Forget your sexy viral marketing campaigns - you need to spend time on your hygiene content. The content that powers your site and is the reason people visit you in the first place.
3. Talking points
• What is evergreen content and why is it
important?
• How do you go about creating or identifying it
• What should this content look like?
• How do you quantify success?
4. Who’s this?
In 1906, he came up with his
famous principle (the law of
the vital few)
5. o It’s always in demand
o It does good Google SERPs
o It’s not reliant on a specific event or time of year
o It takes far less effort than the shiny
new stuff
o You’re less likely to be competing with
everyone else
The importance of evergreen
6. How do we recognise this content?
• No matter how much ‘viral content’ we
attempt to create, all our sites have their
workhorses
• Yours may be regularly in the Top 10,
definitely in the Top 20
• Evergreen content tends to be informational
• It’s easy to overlook, because it’s very rarely
the ‘sexy content’
8. What’s your evergreen content?
Now you know what it is and why you should bother, there’s a bit of
detective work involved
o Think ‘useful’
o Check internal search logs
o Comb back through monthly traffic
reports
o What’s ‘your’ USP?
10. But most importantly…
What do your users want?
o Talk to your supporters/benefactors
o Interrogate your partners/customer service
team
o Carry out focus groups
o Don’t think you know better than your
audience – if you do, then you’re
likely to choose the wrong topics
11. Finding the unmet opportunities is key
There’s no point producing content that doesn’t…
a. Meet your audience needs
b. Meet your business needs
13. Think formats
Look at different ways of displaying your content
o ‘How to’ guides: YouTube is full of them
o Beginners guides
o Answer a question
o Curate
14. o Make sense of a trend
o Lists: XX reasons…
o Best in show
o Checklists
Evergreen AND shareable
And a few more…
15. You won’t get it right on the first hit
o Choose things that you think will work and give
them a try
o It’ll take time to rise up the Google rankings, so
always look for a new opening
o If it doesn’t work, go back to the
drawing board
Innovate and iterate
16. Can you repurpose it?
If it’s worked once, why not try it again in a different format?
• Infographic
• Video
• Podcast
• Re-package for social
20. Can you enhance their visit?
The truth is they may never need to come back to you
• Even if they’re in crisis mode, give
them something
• Provoke an emotion
• Encourage them to
take an action
21. In summary
• Find your USP and exploit it
• Listen to your users
• Iterate
• Measure the hell out of your content
Anyone know who this guy is? I’ll be impressed if you do…
Among other things he was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher
The original principle was based on the fact that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by just 20% of the population, but of course it’s been broadened out considerably since.
I think the informational and unsexy thing is crucial to note here.
It may be great to work on hilarious ‘viral’ content, or headline-grabbing campaigns, but ultimately the reason people keep coming back to you (especially online) is this evergreen content.
So, as much as we’d like to be hanging out with George Clooney, getting all the adulation…
Evergreen content is more likely to be Brian Dennehy: you’ll recognise him, yet won’t be able to work out where from. He’s had more than 170 TV and film roles since 1977 (voice in Ratatouille, in first Baz Luhrmann’s R&J
You can always create more evergreen content. The ideal is to have something that you can ‘own’ – that only you can be the authority on.
What do you want to be known for? What can your brand offer that no-one else can?
Most of you in this room should be able to answer that for your own organisation. If you’re not already focussing on that, then go and do it now. Go on, go.
You may already produce evergreen content, but the ‘wrong’ people may be coming to you to read it. You should always map user needs above all else.
I could talk about audience mapping separately – maybe not quite all day, but definitely at length.
Suffice to say, if you’re not serving your core audience, you’re failing them.
James Dyson famously made 5,126 different variations of his first bagless vacuum cleaner before he got it right.
Even if this is the first time you’ve measured things – start with something to use as a benchmark
As with any content, especially if it’s popular, you need to investigate it in forensic detail.
If 65% of people bounce, ask yourself why. That may not be a bad thing, of course
Check the length of time they dwell – bounce rate may not be awful if they spend a long time ingesting your content
At Age UK, we’ve set up analytics, so we can see how far down the page a user scrolls.
Where do they come from? Could you retarget from main referrers?
If they do continue within the site, where do they go next?
In 2013, the GDS added a CTA to the Thank you page of the online Driving Licence page.
After a year, they had registered 350,000 new people to Organ donor register.
Kama Sutra – on G2K, got tens of thousands of visitors every day, but they weren’t who we wanted
Many people come to charity sites’ evergreen content at a time in their life when things aren’t going well: think condition-specific (ie cancer, dementia)
At this point, they need their hand holding and also need to take something away
Relieve them, make them feel a bit better, or at the very least better-informed
Help them to do something: give them a telephone number, a local group,