With the advent of social media, mobile apps, and our growing obsession with keeping up on the latest news and trends, dynamic content is absolutely crucial to your website. We compared 16 Upleaf clients in terms of average monthly visits to their websites over multiple years, and found that the organizations with a strong social media presence and solid content creation strategy saw the most consistent increases in traffic.
Dynamic Content
What is dynamic content? Dynamic content is the content on your website that changes based on timing, user interactions, new uploaded content, etc. Some examples include news, events, blog entries, resources or other content that is time-sensitive and is set up to display most recent content first.
Most websites have at least one dedicated section for dynamic content, usually displayed on the home page.
Content Strategy
But just cranking out fresh content doesn’t cut it. Every organization should have a clearly defined content strategy, written for their specific target audiences, designed to offer relevant, insightful information. By planning your content development, you can ensure that you are creating content that best supports your organization’s goals.
Just to be clear, this isn’t about PR. It’s about useful content related to the issues your organization advocates for and your supporters care about.
Dynamic content is published on the website, and then pushed out across the web through email marketing, social media, organic search engine optimization, and even online advertising.
We train all of our clients to use their online infrastructure in this way and create and follow a clear content strategy. Unfortunately many get lost in day-to-day operations and ultimately don’t see it through.
How Content Strategy Affects Results
The charts below represent Upleaf’s clients whose websites had been around for six months or more at the time of our analysis. We divided the clients into three groups based on their content strategies:
- Good Content Creation
- Average Content Creation
- Poor Content Creation
Then, we looked at the number of visitors to the website over time.
Clients listed under Good Content Creation publish a minimum of four articles per month, have an email outreach strategy, and are active on at least one social media platform (with at least four to five updates per week). Websites for the Good Content Creation group saw visits similar to the following:
Clients included in the Average Content Creation group publish around three articles per month, are not very active on social media, and do not have an email outreach strategy.
Lastly, clients listed under Poor Content Creation publish less than two articles per month, are essentially inactive on social media, and do not have an email marketing strategy. Websites for the Poor Content Creation group saw visits similar to the following:
Across the board we see a direct correlation between actively creating content for the website, using social media and email to push it out to supporters, and website traffic growth.
The Poor Content Creation group had stagnant growth. The Average Content Creation group had steady but slow upward growth.
Clients in the Good Content Creation group experienced consistent upward website traffic growth, with the exception of Client 3 who launched their website with a solid content strategy, then neglected it and saw traffic decline. Client 5 has a very limited geographic audience and as a result experienced slower growth than the rest of the group.
Tips for Your Content Strategy
Creating a site environment of fresh, relevant information is essential; otherwise your organization may fall by the wayside online.
If your team doesn’t have the capacity to churn out new articles every week, don’t despair. Ask your partners, board members, staff, and volunteers to keep an eye out for interesting reports or resources related to your field. Ask them to contribute opinion articles. Another great strategy is to open up your site for community-generated content.
You’re not the only one facing this challenge. See the Writtent blog (image below courtesy of them) for some good content ideas.
Taking our clients as case studies, we have clearly seen that publishing a steady stream of new and relevant content increases website traffic and boosts an organization’s SEO results.
Quality Counts
It takes quality content to connect with your constituents and meet your online communication objectives. For more on content craft, see the following articles: