Content marketing is often proclaimed to be one of the most valuable, effective marketing strategies available. But there’s a critical caveat to that description; people have to read your content for it to be valuable in any way. Of course, content comes in many forms—when I say “read” what I actually mean is “consume”. A person would need to read an article in the same way they would need to watch a video or listen to an interview—the point is, if a person isn’t engaging with your material, your material isn’t worth anything. So why people aren’t reading your content?

There are several potential reasons that could prevent someone from reading your material, and learning to prevent or mitigate those reasons can help you improve your readership (and therefore your entire content campaign). Pay special attention to these seven potential reasons, which I have found to be some of the most common and most devastating.

When people talk of the “quality” of a piece of content, they’re generally referring to its value in terms of captivating an audience or attracting attention to the brand. They might be referring to the depth of research, the style of the writing, or the overall appeal of the topic, but if you boil down the value of a piece to its capacity to engage an audience, you end up with two major factors: its virality and its utility. 

Virality is the potential for a piece of content to “go viral” or circulate amongst audience members and achieve more visibility. Viral pieces are important because they cause the piece to have a greater range of impact, and grant greater overall visibility for the brand. Utility is the overall usefulness of a piece of content for an individual reader. For example, a how-to article holds more utility for a reader than a piece about a company’s operational anniversary.

Lack of time came in as the #1 challenge for both B2B and B2C marketers in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs 2014 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends surveys.

If you’re not sure you’re using your time well enough, or if you’d like a checklist of content marketing areas to emphasize, the following list may be helpful. Each item of this list is a sign you’re wasting time on content marketing. Or – on the brighter side – an opportunity to boost your productivity.

Content marketing strategy is one of the most popular online strategies nowadays, and for good reason. It’s generally hailed as a cost-effective strategy that generates compounding returns over time, as the longer you remain consistent with your approach, the more growth you’ll inevitably see. However, because content marketing affects many different areas of your business’s online visibility—from search engine ranks to far less quantifiable metrics like brand awareness—it can be difficult to tell whether all your efforts are actually paying off.

Some benefits of content marketing are simply unquantifiable—they’re qualitative and often subjective, and because of that it’s hard to reach an objective value. Still, with the knowledge and tools you do have, it’s possible to calculate whether or not your current content marketing efforts are adding value to your online marketing campaign.