The Price of Free: Framing the Cost of Content Strategies
In early January, Jason Falls wrote a really interesting piece on his blog about the value of social media and its impact on search results. It was intriguing to me as I have the task of managing the paid search efforts on behalf of Media Logic for lead generation purposes. With Google and Microsoft making real-time search (social search) a part of their fruit salad, the effort to be found and its associated value is an ever elusive target. Creating inbound marketing leads via social media content strategies is high on the 2010 agenda. In order to open the doors more swiftly agencies, consultants and internal marketing departments need to assign real value for these efforts.
Why was I so intrigued by Jason’s post? The effort to demonstrate the value of his blog content was drastically sold short on its real value. This happened mainly because the value placed on the phrase “social media strategy” by keyword tool estimators is nothing short of wrong. The tools at Jason’s and everyone’s disposal are simply not able to accumulate and react quickly enough to the real-time value of key search terms, especially ones in which paid is only emerging around. To this day if you drop the aforementioned phrase into Google’s own Traffic Estimator tool, you will get a result that states we have too little data to estimate traffic, and the maximum cost per click on the word is estimated to be $0.05. So how do I know it is wrong? I am bidding on the phrase and have been for months in our paid search effort. The cost for the search phrase is skyrocketing and a bid of $0.05 would not even get you on the front page of results in Guam. Using another, slightly more real-time but still imperfect Google tool, Bid Simulator, currently the maximum cost per click bid on this keyword is $36.60. There still is no data on projected clicks and cost but it does get you closer to the real price people are willing to pay to be seen in the top tier of paid results.
In Jason’s post he uses a great term that marketers should add to their dictionary: “search traffic equivalency.” It is used to illustrate the results he achieved from organic traffic versus what one could anticipate spending to drive comparable paid traffic. The good news, his ROI is currently far more profound than he estimates. Don’t run, I am about to use a lot of numbers, but they are telling in the end. Right now Google Bid Simulator allows me to make a rough guess that I could buy 4,650 monthly impressions on the phrase “social media strategy” at the aforementioned $36.60. For sake of argument let’s assume all the monthly traffic Jason’s blog received from this term comes from Google search (my instincts and some anecdotal historical data say it is probably close to 97%). The traffic he generated then is roughly equivalent to 14% of the total clicks possible. At the very highest end someone bidding with the aim to achieve Jason’s results would need to spend $23,570 per month. That is a far cry from the $32.20 that crappy keyword estimate tools valued the phrase to be.
Now even if you wrote the greatest AdWords copy ever imagined I think we can all agree that achieving 14% click-thru is going to be a tall order. But achieving this type of traffic via a developed conversation marketing strategy is clearly achievable. Jason had a great and in my opinion very related post recently regarding inbound marketing. He maps out the time and effort he puts into a month for blogging and social network information sharing, which amounts to his equivalent marketing efforts. I am giving him the weekends off so what it amounts to on a Monday-Friday work week is about 8.75 hours per week, or about 35 hours per month. I have no idea what Jason makes per hour in his consulting work, but let’s assume again for the sake of argument his time is worth $100 per hour to develop his content (a price I am borrowing form Danny Brown’s very excellent piece The Real Cost of Social Media). Using this as the framework it would be a monthly cost of $3,500 or $42,000 annualized. Now I just told you above the paid search equivalent to the traffic Jason brings organically on “social media strategy” alone would cost $23,750 a month. The math is not very hard to follow; you can currently drive inbound traffic at just under 15% the cost of a paid search effort. That ratio of effort put into a content strategy in deference to paid marketing won’t necessarily last, but it is damn appealing and frames the value of the work. It is not perfectly apples to apples, but we are at least talking fruit.
One thing that cannot be overlooked in the paid versus organic search discussion (and frankly it is better to integrate and complement them – not duke it out) is the ability of paid campaigns to drive a clicking party exactly where you want them to be on your website. Consequently the conversions on paid clicks tend to be significantly higher than organic results. Well developed content strategies can achieve conversion but it takes additional effort which will only increase with the impact social media has had, and will continue to have, on search results.
I took a close look at a few of our better-performing keywords which do extremely well at driving traffic to our website. If I opened the faucet and was also able to ratchet up performance on CTR for both, I could spend $5,500 a month between the two. Being conservative on the estimates to develop a content-driven conversation strategy to replace the paid search efforts entirely, I could ballpark a number of roughly $4,375 a month. That number does not include the likely need to change directions slightly, revamp Meta tags for our website to align with a new blogging strategy as well as the extra time needed to begin creating an impact on the already established conversation. There is a savings not to be sneezed at, but in the end there is no small investment in a comparable content strategy.
One thing is certain; the cost to drive traffic via Google or another search engine is not insignificant, either organically or paid. As content creation in the social sphere ramps up the efforts to be found organically, increased time commitment will be required. The cost to do so via a content-driven social media marketing effort is not insignificant either, hopefully more folks like Danny Brown and the project Jason Falls referenced will be laying cost models out on the table. We are trying to ourselves. Right now if your competitor is asleep at the wheel and you are active with an entrenched lead position the tea leaves read well. As referenced by Jeff Molander’s comparative case study of Adagio vs. Bigelow in the world of tea. If you need to play the role of chaser, you can’t afford to put your head in the sand and feel sorry for your brand. You need to dig in and develop your social media marketing strategy. The longer you wait, the more it is going to cost to make up for lost time. Content strategies have a cost and they are just beginning to become understandable.
