In December 2013, Jay Acunzo found that 70% of the roughly 2 million hits of HubSpot’s blog came from posts that were more than a month old. He wrote, “The entire team could stop blogging for a whole month and still see 70% of the expected results – zero work needed. Now that’s ROI!”.
If you’re in the marketing industry you may have come across the terms ‘compound value of content’ and ‘evergreen content’ many times. For those of you who have not come across these terms, evergreen content refers to a piece of content that doesn’t expire in the short term, such as an eGuide or blog that keeps driving traffic to the website over a period of months or, in more technical terms, content that has a compounding return.
I’m going to tell you how just one piece of content can be used to fuel your entire content strategy for months; in Acunzo’s words, now that’s ROI!
Don’t build on land you don’t own
Firstly you have to create that one piece of magnificent content that stands out in the sea of crappy posts polluting the internet, and publish it on a platform that you own. You’ll find that many content marketers share the belief that you should own the property where you publish your content, rather than relying purely on social media.
HubSpot’s CMO, Mike Volpe said “We don’t like to build houses on other people’s land. Meaning it’s better to own the channel AND the content, rather than just the content”.
Create once, distribute everywhere
The key is to create a piece of content that connects back to your brand without involving any overt promotion or contamination of editorial integrity. And, perhaps most importantly, any content you create should be something that people can’t help but share.
Here’s how you can turn one piece of content into several months worth of content:
But remember, this is just one idea of how a piece of content can fuel several months worth of content. There are so many different types of content you could create: Infographics, ebooks, white papers, videos, social media updates, podcasts, press releases… the list goes on and on. If you know your audience, you’ll know which types of content they’re most likely to respond to. Finally, before you begin to create your one magnificent piece of content, ensure that everything you create falls in line with your overarching marketing strategy and brand objectives. Good luck!
