This Tuesday I spoke at the Marketing Week Content Strategy 2.0 Conference about the power of evergreen content and why you need to make more of it.
The Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto came up with his famous principle in 1906 that says that 80% of your output comes from just 20% of the effort.
In content terms, on your website there will be those key pages or sections that make up the bulk of your traffic.
And yet many of us ignore them and fail to sanity check them or try to optimise them, preferring to focus on ‘shiny’ new campaigns.
There are 4 key takeaways from my presentation.
1) Always talk to your users
If you’re producing or amending key content without having talked to your users, you’re either foolhardy or your own audience. All businesses live and die by their users/audiences. If you’re out of step with yours, you’ll likely wither and die.
2) Find your USP and exploit it
Every company has something they do that no-one else does, or at least excels at. This is where you focus your evergreen content. You have to show off your difference.
3) Iterate
No-one gets it right the first time. Do you think Google became the greatest search engine after their first homepage? We all know that Apple has had its problems too – it’s no surprise they constantly evolve their product range.
There are always things that can be improved on. And evrn if you get stuff wrong, you’ll have learned something. James Dyson learned that.
4) Measure the hell out of everything
Talking to customers is important, but so is measuring what they do when they reach your site.
Just because a page is popular doesn’t make it relevant to your audience. If they bounce within 5 seconds, then the traffic ain’t worth peanuts.
Iteration is vital but it needs to be informed by something – usually data.
By all means go and be innovative but don’t forget your workhorses – give your evergreen content some love.
