⚡️One Trick To Beat 99% Of Marketeers
Unravelling the secrets for consistent growth without effort in your content marketing
If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably clicked on a lot of similar sounding titles.
“10 steps to gain followers through content FAST”
“3 ways your content can beat your competition TODAY”
“101 Things with content you could probably be doing better”
I guess what we’re saying is, you know that ‘National Hug Day’ post you had going out? Yeah, think again.
We get it. There’s a lot of small wins we could be doing, a hell of a lot of tools and techniques that sound great in principle.
But if there was really just one thing, core to the driver of real, authentic views and growth?
Well, there is. And even though everyone might not know the terminology, it’s something every marketeer worth their salt understands about the very foundations of how the platforms are built.
We’re talking about Compound Interest or Compound Returns.
Still with me? Or have you left? Did the financial sounding word alone totally scare you off?
It’s really not that scary, let’s break it down & look at why it’s a concept you genuinely need to know about
“Most marketeers don’t have the stomach to keep at a program over time (two years or longer)”
Unlike most forms of paid marketing, content marketing has a cumulative and compounding effect . (1)
Because campaigns that skew in favour of more evergreen content will grow faster and bigger than those that focus on more temporal (or time specific) content. (1)
I guess what we’re saying is, you know that ‘National Hug Day’ post you had going out? Yeah, think again.
We’re just talking about time-specific or time-based content. Versus, content that lasts all year-round & beyond (evergreen).
Here’s why…
So, if you look at an ‘evergreen focussed’ piece of content, here’s some returns you can expect to see:
To get a better idea of how evergreen content performs against temporal content, keep reading.
Tunguz says that a hypothetical evergreen blog post, for example, may generate roughly 150 views on the day it is published, and about 20 views the following day.
Based on the post view decay rate he calculated using his own post, a typical ‘evergreen focused blog’ can still earn about 18 views per day a year later.
Yup, you read that right… a YEAR later.
The graph also shows content marketing’s compounding effects.
While you could argue that this is a hypothetical example, Tunguz says that the idea of compounding return still holds.
That’s because — the value of quality content will compound over time, and that is what differentiates it from traditional marketing tactics.
Now… contrast this, the evergreen strategy, with a temporal strategy.
Still with me?
Find the optimal balance that works best for your target audience
Stripped back, we’re just talking about time-specific or time-based content. Versus, content that lasts all year-round & beyond (evergreen).
A temporal strategy, on the other hand, a typical post may earn the same amount of views that an evergreen-focused blog generates on the first day (150 views) and the following day (20 views), but the decay rate for temporal content is way steeper.
So whilst the blog post may only get about 1 view per day after a year. Traffic also hits a ceiling at around 70k readers, which is less than a third of the traffic of an evergreen post.
The examples here aren’t suggesting that your content strategy should focus solely on producing evergreen content. Rather, content marketers should experiment and find the optimal balance that works best for their target audience.
Because, in reality, content marketing campaigns have to balance evergreen and temporal content.
While temporal content may not have the same compounding effect as evergreen content, it does deliver timely, fresh content to your readers, which some of your target customers may appreciate.
Evergreen content, however, is what will ultimately drive sustainable traffic, growth for your brand in the long term, to help you increase awareness, generate quality leads and convert those leads into sales.
So to benefit from the compounding effects of content marketing, marketers should look to actively invest in building evergreen content that keeps contributing to traffic growth, building your brand and generating sales.
So, what does this all mean?
The way thing to take-away from all this is… the return on your investment with content marketing compounds over grow over time. As does your financial investment in the content, but that’s a blog post for another day…
You can and will continue to see results even years after launching your campaigns, making content marketing a smart investment with lasting power and the possibility for returns that far exceed other promotional strategies.
Sam is Strategy Director at Wildish & Co — a creative agency with studios in Hackney & Marlborough
Appendix
- https://tomtunguz.com/content-marketing-compounding-returns/
- https://tomtunguz.com/compounding-blogging/
- https://tomtunguz.com/compounding-blogging/
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/compounding-power-content-jason-therrien
- https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/playing-offense-what-it-takes-to-drive-growth
