It is no secret that Content Strategy is an important part of any well-oiled marketing machine.
Most businesses, by now, understand that a well-executed Content Strategy helps your website rank higher in search engines, boost brand visibility, invoke trust, generate leads, and finally bring in sales.
On top of that a solid content strategy provides overall exposure (that you’d have to pay through your nose to get otherwise), a better user experience for visitors, several windows of opportunity for your potential and existing customers to interact with your brand, build trust, and even build a community.
Yet there are many content strategies that are half-baked resulting in losses for the business owner.
For clarity, this is how half-baked content strategies look like:
- Blog 1 goes live. Blog 7 seven goes live. That’s the end of the road for blogging. Thank you very much.
- No eBooks, white papers, reports, or anything else that’s ever published.
- Almost zero presence on social media. Even if it exists, it’s not consistent. Occasionally, your Tweets arrive on Twitter feeds. A LinkedIn update goes live which yearns for engagement of any kind. Some updates. No clicks. No engagement. Nothing.
- No videos show up on Youtube (not even screen share ones). As such, no one ever saw a face or the sound of your voice ever.
- No pop-ups, no Calls to actions (CTA), and you never asked for an email address in exchange for something valuable you give away (see point 2 above, a.k.a lead magnets). You don’t have your own captive audience in the form of a well-segmented, sorted, and planned email lists (good luck depending on other platforms for everything, if ever).
These are the basics of Inbound marketing (or content marketing). This is what everyone keeps talking about. Just as we tend to ignore ads, business owners stopped paying attention to content strategy as well.
The result: you’d think $0 in sales and revenue (attributed to digital marketing). In reality, it’s pure losses (like bleeding cash).
Like, Minus $$$
Here’s how:
Your Design Ideas Vs Profitable Design
Good website design should have had a singular goal: More revenue from the website for your business.
Apart from an appalling lack of any strategic direction from so called web-designers( and DIY website solutions don’t talk back to us, remember?), guess what most business owners and entrepreneurs think about?
“How pretty does my site look?”
The colors, typography, fancy animation blocks, alignment, and being mobile-ready(thank God you think about this at least).
Instead, everyone should be thinking and focusing about:
How fast does the page load?
How does the design help meet business objectives?
How does the website perform? [ Relevant traffic, engagement, leads generated, and sales & revenue.
Your website is your business. This isn’t a beauty pageant.
Since you didn’t think about all of this, your website remains like a static brochure on the cloud. Enough said.
You do spend money on web hosting, you paid for the domain, you’d have paid for a designer/developer, or maybe spent time doing the website yourself.
Either way, you won’t make it to the finals.
The Story of 3 Blog Posts & No eBooks Situation
Since you did hear about content strategy, you do hire people (or maybe create content yourself) to create exactly 3 blog posts (or 17, but you get the point). You also go as far as to create a lead magnet (like an eBook).
That’s where it ends.
Remember that even the 3 blog posts were published randomly, without a specific frequency.
You can also conveniently forget about publishing velocity (the “no matter what happens, this is the rate at which we publish high-quality, impactful blog posts”)
Writing those 3 blog posts (or any number of random ones) and the eBook costed you money (or time). You’ll never get this back and Google can never find you.
Since you’ve been inconsistent, you won’t have any reading, visiting, engaging, commenting, signing up, and later buying from you.
Say hello more costs, fuelled by blind ambition
By this point (and if you hanged around until this point, congratulations), you’d have:
- A website with exactly 3-5 pages (which is all about yourself, and it’s not interesting for your customers), loads slowly, and is designed to be so pretty that users can only stare at it for exactly for a second or two before leaving
- A few blog posts (and no one reads)
- Sporadic social presence (or none at all).
- Nothing like a Pop-up, sticky bar, slide-in, or an exit-intent pop-up to entice your potential readers to sign up and get the “relationship started”, a “digital date” if you will.
You won’t stop there, will you? You’ll now look for the following:
- Staff content strategists or writers who aren’t given any strategic brief about how the content strategy should tie-in with business goals. Yet, you’ll hire people randomly (only to spend for nothing).
- Hire SEO specialists (without any content strategy to back it up). How do you think you’ll rank 3-5 pages with a grand total of 1750 words on your site? How much On-Page SEO will you do (and how exactly…)? How will you request backlinks to help with Off-page SEO? Who (and why) will any one link (unless you pay…and then you know the exact ROI on that payment)?
- Hire people on Fiverr to redesign your site (while ignoring the fundamental fact that design should meet business goals again). Have a content strategist help come up with a marketing plan (which you’ll never execute). Hire a virtual assistant (to do exactly what you shouldn’t be doing).
- Obsess with marketing tools, spending too much on your marketing stack, web platforms that you think you should be using, and more.
- If your business isn’t completely digital, we haven’t even included your actual business overheads.
Do the math now. Let me know what you think.
