What is “evergreen” content?
Pumping out content on a daily basis is not an easy task. How can you use evergreen content to build a long-term content library?
Many brands that come to us seem to have bad habits. A habit of constantly creating new content. With time being limited in many teams, what happens is that in the end, the content created only touches the surface of a topic, is short, or worse, does not tie into the business’s objectives.
What is seasonal content?
Content that has en expiry date, only skims the surface of an important topic for your audience, this is what we call seasonal content. It is content that will only be relevant for a very short period of time because of seasonality, or worse, lack of perceived value from your audience.
Which brings us to the opposite…
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content is a type of content that has a long shelf-life. It dives deep on an important topic, allows your audience to learn more, spend more time with your brand, and in the end come out of their content experience with clear takeaways. It brings a lot of value to your audience by informing, educating, entertaining, or any combination of these three approaches.
In a Content Marketing Association article, the organization outlines three key advantages of evergreen content:
- Your target audience is always looking for answers and trying to learn more.
- Evergreen content provides a higher return on investment (ROI).
- People seem to have this amazing radar and will quickly shun seasonal content.
The CMA article dives deep (it IS evergreen content itself) on the topic of creating a content library that integrates the notion of longer-form content that will be relevant to your audience for a long time.
Once you integrate evergreen content into your content program and content strategy, you can really exploit and amortize it differently from seasonal content, on a regular basis, applying our RRR methodology in order to make sure it stays relevant for an even longer period of time:
- You can RECYCLE it, transform it into another shorter form format and, for example, use it on social media (linking back to the longer piece).
- You can REUSE it, as not everyone will have seen your social posts or your newsletter when you published it, meaning that you can definitely re-promote it to your audience, catching people that weren’t interested in the topic the first time, for example, but are now in the market for what your piece of content talks about.
- You can REFRESH it, updating it on a regular basis with new concepts, new lingo, new insights, etc. This is also a great way to help it be indexed and found through SEO.
Evergreen content has to be part of every brand’s content strategy and we help many brands explore the potential of this through workshops and strategy mandates. Do not hesitate to reach out to our team if you have questions or would like to explore evergreen content for your brand.