Everybody seems to be anxious about content marketing ROI. Some have a clear strategy and the latest tactics, some, like Lewis the marketing dinosaur from our new book … not so much. If you’re among the not-yet satisfied, there are 6 areas for you to diagnose:

1. You haven’t segmented your prospects. They’re not just a faceless crowd in your SalesForce files. They have very different and real interests that you should address. If … you can learn more about them.

2. Your content format is turning them off. No video? No charming charts and graphs? No color? No interactivity? If it’s too text-y, you’ll lose them. A paragraph 7 lines long is TL;DR, so they’l bail out and you won’t get them back.

3. The un-engaged prospect will not buy. If you’re satisfied you have good, solid, useful content … you’ve only done part of your job.

4. You’re not getting good analytics. How is your content working, and with whom? If you send a catalog, or PDFs, for example, you have no way to know if anybody read even a single page. You can only sit around waiting for them to contact you.

5. You’re not getting feedback to improve your next edition. You’d really like to know what pages people are reading – and what pages are being ignored. And, yes, new technology makes that possible. No more spray and pray marketing, please.

6. Content marketing should not be a sermon, the way old-school marketing was. It must be a dialog, where brand and buyer exchange insights to speed the buyers’ journey. Sending out content and getting nothing back is a megaphone, not a telephone.

New rules, new tools. There’s a cure for the brochure. There’s a better way to be a thought leader, or to offer a catalog of offerings. That’s why we wrote the book. Check it out.