden costs and realize, sometimes, ‘less’ means more.
Much like trying to find that diamond-in-the-rough freelancer, the push for in-house content marketing efficiency is undermined by procurement and training needs, which dig way deeper into the company’s bottom line.
One way to think about the cost of in-house content is in terms of working spend (the cost of content distribution) vs. non-working spend (the cost of creating and measuring content). Content marketing platform Percolate found that non-working spend typically takes up more than 40% of a company’s average advertising budget. Aside from talent procurement costs, inefficiencies in the marketing process—delayed approvals, missed deadlines, errors, searching for lost content, and non-reuse of existing content—are the biggest drivers of wasteful spending.
The most efficient companies were able to reduce their non-working spend down to 24% of the total budget. In real dollar amounts for the average company spending $5,000 a month on content production, the most efficient companies can save close to $10,000 a year—by creating better internal workflows, increasing agency relationships, leveraging technology, and providing more effective team training. Of course, economies of scale apply: the more you invest, the more you save. A quarter of companies spend $15,000 a month on content—and save twice as much per year.
Another way of thinking about internal staffing is in hard costs vs. soft costs. According to benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management, you can expect to pay an average of $4,700 per hire in hard costs. Then add on 3-4x that person’s salary in soft costs. You can think of “soft costs” as the time departmental leaders and managers invest in supporting human resources activities—screening applications, meeting with candidates, interviewing, making final decisions—all of which take away from accomplishing the organizational goals. That means if you’re hiring one copywriter at $60,000, you’re losing $180,000 or more in productivity simply to (temporarily) fill that role. Whether that person’s in it for the long haul or not is another matter entirely!
Then what happens when managers are pulled from these teams? The workflow is disrupted, oversight may not be there at critical moments, and crucial brokers of information get pulled away—preventing work from getting done efficiently. Workers become unmoored. We can see these less tangible mental and emotional tolls in employee demands for competitive compensation, flexible work schedules, paid leave, and personalized perks—which have grown exponentially over the past few years.
Beyond decreases in management productivity, what about go-to-market delays or lost customer engagement that may arise from content marketing dysfunction? You may not be able to put a definitive price tag on these losses—and yet, the pain can be felt across the organization. Lack of employee support begets loss of morale, and loss of morale begets turnover, and turnover slices directly into your bottom line ability to thrive.
So far we’ve talked about the ‘less’… but this story isn’t all doom and gloom. Next, let’s take a look at how you might do more and avoid some of the pinch your competitors are undoubtedly experiencing at this very moment.
This is what ‘more’ looks like for content marketers in 2023
The only true ways to “do more with less” is to create a stable, long-term content procurement pipeline—and to get your content management process under control.
You find that sweet spot: a partner who ‘gets’ you.
Over the coming years, over a third of B2B businesses will invest more into agency partnerships to cope with budget and personnel cuts. Less than a third of businesses manage all their content in-house these days, while half outsource 25-50% of their content to a trusted partner.
You cut wasteful spending—and gain proven processes.
The benefits are undeniable:
- Forming a strategic content marketing partnership completely alleviates the entire procurement pipeline: vetting, hiring, onboarding, training, micromanaging, turnover.
- A partner will provide a tested, tried, and true process for collaboration that reduces role redundancy, information silos, rewrites, and drop-offs in management productivity.
- 15% of Deloitte-surveyed CMOs said they’ll partner with an agency to access new skills. Maybe you want to incorporate AI SEO without the learning curve, you need a specialist, or you’d like to train your in-house writers on a particular theme.
- Agencies keep a retinue of trained talent on standby to execute on all your projects. You only pay for the bandwidth and the projects you need—no wasted money on “busy work” to keep salaried employees’ plates full during lulls—and the ability to scale at a moment’s notice when business heats up.
You double-down on investing into more of what works.
With waste cut out of your budget, you can then invest in meaningful projects featuring high-quality storytelling that takes audiences on a journey, across internal departments and across channels to build a better, stronger brand from the inside-out.
