Are You Creating Marketing Assets or Just Generating Marketing Expenses?

A modification in how you think of your marketing, simply changing your thinking from an expense to an asset, is a powerful reminder to build marketing that will help your business grow. In accounting terms, an asset - such as equipment, furniture, real estate, and inventory - is a resource that belongs to your business and has value over time.

Expenses are ongoing costs including rent, wages, and insurance.

The vast majority of entrepreneurs and CMOs look at content creation in the same way as they look at marketing expenses that they currently pay such as advertising, participating in tradeshows, spending on agency retainers, and printing brochures.

This leads to people saying things like: "I cannot find money in my budget to spend $10,000 a month (or whatever the number) on content creation."

Thinking of your content as an expense like advertising means you always under-spend

For example, if you spend $5,000 in a given month on advertising via Google AdWords, the only thing you are buying are the resulting clicks of your ads appearing against the important phrases people search on to find your business. But as soon as you stop paying, your clicks stop completely. This is the classic example of a marketing expense.

However, if you spend $5,000 in a given month to hire an agency or a freelance journalist to write a bunch of interesting blog posts relating to important phrases people search on to find your business, you will have assets that live on forever that will drive people to your content from the search engines for years to come. The content will have value many years after it has been paid for.

I started writing my blog fifteen years ago. Every day I get a few hundred inbound clicks from Google because people find my work as they are searching. Posts I wrote many years ago rank highly in the search engines. This blog is an essential asset of my business.

My free ebooks have been downloaded millions of times. They are also an important asset of my business.

My blog posts and ebooks are assets that I own! They were “paid for” years ago!

It is time we educate the decision makers that content creation is asset building

I am such a believer in this that I think we should put our website or blog or YouTube channel onto our balance sheet in the same way that many companies value patents or brands.