Improve your content's longevity and ROI with a predictable framework

A new article on Martech.org says that you can apply a strategy to each stage of the content lifecycle to see traffic come in long after you hit publish.



The author says the scramble to create as much new content as possible to see what sticks is outdated and unsustainable. We've all read and heard the laundry list of things to do:

• Write quality content (but how?)
• Refresh your content (where to start?)
• Monitor competitors' content (what are they updating/launching?)
• Apply search intent (impossible at scale?)

Help is at hand!

If you are in this situation and still fumbling with these questions, Martech.org created a structured framework that will produce a desired content lifecycle to generate predictable ROI with your content investment. Investment in content marketing isn't the challenge anymore. Those of us leading SEO want to hone that resource to generate repeatable results.

Luckily, there's a systematic way to bring longevity and relevancy to your content lifecycle to drive results long after you hit publish. The typical content lifecycle stages are: Plant, Grow and Decay, with traffic over time.

Content is planted (published), it grows (gains rankings and traffic), reaches a peak (growth dependent on many factors), and begins to decay (declines in ranking and traffic due to changes in market, relevance, or competitor efforts). Enterprises need to apply a strategy to each stage to avoid content that reaches its peak and decays.

Content's predictable performance: When marketers apply a strategy to each stage of the content lifecycle, they create better content, grow it faster, and prevent decay. With the right framework in hand, content success becomes a consistent and repeatable process:

• Plant: Create content
• Seed: What questions is your audience asking?
• Grow: Expand visibility
• Feed: How do you optimize your content?
• Splice: What topic needs more depth?
• Decay: Update and optimize old content to secure your position
• Prune: What content is no longer relevant?
• Refresh: What content is decaying?

This is a slightly long read, but the author goes into concise detail about each stage of the process, and it's very informative.