More and more organizations are recognizing the importance of content to their marketing strategies, but most offer lip service to the value of content. If you want to know which companies really value content marketing, look at their budgets.

Let’s say you want to launch a weekly electronic newsletter on a $50,000 budget, and you want to outsource the whole thing. Let’s assume you already have access to a mailing list, whether it’s your customers or purchased from a third party. Here are some of the typical line items you might need in your budget, and where I think money should be allocated proportionally:

Newsletter Logo Design                                                                          5%
Newsletter Layout Design                                                                    15%
Newsletter Delivery                                                                                10%
Content Development (Writers, Photographers, etc.)                      70%

Every budget is different and depends on many factors, so I’m really throwing these numbers around to make a point. Do you spend anywhere near this much on the content that goes into your marketing communications?

The truth about content marketing is that you get what you pay for. Content is virtually free to organizations that want to aggregate it from Google alerts and other news sources, so you could operate a publication for much less than what I’m suggesting here. But when you think about it, so can every one of your competitors.

So what’s the value of your publication when the content is free to everyone? Why should your customers care that it came from you when they’ve already found it much more efficiently through a Twitter feed, Google alert or RSS reader?

If you want to start setting yourself apart from competitors and really make an impact on your audience, create proprietary content. Create it from scratch and be willing to pay for it. Even in this hypothetical scenario, you only spend $35,000 on content development for the entire year. If you’re mailing list is big enough, you’ll make that up easily in sales when customers come to rely on you as a familiar and trusted source for unique content.