Did you know that Swedish furniture company IKEA typically spends close to 70% of it's marketing budget on content creation? Every year, IKEA publishes 208 million furniture catalogs in 62 different variations across 43 countries, according to the Wall Street Journal. Now that's a lot of content development! IKEA uses a 94,000 square foot studio to construct sets that showcase it's furniture. These sets are photographed for the IKEA catalog.
With IKEA's ongoing focus on efficiency and lowering costs, the company has committed to creating 12% of it's web and catalog content virtually this year and increasing that amount to 25% for 2013. Instead of constructing and subsequently tearing down furniture sets, IKEA plans to use 3-D software to render sets virtually and then modify colors and other aspects of the virtual sets to suit each country's preferred cultural tastes.
You may not be running a global furniture company like IKEA, but with the continued importance of content as part of your enterprise inbound marketing implementation, you should be thinking of ways to continuously drive content development efficiencies and lower costs.
Relative to content efficiencies, you should have an inbound marketing annual plan in place. We develop an annual plan with each of our enterprise inbound marketing clients to allocate resources appropriately and prepare for the brand themes or demographics we are targeting in a given time frame.
Secondly, you should have content development accelerators in place for your marketing team. A content accelerator could be anything that helps you develop content more efficiently and effectively. A tool as simple as Google Docs or an event like a weekend content creation hackothon can help speed content development.
As content and context lead SEO, expect more of your marketing budget to be used for content development. If you're not producing content effectively now, you may risk exceeding your marketing budget in future quarters.
Photo: IKEA