Is your content a waste of time or money?
Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern explains why you should avoid filer content at all cost.
Most content gets in the way. It’s poor quality. Nobody’s interested in it, except those who create it. How much of this sort of content are you publishing?
There is a certain website that has one million pages. After analysis it was discovered that 35 percent of the pages on this website had never been visited. Not even once. 350,000 pages that nobody had ever looked at.
An intranet that had 100,000 pages got rid of 60,000 of them.
They did not have a single inquiry in relation to the deleted pages.
It’s so easy to justify the existence of content. It doesn’t require much thought to come up with a scenario where a particular piece of content might be useful. Indeed, most content is useful to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean it can show a return on investment.
Generally, for a piece of content to show a return on investment, it has to reach a certain number of people. A commercial publishing enterprise understands this brutal logic very well. If you keep publishing books that don’t sell, you go out of business. If you keep releasing films that get poor audiences, you go out of business.
Most organizations are producing vast reams of content with no business case, no way to measure whether the content paid for itself. It’s time for that to change. It’s time to measure the value that content delivers on your website or intranet. Sure, it’s complicated, but that’s not an acceptable excuse anymore.
Putting up content on your website without a model for how you will measure the value that content delivers is not good management. You must create such a model because otherwise what has no measure has no value, particularly in the eyes of senior management. And that means your role is not going to be valued.
Little work has been done on developing return on investment models for content within organizations. However, that is beginning to change as management realizes that a significant portion of staff time is taken up either in creating or reading content. The public website is increasingly the first impression customers get of an organization.
Content can create both positive and negative value:
» It creates positive value when it gets people to do something positive.
» It creates negative value when it stops people doing something positive, or when it makes people do something negative.
The second point needs further explanation. Every link you put on a webpage in some way detracts attention from every other link. A “landing page” is typically a page someone lands on when they click on a keyword or banner ad. These pages generally have a very specific purpose-to sell something, to get you to join something, etc.
In its excellent report, Landing Page Handbook, Marketingsherpa found that the more clinical, simple and focused a landing page is, the more likely it is to succeed. Any links that do not support its primary objectives will create leakage of potential customers, as they click on ‘interesting’ links that lead them away from the sale.
Filler content distracts the customer from killer content. Put up enough filler content and you smother your killer content, thus destroying the value of your website.