How To Create a Content Budget for Your Business

Without a budget for your content marketing efforts, you run the risk of overspending on low-performing content or underspending in areas where you would see the greatest return on your investment.

A content marketing budget is particularly important when your resources are limited. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets held flat at 7.7% of company revenue compared to the previous year, meaning content marketing teams are under pressure to make their existing resources work harder versus simply spending more to produce the same high-quality content.

Learn what a content marketing budget includes, how to build one around your specific goals, and how to review and adjust your spending over time.

What is a content budget? 

A content budget reflects how much your business plans to spend on its content marketing efforts in a given period. This includes content creation and distribution, as well as assessing the content’s performance. Content marketing programs are sometimes subsections of larger marketing budgets. 

Your content marketing budget may include external costs, such as fees for outsourcing content creation with freelancers or agencies, software, and paid promotion, as well as internal costs, such as the time your team spends producing, reviewing, and improving content.

What to include in a content budget

How you build and itemize your content marketing budget depends on your business goals, team size, content marketing channels, and available resources. You can divide your online store’s content program into categories, with each category broken down even further. Here’s an example:

• Content creation. Fees or wages for your entire content team, including writers, designers, photographers, videographers, editors, and independent content creators, that are directly tied to content production.

• Content distribution. Costs associated with posting, boosting, or promoting your marketing content through email, social media platforms, paid advertising, or creator partnerships.

• Search engine optimization (SEO). Internal and external costs related to conducting keyword research and updating your old content with target keywords, new internal links, and improved or refreshed messaging to boost organic traffic.

• Tools and software. Subscription fees and costs for the use of internal content calendars, email marketing software, design tools, SEO tools, analytics software, project management tools, and social media scheduling platforms.

• Measurement and reporting. Costs connected to the time your content team spends measuring content performance, including tracking traffic, sales, email sign-ups, and social media engagement.

A content marketing budget may also include the founder’s time. Haley Pavone, founder of footwear brand Pashion, is one example. After cutting the company’s paid content marketing spend, she shifted her focus to organic TikTok discovery, where the main investment was her own time. “It’s just me with my phone [for] an hour a day, every day, talking about the product and the company that I love,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. 

How to create a content budget for an ecommerce business

1. Set a clear content marketing goal
2. Determine your content types and channels
3. Estimate all associated costs
4. Decide what to fund first
5. Review results and adjust your budget

Your content marketing budget should serve your greater content marketing strategy, not the other way around. Here are five steps to creating a content marketing budget with a well-defined purpose:

1. Set a clear content marketing goal

Before you decide how to allocate resources, determine what types of campaigns you want to run and why. Start by reviewing your online store’s current performance. For example, in Shopify you can filter your analytics and reports to look back over a recent period, such as the past 30 or 90 days. Close analysis may reveal room for improvement in one or more areas. 

Here are some potential goals for your content program based on your ecommerce store’s performance, plus ideas of how to translate those business objectives into specific content marketing initiatives:

• Increase web traffic. Budget for SEO content that will surface your website in more search engine results and encourage people to click through to your store.

• Increase add-to-cart behaviors. Budget for thorough product page descriptions that explain your products more clearly and preemptively answer shoppers’ most common questions.

• Increase first-time purchases. Budget for content that reduces last-minute hesitation from shoppers, such as social media videos featuring customer testimonials.

• Increase repeat purchases. Budget for content that will bring customers back, like post-purchase email marketing campaigns to share personalized recommendations, promote your loyalty program, or remind your customers to replenish or restock the product. 

Alternatively, you may have goals that aren’t directly tied to your store’s existing data. For example, you may need to support the launch of a new product or product feature. In that case, you might budget for multichannel content that spreads awareness of your new product, educates consumers about the problem it solves, and persuades them to make a purchase.

2. Determine your content types and channels

Your overall content marketing strategy and goals will dictate what form your content should take and how you will distribute it. In turn, both of these things will impact your content marketing budget. Common forms include:

• Blog posts. Blogs can help surface your website on search engine results pages (SERPs) and answer questions for shoppers who are contemplating a purchase. Examples include product comparisons, gift guides, recipes, and how-to articles.

• Email campaigns and newsletters. Use emails to nurture leads and encourage purchases. Examples include emails to promote product launches, kick off promotional periods, educate customers, recover abandoned carts, or increase awareness about your loyalty program.

• Social media posts. Use social media posts to increase brand awareness, engage your target audience, and encourage repeat purchases from your existing customers. Examples of engaging content include posts that announce special offers, share tips, or feature a positive review.

• Videos. Videos make your product easier to understand by showing versus telling. Examples include short-form videos to explain your products or features, break down a complex industry topic quickly, or communicate your brand values.

• Case studies. A case study can provide social proof for shoppers who are still in the decision stage of the customer journey. Examples include customer success stories and explanations of how your product helped solve a customer or industry problem.

• Creator content or user-generated content (UGC). Use user-generated content when your product benefits from a real person demonstrating it, styling it, reviewing it, or showing how it fits into their routine. Examples of UGC include photos, videos, and social media posts.

• Infographics. An infographic can quickly and clearly communicate to your audience vital information about your product as well as provide social proof. Examples include infographics that share data, illustrate steps or processes, and compare multiple products or features.

For most types of content, you’ll need to decide which distribution channels will best help you reach your goal. For example, hydration brand Waterboy focused on posting to TikTok because the algorithm made it possible for it to build an audience quickly. 

The platform’s For You pages pull in content from both new-to-you users and accounts that users already follow, meaning the content’s relevancy is just as important, if not more important, than the size of the creator’s following. “It felt like that was the [platform] where your content reach was not dependent on how big a channel you have,” co-founder Mike Xhaxho says on Shopify Masters.

3. Estimate all associated costs

Once you’ve planned your content types and distribution methods, you can estimate each campaign or piece of content’s associated costs, taking into consideration both time and fees. Create a simple planning table to visualize how you will need to allocate resources for each asset before you commit any portion of your content marketing budget. Here’s an example template to use as inspiration:

Itemize the production and distribution costs for each content asset as accurately as possible to find your total marketing budget. Where an in-house marketer’s time is involved, rather than a direct fee, you can factor in an estimation of what the team member’s time is worth. 

Here is a sample budget for a product demo video:

4. Decide what to fund first

Prioritize budgeting for content tailored to people at the bottom of the sales funnel so you don’t have to wait long before seeing your anticipated return. For an ecommerce business, this might mean budgeting for product page copy, abandoned cart emails, and videos that answer shoppers’ most frequently asked questions. These assets are directed at people who are already considering making a purchase.

Next, budget for top-of-funnel (ToF) content to attract new customers, or middle-of-funnel (MoF) content to persuade consumers to choose your product over another brand’s. ToF and MoF content typically take longer than bottom-of-funnel (BoF) content to show a return on your investment and include things like SEO articles, gift guides, educational videos, and social media comparison posts. 

For some creative content ideas, it can be easy to determine a production and distribution budget but difficult to calculate an expected return. Take, for instance, a brand storytelling video, which may not directly impact your bottom line but may boost brand awareness, public perception, brand authority, and consumer trust, all things that can be difficult to assign figures to. 

Elaine Choi, CEO of Crown Affair, a luxury hair care brand, applies a simple rule to situations like these. “If you can’t measure it, then only 5% of your budget can go toward it,” she says. This gives a content marketing team creative room without letting any one project take over the whole budget.

5. Review results and adjust your budget

Your content marketing budget should change as you learn what works. For example, if you discover that product demo videos drive more add to carts than static posts, you may shift more budget toward video. If abandoned cart emails recover more sales than retargeting ads, you may fund more email testing before you fund photography for new ad creation.

Set a review schedule based on how quickly each channel produces useful data. Consider reviewing data for your social posts, paid campaigns, and email campaigns each month since they tend to produce results on short timeframes. Meanwhile, you can review your SEO efforts and blog performance on a quarterly basis since search engine rankings and organic traffic can take longer to gain momentum.

Data points worth tracking and analyzing include:

• Traffic and engagement rates. Which posts, emails, videos, or articles brought people to your store and received clicks, saves, comments, or shares?

• Conversion rates. Which content drove purchases?

• Add-to-cart rates. Which content encouraged add-to-cart behaviors?

• Repeat purchases. Which campaigns encouraged returning customers to convert?

• Open and click-through rates. Which content persuaded subscribers to open your emails and click through to your website?

• Return on investment (ROI). How did the revenue generated by a piece of content compare to the cost of producing and distributing it?