You’re a smart, experienced individual who understands the value of marketing; you’ve put in the time to blog, post on social, send emails, and help your team become thought leaders, yet your digital marketing efforts aren’t moving the dial. So why aren’t you getting the results you had been promised by digital marketing? The reality is that without a solid strategy in place, digital marketing becomes mere trial and error. You can’t reap the benefits of digital marketing by aimlessly churning out content without a solid strategy. To benefit from content and get results, you have to do it right; otherwise it can work against you and give your competitors the edge.

Related Post: 4 Ways to Make Your Content Strategy More Authentic ➢

Here are six signs you need to create a content strategy before you do any digital marketing. If you’re doing any of the following, it’s time to strategize.

1. Posting Random Content/Making It Up As You Go

Working as a digital marketer for the past few years has taught me that if you are coming into the office and creating your topic on the fly, you’ve already lost. It’s easy to fall into that trap—we’ve all done it—but carving out some time at the beginning of your content journey will save you countless hours and dollars down the line. You wouldn’t jump into a car and head out on a road trip without looking at a map would you? You’ll run out of gas before you get there, or worse, you’ll get so lost, you’ll give up on trying to find your destination. To avoid scrambling to find new ideas each month, you need a content calendar and schedule of ideas planned out in advance. Which brings me to the second sign you’re in need of a content strategy…

2. Posting Inconsistently

There are many symptoms of purposeless content, but the biggest tell is not publishing consistently. Business owners are very busy and when it comes to posting content, let’s face it, it seems like a great idea in the moment, but then that conference comes up, or a new sales lead often takes priority. Publishing content consistently takes more than just sticking to a strict regimen of pushing out content; it takes a well-thought-out plan and resources put in place to stick to that plan.

3. Your Content Efforts Aren’t Generating Leads

This one is pretty simple. If you’re making a lot of noise with your content, but you aren’t generating any solid leads or sales from that content, then it’s time to take a look at the kind of traffic you are driving. Remember, 97% of visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy, so it’s not enough to just get them to notice your content, you need to have a strategy behind that content to make sure that it’s as effective as it can be.

4. You’re Not Offering Rich Content

Blogging and posting to social media sites is a great way to generate traffic, but once a visitor comes to your site, how do you turn them into a lead without providing some sort of content like an eBook, webinar, checklist, etc. By providing rich content that your visitors find valuable, you are helping build trust with your visitors, positioning yourself as a consultative leader, and helping them through the buyer’s journey. In an age where “everything is online” and buyers are more informed than ever, it’s critical that you include rich content offers in your content strategy.

5. Your Content Isn’t Resonating With Your Audience

This type of marketing doesn’t motivate your reader to do anything. Content has emerged as one of the most effective ways to build your business’s brand and voice. But if you want your content to be effective, you need to understand what your potential customers are feeling and how they want to feel. Essentially, you have to appeal to the emotion of your prospects, not just the logic of what you do. If you’re in a rut and not seeing results from your content, it’s time to get back to the human element of what you do and make an emotional connection.

6. Your Marketing and Sales Goals Aren’t Aligned, or Worse, You Don’t Have Marketing Goals

Businesses with highly aligned sales and marketing teams achieve an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth. There’s no doubt that content can boost your brand awareness and improve public sentiment towards your company and its product or service offerings. But if you’re not tying content efforts back to sales and revenue, it can be difficult to motivate your team members to invest the proper amount of effort into content. Without a content strategy to align your marketing and sales efforts, it will be difficult to understand the ROI of your content. To know if you’re getting a return on your content investment, you need to figure out how much you’re affecting the business’ bottom line.

Related Post: How to Create Content that Sticks ➢

Above all, my point is that there’s truly no shortcut to building out your marketing funnel, growing your traffic, and generating leads from your website. Simply pushing out content without a plan is not enough and, unfortunately, can actually work against you if customers walk away with a bad taste in their mouth after reading it. With thousands of businesses out there vying for recognition and attention online, building awareness and customer loyalty through meaningful engagement is key to getting noticed. Quality content creation lies at the heart of these efforts. At Parqa, our inbound marketing approach aligns your business and marketing goals so that you can convert more prospects into customers and grow your business online.

The word “content” gets thrown around so much these days that it’s become slightly convoluted. Yes, businesses do need to produce content and distribute it to increase visibility and grow their brand, but throwing words against the wall won’t do you any good. At the end of the day, content creation is about telling a story. And with so many different brand stories saturating the market, the ones that will stand out are the ones that are authentic. Consumers can smell flimsy, inauthentic content from a mile away; if you stuff your blogs with keywords or come across like a used car salesman, you don’t stand a chance of surviving in today’s era of shortened attention spans and an increased desire for transparency. What your company should aim for when it comes to content creation is, at the end of the day, what we all crave: authenticity. It’s time to get real.

Related Post: 6 Signs You Need a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Stop being overly promotional

Show of hands: who likes listening to commercials? Didn’t think so. Our attention spans are shrinking by the day, and people can quickly identify if an “article” is really just a longform advertisement. People search for answers to their problems on the internet. They want to be informed, educated, and to walk away with a new insight or fresh perspective. In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn about how great you are. You have to show them you’re great by providing something to them, no-strings attached. What can your content do for your reader? Don’t sell in your blogs: inform. Educate. Tell them a story. This is how you earn their trust—and yes, potentially their purchasing trust, later on.

2. Get vulnerable

Companies—and the people behind them—love to talk about their successes, but rarely do they address their shortcomings. But our vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and failures are often our greatest opportunities for growth. When you’re writing content like personal essays or articles in the first person, don’t be afraid to talk about mistakes and missteps you’ve made. Articles about things you “wish you’d known,” areas in which you’ve grown, or obstacles you’ve had to overcome are incredibly helpful to other people—and they’re highly shareable. In today’s age of lifestyle bloggers and influencers, brands have to compete with those “oversharing” personalities, the most successful of which are usually people that keep it real, incorporate some levity into their content, and open up about their vulnerabilities in a humble way.

3. Remember who you’re talking to

Along the same vein as being overly promotional, I see a lot of people who create content without thinking of their audience. You may not be physically next to your audience, but you’re still talking to them. Consider the tone you take; don’t be condescending but don’t underestimate their intelligence, either. Truly take the time to picture your ideal reader or customer and think of how you can help them. What is their day-to-day life like? What kind of content can improve their life? What do they value? What are their biggest challenges? People want information that will solve problems, inform them, improve their lives, or open their minds. Tell your story in a way that will deliver the most benefit for them. An article about retirement funds aimed at baby boomers can and should be formatted and written differently than an article written about Snapchat trends aimed at Gen Z’ers.

4. Don’t be afraid to be the first or only

Digital marketing is a competitive world. As such, many companies feel desperate to churn out a lot of content in a short amount of time, often at the expense of that content’s quality or purpose. To do this, they tend to copy specific formats that they see other people using successfully. This isn’t wrong—you want to learn from successful companies and how they’ve established themselves. But you also shouldn’t be afraid to branch out once in a while and try something new. Don’t be afraid to create content that nobody has thought of yet, and present it in a style that’s uniquely you. If you do what’s authentic for your company, do it well, and do it consistently, you will establish yourself as a content leader in your field.

According to HubSpot, 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority—as it should be. The internet isn’t going anywhere, and Google keeps getting smarter, filtering more data and grading your website on the quality of your content. You need a solid content strategy in place if you want to make any headway with digital marketing. But while most marketers know they need to focus on content creation, few actually know what content marketing success actually looks like. So how do you create clickable content that works in your business’s best interest?

It’s a more difficult question to answer than you might think. Yes, ROI is the top priority of any marketing effort; we obviously want our time and energy to be spent helping the bottom line. But how do we get there? Let’s explore how Parqa has been effective in our content marketing strategy so far by taking a look at creating content that sticks.

Related Post: 5 Content Marketing Mistakes that Give Your Competitors the Edge

1. Clearly define the purpose of your content

The most important question to ask yourself is Why am I creating content in the first place? Are you simply trying to keep up with the times? Is your website lacking the same marketing materials you’ve identified in your competitors? Are you creating content that will inform your web visitors and engage them? Do you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry? Determining the purpose and goal of each piece of content will help you more clearly organize your thoughts. Instead of just writing about whatever happens to be on your mind in a disorganized fashion, you’ll have a clear idea of what you want your content to accomplish going forward.

2. Identify common challenges

Determine common challenges that people in your business or industry face and empathize with. As you direct traffic to your various content offerings, remember that visitors are looking for an answer to their problems. You may be an expert—you may have a brilliant sales and marketing team—but the main goal of your content is not to be overly promotional. It’s an opportunity to help someone solve a problem, not hype your business. Create content that will identify and empathize with common pain-points to attract potential leads to engage with you.

3. Use your first-hand experience

Share personal experience from within the industry. Take some time and brainstorm. Write out your top 10 to 20 questions YOU asked over the years, that helped you get to where you are. Before you were managing your firm, think of all the experiences you had that shaped your understanding of your industry. Think of all the questions you faced, maybe asking colleagues or mentors how to navigate through, or learning the tough way through trial and error. Your potential clients and candidates want to hear from someone who’s been on their same journey and become successful.

4. Audit your content

Getting started with a content strategy can seem overwhelming, but a final way to get started is to reuse old marketing projects. If you’ve used specific collateral in the past and it was effective, you may not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. Repurpose that material, even if it can just serve as a starting point when building a blog campaign or ebook outline. It will help expedite your content creation process and help you start brainstorming potential content ideas in the future, as well.

Related Post: 4 Ways to Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Authentic