Evergreen content is a powerful tool and a great tactic in any inbound marketing strategy. By utilising this concept, you can create valuable content that benefits your audience, demonstrates the expertise of your business as well as attracting and engaging potential new customers.
Evergreen content is defined as content that delivers information on a topic that will benefit the audience for a prolonged period. The details within the content must be both sustainable and not time sensitive. This then creates a long-term resource to be discovered and revisited by an identified audience.
When done well, evergreen content creates a regular entry point for people to find and interact with your business. The content should be search-engine optimised to ensure the best chances of regular visits. The material can then be reused within different strategies, saving future time and resources. Quality content is such an important and vital part of any campaign, spending the time and money to produce content designed to be evergreen, can prove to be hugely cost effective in the long run.
There are a wide range of forms evergreen content could take, some commonly used options are:
This is a great resource that can benefit any industry as it can lend itself to any topic. It also works well as both blogs and videos so a versatile option for those looking to get started with evergreen content. Additionally, "How To" is a commonly searched term so can help with the SEO of the content.
Often Listicles appear as articles such as Top 5 websites for X or 10 ways to do X. It won't necessarily feature your own content, it is a compiled list that then demonstrates your expertise and knowledge on a subject.
Have a look at an example of a listicle with our blog: Our Top 5 Free Copywriting Tools For Inbound Marketing.
Similar to Listicles, but specifically on tips or tricks around a specific subject or task. The benefit to the reader is they can improve their current skillset around the subject area. Similarly these can prove expertise on a subjects and by sharing tips can make your business look authentic and invested in customer experience. Tips work great in form of a blog or a video with visual references to what is being highlighted.
This one is more business specific as will not be suitable for all. However, featuring reviews from customers and testimonials is a great way to appeal to your audience and a common search for potential buyers.
The main thing to consider when creating the content is that the subject needs to be sustainable and not impacted by time. Due to this the following would not work:
By its own nature, social media posts are designed to expire. Whilst a post can provide the beneficial information in the moment, social media is meant to have a short life cycle. Every platform has varying average life cycles for a post: Twitter - 15 minutes, Facebook - 6 hours, LinkedIn - 24 hours and Instagram - 48 hours.
This does come with an exception of TikTok, posts can have a longer life as a video post can gain traction, and potentially even go viral, weeks after the initial post, however majority of content does not reach that, and TikTok is generally classified as having instant decay for a post.
News and current trends are both hugely time sensitive, and once the interest has calmed down, they will have minimal reach. For a "big" event news story it is estimated the interest lasts about 7 days, pending on outcomes and developments. Similarly, some trends no matter the industry can become unfashionable over night as something else launches, rendering your content as old news. Both news and trends have an important place in strategy, it demonstrates industry expertise and knowledge, but they will not work as evergreen content.
Similarly to what was said above, statistics are time sensitive and will change regularly. They can make for interesting and valuable content for some industries, but will not work for this specific purpose. Statistics may play apart of the overall content to help establish or emphasise a point, but the content could not solely be about certain statistics.
If you want to get started with evergreen content, here are some things to consider before planning your material.
It's important to understand what your audience are actually looking for to create content that is going to appeal and gain views. One way to do this would be to look at what ways your current content is being discovered, are there any regular search terms that you can utilise to help drive traffic to your content. Similarly, doing a Keyword Analysis would be beneficial to see how key terms are performing around your chosen topics. There can be benefits for using long-tail keywords so your content can target specifics without competing for search results, but these still need to have traction to get results.
Consider what sort of level you are trying to appeal to as that will impact the content in ways such as language use. This is going to be influenced by your business and by your identified buyer personas. In a lot of cases, writing for beginners will be the best way to appeal to the audience. As mentioned previously, some great examples are Getting Started or How To pieces, which often appeal to beginners or inexperienced individuals to a certain topic. However, it is key to consider who your buyer personas are, as they may find expert content more beneficial.
CONSIDER REPURPOSING PREVIOUS CONTENT
You may not necessarily have to make this content from scratch, you may already have some material that could be adapted. This could be a change in format or compiling some previously made content together to create a more valuable resource. For example, a video demonstrating a product could easily be adapted and included in a blog demonstrating How To use a product, and the already made video helps illustrate the points being explained. Another common practise is adapting videos into short form content for TikTok or Reels.
The SEO of the content is key, without discoverability there is going to be minimal long term benefit for the content. The material can be as valuable as anything, but without being optimised for discoverability, it will not have the long term benefits you want to achieve. As stated previously, understanding what your audience searches for is important and then additionally, having a broader understanding of your topic. What is trending? What are the related keywords? What are your competitors using? All are important to optimise your content and to gain long term traction.
Interested in how we have used evergreen content? Have a look at our case study featuring Grainger & Worrall, or even download our own with our e-book Intro to Inbound.
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