Every few months, someone emails me asking for a quote for content strategy.
I get it. You have a budget. You have a scope, or something that feels like a scope. You want to know what it costs so you can proceed. This is normal — it’s a reasonable way to buy most things.
It’s not a red flag, It just doesn’t work for content strategy. And the reason it doesn’t work tells you something important about what content strategy actually is.
Fixed Quotes Break
Asking for a quote on content strategy is asking me to price a solution before we have defined the problem.
This seems like a small distinction until you try to do it, at which point it becomes immediately clear that the problem definition is most of the work.
What do you actually need? What is your content supposed to accomplish? What is it doing now instead? What is broken vs what is merely underperforming? Who is your audience, and what do they need from you that they’re not currently getting?
These just aren’t questions I can answer by looking at your website for twenty minutes. They are questions that require a conversation, and sometimes data, and sometimes the uncomfortable discovery that what you think the problem is and what the problem actually is are not the same thing.
A fixed quote before that discovery is a guess dressed as a number. It might be a reasonably educated guess, but it is a guess. And when the engagement begins and we find out the actual problem is different from the assumed problem, one of two things happens: the scope expands and the price becomes a source of friction, or the scope stays fixed and the work becomes inadequate.
Neither is a good outcome. Both are predictable. And the fixed-quote model produces them routinely.
What’s Actually
Happening in a Content
Strategy Engagement
A content strategy engagement — the real one, not a document — has roughly three phases, each of which can expand or contract significantly depending on what you find.
- Discovery.
This is where we figure out what’s actually going on. What content exists, what it’s doing, what your audience actually needs, what your competitors are doing, what channels are relevant. Discovery can take a week, or it can take six months — all depending on the size and complexity of the organization and the state of your existing library.
This obviously cannot be accurately quoted before it begins.
- Definition.
This is where we turn what we found in discovery into a plan — what to build, what to fix, what to kill, in what order, on what timeline, with what resources. Definition is shaped entirely by what discovery revealed.
This, too, cannot be accurately quoted before discovery is complete.
- Execution and iteration.
This is where the plan meets the real world and gets adjusted accordingly. It is ongoing and also variable.
A quote that covers all of this before discovery begins is a polite but ill-advised fiction. The number is made up. The person quoting it is either working from a standard package that may or may not fit your situation, or they are guessing, or they plan on revising it once they know more.
The Conversation
That Actually Works
Here is how to have a productive pricing conversation for content strategy.
Start with a scoped discovery engagement. Instead of asking for a full strategy quote, ask for a discovery-only engagement with a defined deliverable — an audit, an assessment, a set of recommendations.
This is scopeable, quotable and bounded. It produces a document we can act on. It gives us both a shared understanding of the problem and leads toward an intelligent, useful conversation about what comes next.
Ask what’s included at each phase. A strategy document is not a strategy. Ask whether the engagement includes implementation support, revision cycles, performance review, team training. Ask what happens when the plan needs to change. These questions reveal quickly whether you’re into buying a deliverable or an outcome.
Talk about what success looks like before you talk about price. If you can’t define what a successful engagement produces — in traffic, leads, content quality, team capability; whatever matters to your business — you can’t evaluate whether the price is right. Define success first. Then price the path to it.
Be honest about your budget. I know it feels counterintuitive. But telling a content strategist your budget is not giving away your negotiating position. It is giving them the information they need to tell you honestly whether they can do useful work within that constraint — or whether you need a different approach, a smaller scope, or a different partner.
The Harbor Situation,
Part I
I will tell you briefly about an engagement I should not have taken, and why. I will call this client “Harbor,” which is not their name.
Harbor came to me with a fixed budget and a very clear sense of what they wanted: a full content strategy, six-month editorial calendar, ongoing implementation support. All of it.
The budget was real but not large. I knew going in that the scope they wanted and the budget they had did not match. I took the engagement anyway, because I thought I could make it work and because I wanted the client. I wanted the client because the job fit my career goals, they had a mission I believed in, and I liked the marketing director who approached me.
What happened was predictable. The discovery phase revealed that the actual problem was significantly larger and more complex than either of us had understood at the outset. Doing the work properly would have required three times the budget. Doing it within budget would have required cutting corners I wasn’t willing to cut.
We had a somewhat difficult conversation, restructured the scope, salvaged the engagement. It worked out eventually. (Well, for a while — but that’s for another blog.) But it cost both of us time, and maybe a little goodwill, that a clearer initial conversation would have preserved.
The lesson: no engagement is improved by starting at a mismatch between what the client expects and what the budget allows.
That mismatch doesn’t resolve on its own. In fact, it grows.
Have the conversation about money before you start the work. It is an uncomfortable fifteen minutes. The alternative is everyone being uncomfortable for months.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the mechanics of doing this work well. For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative