Content budgets and barriers

Discover how much today’s content marketers have to spend—and what challenges they face.

Content budgets are up.
And they’re rising even higher.

The majority (a healthy 56%) of the marketers we spoke to told us their annual content marketing budget has increased over the last 12 months. What’s more, 62% said they expected it to rise even further in the coming year.Even among marketers who haven’t seen a massive amount of success with their content strategy, most believe their budget is set to grow.

70% _{^{of very successful content marketers expect their budgets to increase in the next 12 months}}

_{^{… compared to}}56%_{^{of not very successful marketers}}

The money being spent—and where it’s all going.

We also asked each marketer to share the size of their annual budget, how that size is decided, and what activities it funds.

£277K is the average content marketing budget (for our sample).

Of course, every marketer’s content budget will depend to a large extent on the annual turnover of their employer.

Our survey included businesses with less than 100 employees, and enterprises with more than 10,000, across a broad range of industries.

Tell us how big your organization is, and we’ll send you the average content budget for organizations of your size.

Under 25 employees
26 to 250 employees
251 to 999 employees
1,000+ employees

Send me the data

Most marketers (54%) told us their company’s annual business objectives influenced the size of their budget.

As you might expect, most (56%) also said the historical performance of their content was a factor in deciding how much they could spend in future.

Marketers are splitting their budgets fairly evenly between the core content marketing activities of content creation, paid content distribution, and owned, earned and organic content distribution.

Not every content marketer is rolling in ROI

All this money is being devoted to content, and yet—only 42% of marketers told us their content strategy was very successful.

The greatest barrier to success, identified as a major challenge by 55% of marketers, is finding innovative ways to engage audiences.

Our respondents also called out a raft of other factors—including high costs, long creation times and lengthy approvals—as holding back their content strategies. But some content marketers are finding ways to leap these barriers or, at the very least, to shrink them down to size. We know this to be true, not just because of other findings in this study, but because we’re helping plenty of them to do it.

The biggest content challenges faced by today’s marketers

01. Finding innovative ways to engage

02. High marketing team costs

03. Long content creation times

04. Content that doesn’t get read

05. Lengthy approval processes

Streamlining Cisco's content machine

Learn how Faith Wheller and her team slashed content costs and turnaround times, while winning 7x more readers