Want to Know How Much to Charge for Content Creation in 2024?
The Glorious Company Team
You’re a content creator and influencer, yet you’re having a hard time figuring out how much to charge for content creation. This is a common problem for any marketer and entrepreneur working in the content industry. As brands understand the sheer value of using content to build relationships with their target audiences and market to them, content creators are more in demand than ever.
With that comes the problem of charging a favorable price for the content you create, so you make a healthy profit and are properly compensated for your expertise and social clout. Research backs this up, with Influencer Marketing Hub’s Creator Earnings: Benchmark Report 2023 revealing that the creators they surveyed desire better wages for their work.
Don’t wait for brands to tell you how much they think you’re worth. When you’re approached for a content engagement, you need to have your rate card set and be able to demonstrate your value. It’s crucial that you don’t sell yourself short.
Read on to determine how to make sense of charging for content across various formats.
What Is a Content Creator and What Content Do They Create?
A content creator is a marketing specialist who creates highly engaging content for brands, both on their own platforms as well as the brands’ platforms. Creators contribute content across various channels in a number of different formats.
The content they create takes on a specific tone for the purpose of the marketing campaign. It can be educational, promotional, or entertaining.
The goal of producing content on the internet is usually to raise brand awareness. This leads to other secondary goals, such as boosting brand engagement, increasing organic traffic, and generating conversions and sales.
The responsibilities and process that you’re charged with and undertake come down to the following:
Ideating content strategy (for your own brand or partnered with businesses)
Creating the content (whether writing the copy itself or creating the media, like with a video)
Sharing, delivering, and posting your content (handing off your content to your client or posting it to your own channels)
Let’s take a look at all the places your material can appear online.
Blogging
A blog is an integral part of any website today, no matter what industry you work in. It’s a powerful lead-generation tool that helps brands rank for keywords in their industry and drive in organic traffic from search engines. This traffic converts and becomes clients and customers.
Many content creators run their own blogs in a specific niche or contribute to the blogs of companies and businesses in various industries. Blogging is the third-most popular marketing channel used by creators, according to The Tilt’s 2022 Content Entrepreneur Benchmark Research.
Social Media
Social media is the channel that most people associate with the content creator economy. Whether it’s Instagram, X or Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, there are many options here to build your brand and following. Your follower count determines what type of influencer you are:
Nano Creators — These creators have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers on any given social media profile. They’ve niched down to where they’re considered an expert in their niche, due to their knowhow in that area. According to research from Aspire, this smallest of all creator categories has the highest engagement rate at 3.69%. Higher engagement rates are more appealing to companies.
Micro Creators — They have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers on any given social media platform. This is the next step up in clout in the influencer industry. Studies show that micro influencers carry quite a bit of clout with their audience. An Experticity study determined that some 82% of all consumers are “highly likely” to go along with the recommendation of a micro creator, more so than they would when an average person recommends a product.
Macro Creators — These have between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers on a social platform. Now, you’re getting into the big leagues of online influencer marketing. These creators can be bona fide thought leaders, internet-created celebrities, or social media personalities. Macro creators have been in the game for a relatively long time, which has enabled them to earn a considerable number of followers, with whom they have a bond of trust. They also have experience working with brands for promotion.
Mega Creators — These top creators have more than 1 million followers on their social channels. Think of mega creators as macro creators, just on steroids. Mega creators have the biggest reach, the most loyal follower base, and command the highest rates. With these types of creators, brands can expect strong professionalism and significant boosts in their brand awareness, though a partnership.
There are pros and cons to working with influencers of different follower size and clout.
The creators with fewer followers have higher engagement, which is more important if brands want to maximize sales. Creators with higher engagement are more persuasive to their audiences in making recommendations.
For the macro and mega creators, while they have a lower engagement rate from their followers, they command much greater reach. Brands interested in aggressive brand awareness benefits may want to partner with these bigger influencers. Of course, the cost of working with creators with higher follower counts will be greater.
Video
Video content is increasingly popular. Worldwide, according to Cisco research, internet video traffic counted for 82% of all consumer internet traffic in 2022. This was up from 73% in 2017. The world’s most popular video platform, YouTube, will have more than 1 billion users by 2028, according to data forecasts from Statista.
Video features prominently on all social media platforms, where it’s a positive ranking signal for social algorithms. And, based on Backlinko’s 200 Google ranking factors, we can also confirm that video might be a content quality signal for the search engine, along with the fact that YouTube videos are given preferential treatment in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Besides YouTube, there are other competitor platforms like Rumble, DailyMotion, and Vimeo.
Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to building a relationship with your target audience via creating and distributing engaging content that educates them and moves them down your sales funnel. Content marketing involves a number of content formats and types:
Articles
Ebooks
Case studies
Emails
Infographics
Videos
White papers
As a content creator, you can create this material for your own website or for the websites and social platforms of brands that partner with you.
Know Your Worth
Now comes the most important part of how much to charge for content: Understanding your value, how to communicate that, and getting paid what you’re worth.
As a content creator, you are providing a valuable service to any brand interested in partnering with you. Through your influence and knowledge of online marketing, you’re helping them raise their brand awareness and persuading your followers to buy their product or service. The fact that you have proven expertise and you’re introducing your audience to the brand is crucial because that’s where your leverage for pricing comes from.
Create Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Your unique value proposition is what benefit you deliver to the brand working with you, which no other creator can deliver. According to CXL, a UVP answers why your prospect should purchase from you. The first step is successfully communicating this UVP to a brand that wants to partner with you. You need to enumerate what you bring to the table. For example:
Is your engagement rate higher on social than other creators or influencers in your niche?
Have you succeeded in getting your clients’ blog posts to the first Google search engine results page (SERP)?
Are the ebooks and case studies you’ve created becoming effective lead magnets for your clients?
Can you demonstrate that your content increases the amount of organic traffic for websites?
Has your video content lead to more leads for the businesses you’ve worked with?
Then, take a look at your follower and audience makeup, in the case of social media creation. For example, if your would-be partner brand is looking to target a super-niche audience—let’s say a tech audience of decision-makers for SaaS—and that’s most of your follower base, then that works in favor of your USP argument.
Experience is another factor that helps you develop your USP. If you’re an expert at producing, say, video content or ebooks as downloadable lead magnets at the bottom of the sales funnel, then your expertise in crafting this content so it’s excellent every time is significant.
The point of developing your USP is being crystal clear on the value you provide anyone interested in working with you, which you need to be able to communicate properly.
How to Price Your Content Creation Services
After you’ve worked out your USP, you need to nail down your pricing because now you can more than justify it. There are numerous considerations that influence how much you’ll charge for different content campaigns and types.
The first to consider is the type of deliverable. Is it social media content or content that’ll live on a website? Once you share it with your brand client, will they edit it further in-house, or will you be part of the editing process?
Then think about the complexity of the content you’re being asked to create. Is it video? Is it a long pillar page? An entire email campaign? The more task- and time-intensive the content is, the more you can charge.
Finally, consider the overall requirements of your engagement with your client. If you’re creating social media content to plug their product or service, do they expect you to also engage with your audience once you post? If you’re creating a blog post for your brand partner, will you also be required to provide SEO services? If you’re creating a video, is there an expectation for intensive post-editing or for you to solve any licensing issues?
All these legitimately add to the cost you should charge.
What to Charge for Blog Content in 2024
Blogging is strongly effective in driving business to companies. According to Demand Metric, those companies that have blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those with no blog. As a result, you need to realize how valuable content creation is for a company’s blog and charge accordingly.
At The Glorious Company, we’ve outlined our specific prices as part of our content marketing packages. It’s not unheard of to charge between $700 and $1,000 for a blog post because that includes research, data, SEO, and an editing round. We don’t break down the prices by word since blogging is a product whose value is best captured as part of a package.
What to Charge for Social Media Content in 2024
Social media content is a different beast, so there are a few different ways that make sense to charge for this type of content.
You can go the hourly route, and this will be based on your experience level. If you’ve been a social content creator for up to two years, then a rate of $20 to $50 per hour makes sense. If you’ve been in the industry for more than two years as a social media manager, then feel free to charge up to $100 per hour. If your experience is several years or more, then you can go as high as $300 per hour.
We recommend charging hourly if you’re in the beginning stages of your career or don’t have that many clients. As you gain experience and clients, you should streamline your operations by productizing your services and charging for social media packages or at least on a monthly basis.
If you do charge monthly, include a set number of posts on however many platforms you agree on as part of your monthly services. Consider how much your hourly rate is and then extrapolate that accordingly to your monthly business model. An example pricing structure could be 10 social posts with custom graphics or images for $300, for one social platform.
You could also just charge a flat fee per project to keep things simple.
If you’re a nano creator, video content can cost up to $150. If you’re a micro and macro creator, you can command as much as up to $300 for a video on a social platform and go up to $400 for creator licensing.
What to Charge for Video in 2024
Video content is lucrative. Besides the social media pricing outlined above, there’s also charging for video content for other purposes.
For example, you can create explainer videos for YouTube, which can also be embedded in blog posts that appear on websites. Your rate depends on the length and complexity of these types of videos. For shorter videos, up to 5 minutes in length, $400 makes sense, while longer videos up to 10 minutes in length can be priced at $600 and higher.
For other types of more complicated videos—such as in-depth product reviews, interviews, and behind-the-scenes videos—charging thousands of dollars and as high as $10,000 is justified.
What to Charge for Content Marketing in 2024
Content marketing is a broad area that covers many different format types.
Let’s look at each one in turn and its pricing structure:
Ebooks — $2,000
Case studies — $2,000
Email campaigns — $1,000
Infographics — $1,000
White papers — $6,000
For each of these content formats, you’ll be performing a copious amount of research, which increases the complexity and the time involvement in creating each of these projects. That consideration is figured into each pricing structure.
Now You Know How Much to Charge for Content Creation
Creating content gives you the opportunity to work with brands to promote their products and services, as well as to raise your own brand awareness for your own material. While it’s fun to be an influencer and create content, it’s imperative that you don’t underprice your expertise and services. After all, brands you’d be partnering with are getting the benefit of access to your audience, along with recommendations for their products or services.
That’s why you need to price your content in a way that aligns with your value. This guide will hopefully have given you the necessary information to successfully negotiate with any brand prospects and clients.
If you’re in need of a content marketing agency to partner with to raise the brand awareness of your product or service, then reach out to us today. Contact The Glorious Company today for a no-obligation consultation and estimate.
Any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.
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