How Much Does a B2B Blog Post Cost?

As a marketer, outsourcing content creation can be a smart move to free up your time, allowing you to focus on more strategic work, but outsourcing content is obviously not free nor free from risks.

Your finance team probably gave you a budget, and your CEO gave you a KPI like traffic, conversions, or revenue to own. There are a million things you can spend your money on to move that number. If you've decided that you want to invest that into long-form content for SEO, sales enablement, or thought leadership, and you don't have the time to spend 8 hrs writing — ok, maybe 4 hrs with AI — you need to understand what it's going to cost you so you can plan your budget.

There's a huge range in pricing and deliverables across content agencies and freelancers. They all fit different needs. Sometimes you need a minivan for grocery runs and delivering kids. And sometimes you need a Lamborghini that everyone is going to gawk at. But you want to buy the right product for the right purpose. Try hauling lumber in that Lamborghini. People will gawk all right, but for the wrong reasons.

In this guide, we'll help you figure out what a blog post should cost you.

What Factors Influence the Price of a Blog Post?

Here are factors that determine a blog post's price:

What's the purpose?

• SEO
• Sales enablement
• Thought leadership

Who is your audience?

• Other businesses
  • B2B content often requires in-depth knowledge about the industry and might require interviews or expert conversations
• Consumers
  • B2C content is more accessible, requires less expertise, and is, therefore, cheaper to produce

How long are your blog posts?

• 500-800 words
• 800-2500 words
• >2500 words

What's the level of expertise you need?

• Low: AI-generated content or mass-market content
• High: Technical content that needs Subject Matter Expert input

AI-Generated Content

With over one billions users, ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through the content industry.  

An AI content generator requires minimal human work. You provide inputs like keywords, prompts or a short description, and it can deliver outlines, paragraphs, or even an entire post.

Large Language Models (LLM) probabilistically generate text given some direction. You can't guarantee that it's accurate, but you can improve quality through careful prompting. While the content will pass a plagiarism check, it won’t include original research, insights, or data. It may not even be factually correct.

How Much Does AI-Generated Content Cost?

ChatGPT is free, so you can started at no cost. The paid version and equivalent tools are fairly cheap, often starting at under $100/mo.

Who Should Use Purely AI-Driven Content?

All content moving forward will be AI-assisted. There are some areas where it's worth exploring creating purely AI-generated content with no human in the loop. This is primarily programmatic SEO where you're generating thousands of look-alike pages, but with minor data.

For an example, look at FairSquare's Medicare Supplement Plan pages where they have pages for every state and county that are largely the same.

‎They use AI to fill in some generic information about the state and data from their database on plan pricing in each state.

What Are the Pros and Cons of AI-Generated Content?

Pros:

• Low cost - generate thousands of pages for a few hundred dollars
• Produces content almost instantly
• Helpful for creating content on information that's already available, like describing terms or products, stating facts, or rehashing what's already out there.

Cons:

• Lacks original or unique insights
• Can't create content on current or rapidly changing topics
• Can't generate thought leadership content
• Sometimes hallucinates, making up facts or information

Mass-Market Content

If you're a B2C company or working in a space where the information you need to produce isn't sophisticated, you can possibly get by with lower cost freelancers assisted by AI. You can hire freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr and generally get decent results as long as the content doesn't need extensive research or specialized knowledge. You can choose a writer based on experience, rating, and price.

‎How Much Does Mass-Market Content Cost?

A freelance blog post of approximately 1000-1200 words can typically cost $100-300 depending on the freelancer's background and expertise. They might charge based on number of words.

Who Should Use Mass Market Writers?

Mass market content is best for businesses that want to create content on simple consumer products like lifestyle, fashion, makeup, sports, entertainment, or CPG.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Mass-Market Content?

‎Pros:

• Relatively affordable
• Easy to find writers with the skillset
• Sufficient for SEO

Cons:

• Inconsistent — content quality and cost vary widely by writer
• Lacks originality — the same writer writes for multiple companies and isn't going to spend a ton of time learning your business
• You get what you pay for: A couple hundred dollars is a minimal investment for someone to spend over five hours of their time when not full-time. Expect the writer to be minimally invested too.

Mid-Market Content

Mid-market content requires an in-depth understanding of your business, product, and the challenges faced by your buyer. Writers collaborate with your marketing team to develop content that really speaks to the buyer to educate them and move them closer to making a purchase.

You can hire professional freelance writers with a credible background to create mid-market content or work with reputable content agencies. These freelancers and agencies will have their own site, portfolio of work, customer testimonials, a list of clients they've worked with, and established practices around their services. Expect some level of project management and expertise from them.

‎How Much Does Mid-Market Content Cost?

Mid-market writers can cost anywhere between $500-800 per article for B2B content.

Who Should Use Mid-Market Writers?

It may work for typical B2B companies selling into non-technical functions like sales, marketing, HR, and operations. It's likely not a fit for Devtools companies, cybersecurity, deep healthcare, or technical finance.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Mid-Market Content?

Pros:

• High-quality content that will educate buyers
• Can be used for thought leadership and sales enablement in addition to SEO
• Better equipped to handle large projects

Cons:

• More rigid terms
• Need to be backed by a solid content strategy so that you don't waste your money on content that doesn't drive business results, not because it's bad content, but because it didn't fulfill a business need
• You need to spend time to get them up to speed on your business and product

Technical Content

Are you selling to a very sophisticated audience? Do you need actual code or need to make complex arguments around deeply technical subjects in software engineering, healthcare, legal, or finance? You're probably looking for high-end agencies or specialists to help you.

If you're targeting a technical audience of software engineers or CTOs, your writers need to be able to understand developer documentation, your product, Open-source libraries, and write technical tutorials with actual code samples.

Once again, AI might be able to assist by reading documentation for you, but you still need a very smart human behind the wheel to make sure the final output is technically correct.

As soon as a writer needs deep technical expertise — software engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc, the price goes up considerably. You're getting writers who could otherwise be working in these high-paid professions.

How Much Does Technical Content Cost?

Technical writers charge around $1000-2000 per article or more.

Who Should Use Technical Writers?

It works well for DevTools companies, cybersecurity, legal, and pharmaceuticals firms.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Hiring Technical Writers?

Pros:

• You get in-depth and accurate information
• You're hopefully selling a high-priced product and this kind of content will help justify the business decision to buy from you
• Authentic and can be used in thought leadership — you can establish yourself as an authority in your field

Cons:

• Expensive
• It can be hard to find technical writers - they're hard to come by and always booked up

High-End Agencies

If you want to be a thought leader in your space or have ambitious revenue goals, it might make sense to look into a high-end content agency that can help you with content strategy as well. Agencies like Animalz, TenSpeed, and Grizzle work with you to create content that drives results.

‎How Much Does High-End Content Cost?

High-end content agencies like Animalz can cost as much as $10k/month.

Who Should Use High-End Content Agencies?

High-end content is best for those who truly want to be thought leaders in their space and set the tone for their industry. If you're seeking positioning and execution in addition to deep messaging expertise, then this could be right for you.

What Are the Pros and Cons of High-End Content Agencies?

Pros:

• Holistic consulting for your content strategy
• High-quality content that will make buyers pay attention

Cons:

• Expensive

Which Is Better: Agencies or Freelancers?

Now you might wonder — freelancers or content agencies?

When Should You Use Freelancers?

We recommend this route if you have a Content Marketing manager on staff who can manage freelancers. There are fewer people to deal with, you can personally vet your writers, they can spend more time understanding your business, it's cheaper, and you'll end up with higher-quality content.

Pros of freelance writers:

1. Freelancers are less expensive than content agencies since they aren't employing others or have a margin to make
2. Freelancers can deliver ad-hoc content quickly since they have fewer clients they're working with at any point in time
3. Freelancers have more predictable quality since you know who you're working with vs. getting the B-players at a large agency

Cons of freelance writers. They:

1. Freelancers might be good at understanding your business and writing, but not have experience with technical details like SEO optimization
2. Freelancers might require more project management, editing, and handholding since there is less process in place
3. You need to hire a lot of them if you want to scale content production — one person can only do so much at a time. Vetting for good talent is a very challenging process.

You can overcome the cons of freelancers and get the best of both worlds by using a tool like Letterdrop to automate SEO optimization, content calendaring, and project management.

When Should You Use a Content Agency?

Agencies might be a better option if you don't have a marketer on staff to manage anyone and need a more done-for-you solution.

Pros of content agencies:

1. Agencies are more productionized and can scale content volume if you need it
2. Agencies offer better support since you're working with an actual business, and not an individual
3. Agencies offer additional services like SEO-optimization, content strategy consulting, etc in addition to just writing

Cons of content agencies:

1. Most good agencies are run by experienced people who truly know a lot about content marketing. But that's not who you end up working with when you hire the agency. They hire and train writers to the best of their abilities who work with you. In most cases, you get the B-players and will be disappointed in the output. Very few agencies have managed to scale up without compromising on quality.
2. Agencies are more expensive since they businesses and have to make a margin. You're paying 2-3x the cost of labor because the agency is adding value by bringing the entire operation together.

You might use different solutions over the course of your company's lifetime. Maybe when you're early and don't have the staffing, you use an agency and bring content marketing in-house after a year.