“How much do people spend on marketing?” is the wrong question
A small business owner asks how much one “spends” on content and marketing because they want reassurance that they aren’t making a mistake. The answer they find online — usually some percentage of revenue — doesn’t help. Those percentages were devised for companies with a marketing department and an annual plan. A joiner with three employees needs a different line of reasoning: how much can I afford without it hurting, and what should I buy first so the money isn’t wasted.
This article isn’t about what individual pieces of work cost — that is covered in how much a professional article for your website costs, and you’ll find indicative prices in the pricing. Here we take the opposite view: from your job to a budget, and from the budget to a decision about what to outsource and what to keep.
Derive the budget from one job, not from gut feeling
Before you open any price list, work out three numbers of your own:
- Gross profit on one typical job. Not revenue — what actually stays with you after materials and time.
- How many extra jobs a month you want and can handle. Capacity is the ceiling: content that brings in jobs you have no hands for only produces disappointed customers.
- How long the path from enquiry to signature takes. It determines how long it can take for the investment to show at all.
Those three numbers lead to a simple rule: a sensible monthly content budget is one that a single extra job won’t take too long to pay for. For a firm where one job carries tens of thousands in gross profit, even a larger budget is a bearable risk — the content only has to feed in one customer every now and then. For a firm with small-ticket jobs the opposite applies: the budget has to be smaller, or aimed at content that serves many customers at once — typically answers to the questions that keep coming up.
This reasoning has one more consequence that tends to get forgotten: the budget isn’t only money, it is also your time. Expert input — what customers say on the phone, what the real prices are, what goes wrong on jobs — is something nobody can take off your hands. Without it a supplier produces generic texts, and those don’t bring enquiries.
Three budget tiers and what makes sense in each
There is no single correct figure. There are three tiers matching three situations a small firm finds itself in. Treat the amounts as indicative — set the exact threshold by the value of your own job, as calculated above.
| Tier | What to buy first | What to outsource | What to keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own time, a few hours a month | fix the service pages, write up answers to frequent questions | nothing yet | everything |
| Roughly a few thousand a month | a one-off analysis, then 1–2 texts a month | writing, technical edits, measurement | topics, facts, sign-off |
| Larger budget, full management | planning, creation, updates and evaluation in one | most of the execution | expert know-how and decisions |
Tier 1: no money, just a few hours a month
This is not “do nothing until there is money”. A few hours of your own work a month achieves more than five thousand spent badly:
- Fix the service pages. Put on them what you tell customers over the phone: what you do, who for, what affects the price, how the work proceeds. The enquiry is decided here, not on the blog.
- Write up answers to the questions you hear over and over. Each one is a topic somebody is searching for — how to spot them is described in how to identify the topics your customers are searching for.
- Fill in your Google listing and connect the site to Search Console. Both are free, and without them you’ll have nothing to judge results by later.
What not to buy at this tier: logos, a redesign, “social media management” or a bundle of articles. Until the service pages answer the basic questions, every crown spent on anything else falls into a leaky bucket.
Tier 2: roughly a few thousand a month
The first money shouldn’t go into articles but into the certainty that they point the right way. For a one-off fee you get an initial analysis that goes through the site, the data and the actual enquiries and says what is worth doing first in your case — whether to rewrite the services, add answers, or start with regular texts. It is the cheapest insurance against the most expensive mistake small budgets make: paying for six months of work that leads nowhere.
After that, this tier typically takes the shape of one or two solid texts a month plus small site edits. It sounds like little, but twelve to twenty-four well-aimed texts a year is more content than most of your competitors in the field have — provided each one answers a real customer question and leads to a service. Such a text is easy to recognise: it deals with one specific question, contains your real prices and procedures, and ends with a clear next step towards the service.
What to outsource: writing, technical edits, setting up measurement. What to keep: choosing topics (you know what people ask about), facts and prices, final sign-off. An hour of your time on background material for one text is the best-invested hour of the whole budget.
Tier 3: a larger budget and full management
The third tier makes sense for a firm that already knows content brings it jobs and wants a pace it has no time for itself. A larger budget — indicatively in the low tens of thousands a month — buys a complete service: planning, creation, updates to older texts, links to the services, measurement and a monthly evaluation with recommendations. What such management should cover and how to recognise a good provider is described in website content management.
The same rule applies here: the know-how stays with you. A supplier claiming they won’t need you at all will be writing generic texts that are good for nothing. And a supplier who promises specific search positions for any price at all is promising something they don’t control — walk away from that offer regardless of budget.
Buying order: what comes first when the budget is small
When the budget doesn’t stretch to everything — and in a small firm it never does — buy in this order:
- Service pages. The decision point of the site. Without them, articles have nowhere to lead.
- Analysis. Cheaper than three months of work in the wrong direction.
- Answers to customers’ questions. The content with the shortest path to an enquiry.
- Decision-stage content. Prices, comparisons, case studies — texts for people choosing a supplier.
- Pace and breadth. More topics, updates, further channels — only once the foundation delivers.
It is no coincidence that this is the same order in which a 90-day content plan builds the work — priority is governed not by what is visible, but by what is closest to an enquiry.
Where small firms waste money most often
Waste in content doesn’t look like money thrown away. It looks like work you can show for it:
- Articles by the dozen. Eight generic texts a month “for Google”, with no link to a service and no answer to a real question. Google itself has long said it rewards content useful to people, not content manufactured for the search engine.
- A redesign instead of content. A new coat of paint on a site that answers neither price nor process won’t add enquiries.
- Tools nobody uses. Paid SEO tools make sense for someone working with them daily. For a small business owner, Search Console does ninety per cent of the job for free.
- Paid directories and “guaranteed listings”. A cold call promising the first page of Google for a thousand a month is a reliable signal to hang up.
- A budget crumbled across channels. A bit on social, a bit on PPC, a bit on articles — and nowhere is there enough of it to show. A small budget can carry one channel done properly.
How to tell the budget is working
Don’t check the number of articles produced — that measures activity, not benefit. Follow the path to the job: whether the texts appear on queries from people who want to buy, whether readers move from them to the services and pricing, and above all whether the content shows up along the path of real enquiries. The whole procedure, from Search Console to your record of jobs, is described in how to tell whether content is paying off.
And give it time proportionate to your field: you’ll see the leading signals after weeks, but judge the commercial result only after a period in which your whole sales cycle has run its course.
Increase, hold, or stop
Increase when what limits you is pace, not direction — enquiries are coming in, the content demonstrably appears along their path, and you know which topics are waiting next. Increasing the budget speeds up what works.
Hold when the signals are rising but the commercial result hasn’t had time to show. Stop-start content is the most expensive option of all — you pay for the run-up every time and never land.
Stop and reconsider when, after a full sales cycle, you see neither relevant queries, nor clicks through to the services, nor a trace of content in your enquiries. At that point don’t put more money into the same approach. It is cheaper to get an initial analysis that says where the budget is being lost — in the topics, in the execution, or in the pages the content leads to. And if it turns out the problem is capacity rather than direction, it makes sense to look at content creation and management at a scale your jobs can support.
Because a budget without waste isn’t ultimately about the amount. It is an amount where you know what it produced, where that led, and which job paid for it.
