Introduction
**Episode Description:**
Hey there, marketing maestros!
2025 is shaping up to be a wild ride for B2B marketing, and guess what? Cutting corners on your brand’s voice? Not an option!
With budget cuts around every corner, it’s easy to think marketing can take a hit. But let’s be real—the connection between your brand and your customers is too critical!
Join Mikkel Svold, the genius behind Montanus, as he breaks down how to make that marketing budget stretch like never before.
In this episode, you’ll discover **four strategies** to:
– **Reassess your content creation**
– **Unlock the potential of repurposing**
– **Master strategic distribution**
– **Build a fiercely loyal audience**
Ready to steer your marketing strategy through the storm and come out thriving? Dive into this episode of the Content Universe and equip yourself with the savvy tools and tactics for success!
Let’s go! 🚀
What You’ll Learn
1. Strategies for maximizing a lean 2025 marketing budget.
2. How to cut creation costs effectively.
3. The power of content repurposing.
4. Importance of prioritizing distribution channels.
5. Building an affordable audience through email lists.
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Content Universe. I’m once again back, and now we are in December of 2024. That means many businesses and marketers are looking at their 2025 budget. From who I’ve talked to, it seems that 2025 is going to be somewhat of a lean marketing year, meaning budget cuts are not a rare thing. Many companies are looking into cutting marketing budgets. Many business-to-business (B2B) companies are once again cutting down on marketing budgets. It’s understandable; there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world. I get it. B2B marketing is hard to measure. It’s hard to say that this sale came from this or that webinar. That is a really hard thing to do. It’s an easy place to cut down, but it’s a really hard place to cut down if you’re looking at production. Production is going to be super hard to cut down on because how are you then going to serve your customers? Whereas marketing, it has been, it has been—what am I saying? It has been, and it will always be a kind of add-on to your business if you’re not an agency yourself, of course.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mikkel Svold, and I own the content agency Montanus, where we produce content marketing or marketing materials that is content for business-to-business businesses, for B2Bs, and mainly in the high-knowledge area. So that’s what we do: we do podcasts, we do blog posts, social media stuff, all that. And today, I want to talk about how you can get the most from your 2025 budget if you are facing budget cuts. I have four pointers that I think you should prioritize to get the most bang for the buck.
Alright, so let’s head right into it. I think the first thing that you want to do is cut costs where you can make big savings, rather than cutting a lot of small chunks. So, I would say start by cutting your creation of original new content, and this sounds very counterintuitive to some, but hear me out. What I want you to cut down on is what I call an original piece of content, a master content. I want you to cut down on the number of master contents you do per year.
So let’s play with an example. You may have had success doing monthly webinars in 2024; you actually see quite good results, but they also demand quite a lot of resources, both in terms of ad spend to get people to join and in terms of hours put in. So what I would do if I were you, I would probably cut that down; maybe cut it in half so it’s not every month, but only every other month that you have a webinar. The reason you want to do this is because when you cut down on your creation of original pieces, it significantly reduces expenses because it’s just such a huge part of creating any content whatsoever.
So cutting down on that means you need to maximize something else. And that something else is my bullet number two: maximize on repurposing the content that you have left. Okay, so what you want to do instead of having one webinar per month and then maybe turning that into one blog post and a couple of social media posts, take that webinar that you now have every other month. Maybe make it a little bit longer so you have more content in your content piece. So make it a little bit longer and then maximize on that repurposing. Instead of writing one blog post from that, write three. Instead of doing a couple of social media posts, do ten. Instead of not having video clips made from it, make five or ten video clips from that same piece of content and then use that in your distribution.
Obviously, there are a lot of good AI tools out there that can help you in this process. They will probably take you like 80% of the way, and then the rest you’ll have to do yourself. You still have to make it sound more human, adjust the different clips, and so forth. But maximize on that repurposing and use AI where you think it’s needed and where you can.
Alright, the third bullet is to prioritize money for distribution or prioritize distribution. An old saying is that you should probably deal with your content marketing through the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. So, you should probably use 20% of your resources creating new content and 80% distributing that content. So instead of spending tens of thousands of kroner, dollars, or whatever on producing new content, you should spend it on distributing. This means you should invest in spending money on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, wherever you want to go. Spend that and distribute on all the platforms you can and spend resources there, because if you create really nice content but don’t distribute it, it’s like building your own vintage supercar and then not prioritizing money for putting on fuel so you can drive it. Of course, people can come by your content on your own page or see your car when you pass your garage on the street, but if you never take it for a spin, never put it out there, and never drive around in it, not many people will actually see it. So prioritize distribution—that’s a really important step here.
The last thing I want to say is that you probably also want to prioritize building an audience, and what I mean by this is you should prioritize getting emails from the people who are in your audience. Once you do that, you convert that communication from being something that’s quite expensive through LinkedIn ads or any kind of social media spend into email communication, which is super, super cheap. This is not a new thing; marketers have known about this for—I was just about to say hundreds of years—but at least for the last 15 to 20 years. They know this, and you probably know it too, but not all do it. I’m not the best in class here, but I know it’s really important to do. So prioritize building an audience, whether that is through an email list or through building an organic social media profile that people follow. That audience is going to be a much cheaper target group for your content and advertising.
So those are my four bullets: cut down on new creation or creation of original content, maximize on repurposing the content that you produce, prioritize distribution—at least 50% of your resources should go into distribution—and then prioritize audience building. That’s a really key thing as well.
So those were my four things for your content marketing strategy for 2024 if you are facing budget cuts, and I’m guessing even if you’re not facing budget cuts, this could be a good thing to think about.
Okay, that’s it for this Content Universe of today. I hope to see you on another planet in this Content Universe. See you around.
