Choosing cheap can be costly

Modern B2B marketing organisations have to do a lot with a little. A never-ending list of must-do tasks means that scarce resources and tight budgets need to be stretched across a range of competing priorities. 

It makes sense to be frugal, to seek value and to be careful with your budget. In fact it’s a critical part of the prudential stewardship of your team and budget to manage expenditure thoughtfully and carefully. 

But a desire to do more with less can lead to choices that look good on paper (they don’t cost much) while unintentionally coming at a huge cost to your organisation in other important ways.

For B2B marketers, content creation, production and publishing can be a resource intensive undertaking, so looking for savings in time and money makes sense. Though you need to be mindful of the trade-offs you are making when aiming to do more with less. 

You get what you pay for

We’ve all heard this saying and probably used it ourselves when considering a purchase that costs more but promises much greater quality, utility or longevity than the cheaper alternative. It’s why there can be a factor of 100 between the cost of one pair of shoes and another. 

The principle applies in B2B marketing expenditure as well. Price is but one factor in a multitude of product or service features. The shortcut of choosing the cheapest option means certain compromise on other product or service features. 

If you outsource some or all of your marketing content production, there are myriad choices for bundled or unbundled services including copywriting, graphic design, production, posting and project management. 

For these types of services, cheap often means lower quality (maybe the work is done by less experienced people, juniors or interns). Or perhaps it takes longer to get something completed (because service providers focus their efforts on higher paying customers). Or maybe the project management layer is removed to save money. In this case, the job falls to you, creating an opportunity cost for your time. 

Whenever you are saving money by buying cheap, you are leaving some part of the service behind. Be aware of exactly what you are getting for your money (no matter how much you are paying).

The true cost of doing it yourself

One way of saving money in marketing is to do the work yourself. Don’t hire an agency or a bunch of freelance writers and designers, just insource it to yourself and your team. Who knows your brand better than you after all, and you are likely surrounded by a team of talented people who should be more than capable of completing the required work to get good content in market consistently. 

While this can make sense financially, it rarely works out well. Firstly, there’s the issue of quality. Unless you have a very large team made up of people with quite specific and narrow specialities, your people won’t have the requisite skills required to create great content. 

Can they write compelling and engaging copy? Can they craft cut-through images and designs to attract attention to your content? (Spoiler alert – if they can do these things at the level you require, they would be doing them full-time, not working in your team).

Secondly, your people already have jobs. You know, the ones you actually hired them for that likely didn’t include a KPI to deliver marketing content or do the heavy lifting of content creation. 

Even the basics, such as project management and the logistics of posting to your social platforms, might be well within the skill set of your people, but these tasks will take focus away from their actual job roles and responsibilities. 

Given all this, the result is likely to be lower quality work published at a rapidly diminishing rate, as other work gets in the way of content production.

Welcome back to square one

Let’s face it, nothing good is easy (or cheap). Trying to find false savings in creating a consistent marketing content program is a fool’s errand. You’d be better off doing nothing at all. At least you’ll save some valuable time and money. 

A better approach is to look for value. Find quality, capability and professionalism. Pay for them. And get the results you are looking for. You’ll find what you are looking for right here.