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Content marketing is an invaluable way to promote your brand, establish thought leadership, and cultivate trust. Ultimately, content marketing can help move buyers through the sales funnel, ending in conversions. But content marketing does not always work. In fact, it’s possible to put time and money into your content marketing initiative and be left with little to show for it.

That doesn’t mean content marketing should be abandoned. It just means it should be approached with care. Below are a few warning signs that your content marketing approach isn’t working—and that perhaps it’s time to pause, regroup, and talk things over with the experienced marketing pros at Driven2020.

How to Tell Your Content Marketing Needs Reimagining

You Don’t Have a Strategy in Place

If you’ve already put a lot of time and money into content marketing but haven’t taken the time to formalize and document your strategy, well, that’s probably because you don’t have one. A spur-of-the-moment approach to content marketing probably won’t get results, though, so take this as an opportunity to put content marketing on hold and go back to the drawing board. Get a plan in place, then implement it.

You’ve Not Developed a Diverse Content Portfolio

Having a bunch of blog posts to fall back on is definitely helpful, but content marketing doesn’t only mean blogging. You should also have strong visual content, including both still images and videos. If your content creation efforts have been one-sided, you may want to rethink things, and to take a broader approach.

 You’re Not Seeing Meaningful Metrics

 Content marketing is sometimes regarded as sort of a soft, fuzzy thing—but actually, you should have hard numbers to back it up. The metrics that matter to you might be website traffic, email list opt-ins, or phone calls to your sales representatives. Something like a positive Facebook comment, while certainly nice, isn’t really as significant.

Now, you’re not going to see bottom-line results over night. Content marketing is a long-term commitment. But if you’ve been at it for a few months and haven’t noticed any uptick in your key metrics, that spells trouble.

You Don’t Have a Budget

You’re simply not going to find content marketing success if you aren’t willing to spend a few bucks on it. You’re certainly welcome to start small and grow from there—in fact, that’s something we recommend—but if you have no budget at all, you’re not really serious about content marketing. Again, it’s time to go back to square one.

You’re Doing Nothing to Promote your Content

 You can create the best content in the world, but if you don’t hustle to get it in front of readers/viewers, it’s not going to do you a bit of good. Hopefully, you have a strong content promotion strategy in place—but if not, well, that’s another sign that maybe you’re getting ahead of yourself. Take some time to consider how you can get eyeballs on your content.

Ready for a Sound Content Marketing Strategy?

If you’re ready to talk to the pros about content marketing, we’re ready to help. Here’s our pitch: We don’t like fluff. We only care about results. We want to help you develop a robust, integrative digital marketing plan that will actually get you more sales, as cost-effectively as possible.

If that sounds like the kind of content marketing approach you’re after, we invite you to connect with Driven2020 today. Contact us and let us know you’re ready for marketing efforts that really accomplish something.