Critical to Your Marketing Strategy, Evergreen Content Stands the Test of Time
The term evergreen is most often used to describe certain trees, shrubs, and other plants that maintain their green foliage year-round, enduring all types of weather through all four seasons. Similarly, in marketing and communications, evergreen refers to blogs, articles, website copy, videos, and other content designed to stay fresh long after it’s published, as opposed to topical, time-sensitive content that has a short shelf life.
Brands create content in order to provide their audience with something valuable — be it insightful, inspirational, or entertaining — to attract and engage them, meet their needs, and achieve business objectives. A successful marketing content strategy continually fosters a relationship between customers and your brand, encouraging ongoing interaction that hopefully leads to increased awareness and sales. For optimal impact, it’s best to maintain a nice balance between your evergreen and topical content.
Not tied to any specific event or time, this blog entry you’re reading now is evergreen content. It was written so that it can remain useful and relevant for years to come, with few to no updates needed. While topical, timely content is important for establishing your brand as an industry leader that understands the current landscape and latest technologies and best practices, evergreen content is just as, if not more, critical to your overall content strategy. Providing a constant fount of value and reasons for consumers to keep turning to and trusting your brand, evergreen content has a wide range of brand benefits.
Top Benefits of Evergreen Content
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- Gives your audience something of value
- Continually drives traffic & quality leads to your site
- Improves domain authority & search rankings
- Positions you & your brand as experts & thought leaders
- Increases credibility & reliability in minds of your audience
- Reduces the amount of new content you need to create
- Is highly conducive to sharing & earning backlinks
Providing quality, useful information to your target audience (ideal customers) will help you grow your brand and enhance how they view it. This creates the trust and reliability that consumers crave, which will keep them coming back to you, not just for information but also your products and services.
Evergreen content, both the quality and quantity of it, helps to improve how search engines view your website and rank it in searches. As is the cyclical nature of search engine optimization (SEO) and website traffic, the better your SEO efforts, the more visitors you should bring to your site. The more traffic you bring to your site, the higher your domain authority and search rankings will go, leading to more and more traffic and even higher rankings.
How to Create Evergreen Content
As with any content you create, it should be well-written, well-designed, valuable to your audience, and aimed at helping you achieve your marketing goals. To create evergreen content that stands the test of time and doesn’t need considerable updates at a later date, there are a number of things you should and shouldn’t include:
✓ DO INCLUDE:
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- Timeless information and topics
- Engaging content that’s useful and relevant to your audience
- Enduring figurative language (metaphors, idioms, etc.)
- Appropriate keywords (short and long tail)
- Strong internal and external links
- Undateable images
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✗ DON’T INCLUDE:
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- Topical, trendy topics
- Fleeting pop-culture references
- Too many statistics that won’t be relevant down the road
- The latest buzzwords and slang
- Weak or volatile links
- Time-specific verbiage and images
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As with most topics, there’s an extremely high chance that the ones most suited to your brand, product, and industry have already been touched upon in some way, thanks to the vast, ever-increasing wealth of knowledge on the Internet. Now, there’s no need to regurgitate or plagiarize what’s already been said, but you can and should get inspiration from and put your own unique spin on what others have done. This will help you and your brand stand out from the crowd and make your content more attractive to your audience.
20 Popular Evergreen Content Formats
There are a myriad of different formats on which to base your evergreen blog, video, or other content piece, including:
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- How-to (How to Build a Birdhouse, How to Slice Every Fruit)
- Listicle (5 Top Ways to Reduce Pollution, 7 Kinds of Logos)
- Step-by-step (4 Steps to Applying to a College, 6 Steps to Writing a Song)
- Guide (House-Buying Guide, The Ultimate Guide to Earned Media)
- Glossary (Football Slang Every Fan Should Know, Electrical Terminology Explained)
- Q&A (How Do I Buy a Car Online?, What Makes Evergreen Content So Important?)
- FAQ
- History of a topic, company, or product
- Complex concept simplification
- Original research
- Tips/advice
- Benefits
- Best practices
- Strategy
- Mistakes to avoid
- Myth debunking
- Product pros & cons
- Product demonstration
- Checklist
- Comparison
- Review
- Case study
- Interview
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Getting the Most Out of Your Evergreen Content
It’s been said that “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Similarly, if you publish evergreen blogs, articles, posts, or other content but no one sees it, does it even matter? Digital evergreen content may be available “forever” online, but that doesn’t mean anyone is seeing it. And if no one is seeing it, then you won’t be reaping the benefits of it.
You should make continual efforts to promote your content via social media, emails, newsletters, ads, and other means. You can also highlight recent or featured content on other pages, specifically your homepage. Re-running top evergreen blog entries or social posts on your blog periodically will also help you to get the most mileage out of your evergreen content library.
Even Evergreen Content May Need the Occasional Refresh
Evergreen content is specifically designed to last for years, but it may still need a refresh from time to time. By keeping the core tenets of evergreen content in mind when creating it, breathing new life into it shouldn’t be difficult to do. It’s not a rewrite but a refresh that involves adding new findings and replacing dead links, old images, and other outdated information, especially aged statistics and other information. This will help content maintain its search engine rankings as well.
At M:7 Agency, we’re content pros who can help you leverage evergreen and topical content to strengthen your overall marketing and communication strategies. Talk to us today about your content vision and growth goals, be it more customers, brand awareness, or engagement you’re after.