How to Create and Reuse Evergreen Content
Content marketing is used for a variety of purposes and comes in a variety of forms. Evergreen content is a type of marketing with the purpose to perpetually produce leads, revenue, sales, or subscribers.
Evergreen content assets are your powerhouses. While you should expend some effort creating other marketing campaigns that are time-limited, seasonal, or related to particular events like product launches, those campaigns don’t have a long shelf life. You may be able to repurpose them, but they don’t endure on their own.
In contrast, evergreen content just keeps churning, sometimes for years.
In this article, we’re going to look at everything related to evergreen content marketing. We’ll look at what evergreen content is, the various types, how to create it, and how to use it to grow your company and achieve your marketing goals.
What is evergreen marketing content?
Evergreen marketing content refers to any marketing asset that can continue to achieve its goals year after year, and that is not dependent on time-related or seasonal factors. Evergreen content does not expire or get outdated very easily.
This is distinct from other content you may have on your website. Sure, all the pages can be there forever, but the difference is in performance.
Evergreen content continues to perform for a long period of time. It remains relevant, active, and effective. Effective evergreen content is a tangible, quantifiable asset for your company.
Types of evergreen content
Here are a few examples of evergreen online content:
How-to guides
A downloadable document explaining how to solve a particular problem or achieve a desired result can be an evergreen marketing asset — as long as that problem or result continues to matter to people year after year.
So, to be clear, not all how-to guides are evergreen. A guide to the best toddler toys for Christmas 2023 isn’t evergreen, because the toys you recommend will go out of stock, lose popularity, etc. But a guide on how to keep pests out of your garden is evergreen, because, unfortunately, pests will always try to eat your tomatoes.
Webinars
An evergreen webinar will present on a topic that continues to matter to new crops of viewers. This is common in entrepreneurial-focused businesses, because there will always be people wanting to start businesses, and they need help with a variety of challenges.
If you’ve ever created a webinar that consistently draws in new audiences, you can turn it into an evergreen webinar. This means that you record it once, automate the marketing around it, and just let it run in the background.
Videos
Videos can achieve the same goal as webinars. While they’re less interactive, they can endure perpetually as long as they address something that matters to a continuously-replenishing audience.
Blog posts
Hopefully you’re getting the drift by now. Certainly, not all blog posts are evergreen. An article about the best email marketing books of 2023 isn’t evergreen. But an article about how to make money from email marketing could be.
With blog posts, it’s a bit more complicated. Even if the topic would be considered evergreen, does it continue to draw traffic? Does it continue to show up in search results? Monitor your blog traffic volume — an evergreen post will continue to draw traffic month after month.
Generally speaking, long-form blog posts tend to have a higher chance of functioning as evergreen content than shorter ones, though this is certainly not a universal truth.
The benefits of evergreen content
You can probably already see several ways that evergreen marketing content will help your company. Here are the main evergreen content benefits:
It reduces pressure for new content creation
Suppose your company uses webinars to attract and convert leads. Which would you rather have? Three evergreen webinars that continually bring in new leads, or creating a new webinar every few months to do the same thing?
The more evergreen content you can produce that achieves its goals, the less comparable content you need to develop, and the more effort you can focus on other initiatives.
That’s not to say that such a company would stop producing new webinars entirely. Not at all. But you won’t be as dependent on continually having to come up with new ideas, because your powerhouses are consistently bringing in revenue.
It continually delivers business value — leads, sales, subscribers
Attracting and converting leads and customers is what every business depends on, ultimately. It’s much easier to build and grow a business when you have evergreen content, because it’s additive.
In other words, going from one evergreen lead-generating asset to two is a huge leap forward, because now both are producing for you, and you can afford to spend your marketing dollars elsewhere. The more evergreen assets you add on, the faster your growth begins to multiply.
It increases traffic to other online marketing assets
Evergreen marketing that works well can also increase the value of newer and more specialized marketing assets.
For instance, an evergreen, pillar-style, long-form blog post that attracts high volumes of traffic can be updated with links to newer webinars, PDFs, opt-in offers, and sales campaigns that may not be evergreen. But those campaigns can benefit from the power of the evergreen blog post, and will see far more traffic than if you tried to market them all on their own.
It allows for increased automation and less hands-on work
Once an evergreen asset is performing, you can set it up for automation. An automated evergreen webinar takes much less work to maintain than live or one-time webinars. An evergreen automated email funnel will just keep functioning in the background, only requiring occasional adjustments.
With evergreen content, you’ll have much more marketing at work for your company, but you won’t need to expend the same time or labor.
How to create evergreen content
There are three primary components of evergreen marketing content:
- The topic
- The media channel
- Your long-term strategy
Let’s take a brief look at each one.
Find a topic suitable for evergreen content
Topics ideal for evergreen content include any challenges, problems, or situations that your customers, clients, leads, or target audience consistently face and are looking for help to overcome. You must have both qualifications. If it’s a common problem but no one is looking for solutions, that idea is a dead end.
To be clear, your audience doesn’t need to be willing to pay for those solutions, because a large share of evergreen content is free. Your job is to take people who access your evergreen content and turn them into customers, subscribers, leads, or followers.
Here’s where to start looking for evergreen content ideas:
- Problems that are near-universal to your ideal audience or current customer base
- Needs that your audience is always searching for help to address
- Challenges your audience faces at specific points in their customer life cycle
- Desires, dreams, and hopes that you can help your audience get closer to realizing
- Interests and hobbies that require a particular set of skills or knowledge
Notice the common themes in all these ideas:
It’s your audience, not a general audience. And they’re looking for help to do something.
Your evergreen content’s job is to help them. This is not teaser content. It doesn’t promise the world but deliver an acorn. Good evergreen content really does deliver value and make the prospect feel like their need has been met, to enough of a degree that they don’t feel tricked.
Decide on your media
Next, what marketing channel is ideal for your evergreen content?
For visual content such as demonstrations, or content requiring lots of graphics and slides, consider webinars and videos. If you want to feature a personality that will draw prospects in and make them want to do more, that person should be the one leading the webinar or filming the video.
When written content will suffice with help from occasional visuals, you can consider things like:
- Special reports and white papers
- Blog articles and pillar-style posts
- Long form sales pages
- eBooks and guides
- Checklists
If you can secure an interview with a person your audience would want to hear from and who has enough name recognition that interest in them won’t fall away anytime soon, you could also create a podcast that becomes evergreen content.
Plan and implement a long-term strategy
Once you’ve settled on the topic and the primary form of media you’ll use, begin to plan out and create your content.
To begin this step, you can create it yourself, or you can hire a content marketing agency that specializes in producing evergreen content.
Once the primary content is ready, you want to start promoting it. That means using other marketing channels where you can effectively target and get the attention of your audience.
For example, suppose you create an evergreen automated webinar. How do you get your target audience to watch it?
You could start with free social media posts, possibly on multiple social platforms.
If you’re showing the webinar on particular dates, you will certainly need an automated email campaign for anyone who signs up to view it. Many people who register for webinars don’t show up. You must re-sell the webinar through email over and over. And you may want additional email campaigns for your own list, as well as ones to use with lists from other businesses who give you access to their subscribers for a percentage of any profits generated.
You may also decide to use paid social media ads, as well as PPC and display ads on search engines. You can also advertise on platforms like YouTube.
And you can begin adding links and promotions for your webinar within your other marketing tools. In your other blog posts, find a way to mention the webinar and create a graphic that links to the landing page. And on that note, you’ll need a landing page for the webinar that will catch all the traffic coming from these various sources.
It’s kind of like a whirlpool.
At the center is the landing page for the webinar. All around it and leading into the center are your other media channels and marketing assets, pointing people to this evergreen asset.
If your content succeeds — repurpose and reuse it
If you succeed in the first three steps of creating evergreen content, you’ll know it because the goals of your campaign will be met and probably surpassed.
You’ll have an influx of new leads, new customers, new demos scheduled, new clients, or new subscribers.
So what next?
With successful evergreen content, you can now expand your use even more by repurposing it in other formats and with new marketing assets. Continually point anyone who finds this content back to the evergreen asset.
For example, suppose the evergreen webinar is a huge success. You’ve automated it. You’ve linked to it. You’ve created marketing for it.
Now, you can write a special report about the same content that’s in the webinar, and start promoting that special report across various marketing channels. Within the report, you direct people to the webinar.
You can also turn the webinar into a series of much shorter videos touching on particular points, and again point people to watch the full presentation in the webinar.
You can create infographics detailing key webinar content. You can include a chapter about the webinar content in your next book. You can bring this up in interviews for podcasts you appear on.
There’s almost no limit to how far you can take this, as long as you have the resources for it and are generating enough revenue to justify the ongoing effort.
Repeat this for any evergreen content media
And to be clear, the same process just described will work for any evergreen content. A pillar blog post that draws in tons of traffic can be repurposed as a video, as a webinar, as part of a book, as a series of smaller blog posts, as an infographic, as social media posts, and more.
Does evergreen content have to be free?
In the vast majority of cases, it should be. Evergreen content usually falls into the lead generation branch of marketing. This is how you get people in the door, to raise their hand and identify themselves as a prospect.
That said, you can sometimes turn this content into a revenue-generating system. The most proven way to do this is using upsells. The evergreen content might be free, but before your prospects lay hold of it, you can offer a sweet and irresistible upsell for a great price.
Now you’ve recovered some of your costs associated with the evergreen content. You can also pile additional upsells on top of the first one in some cases.
Not all evergreen content will be free up front, either. You can charge people for books, eBooks, and even webinars. You can put evergreen content behind a paywall as something like an online course. You can repurpose evergreen content and turn it into a live presentation, and require people to come hear you in person at some event that you produce yourself or attend as a speaker.
Additional tips for evergreen marketing
We’ve covered the basics for how to create evergreen content marketing. But there are a few additional things to keep in mind as you go about this. Here are some of the main ones:
Search for keywords related to the topic
Before finalizing the evergreen content or its core marketing assets such as the main landing or sales page, make sure you have a good list of primary and secondary keywords related to the topic.
Look at the bottom of a page of search engine results for search terms related to the one you started with. Use Google Keyword Planner and other tools.
You want this list of keywords because using them effectively will increase the traffic and authority for your primary online content. This includes the landing and sales pages. It also includes blog posts, descriptions of webinars, guides, eBooks, and podcasts. All these things require written descriptions, and you want to include relevant keywords in that content.
Increase research time
Because evergreen content needs to endure, you want to make sure your content is rich with depth, as well as based on authoritative sources. This isn’t something to just throw together in a few hours.
Have examples, statistics from primary sources, diagrams, data, quotes from other experts and studies, and examples from your own experiences. To a degree, this depends on your topic, audience, and industry.
But be sure to spend time amassing a trove of solid information, and plan out how to deliver it in a way that is easy to understand for the vast majority of people within your target audience.
Increase content length
When in doubt, make it longer. Length conveys authority and expertise. 60 minutes is better than 30 for a webinar, especially if you include a Q&A session at the end. You can either record these questions live the first time, or you can just use common questions you know people will ask. You can also survey your audience beforehand.
High-performing evergreen blog posts should be 2000 words minimum, but possibly even as high as 5000 or more.
Avoid most cultural references
You don’t want to make references to current events, celebrities, politics, sports, or other pop culture scenarios. Why? Because six months, a year, two years from now, no one will remember those things and no one will get the reference.
It’s sometimes okay to refer to more iconic items that are broadly known and not flashes in the pan. You can mention Star Wars. You can mention famous market crashes. But even with those, you have to be careful and be sure your target audience will get the reference.
In general, it’s best to avoid this stuff in most evergreen content.
Beware of obsolescence
Watch out when you make claims that may be invalid in a couple of years. This is particularly common with technology-related content. Tech, and how people use it, changes so fast that what was true just a few years ago is often irrelevant and forgotten today.
Imagine quoting a study about digital marketing that was produced before smartphones. Try to be sure your content will remain fresh and relevant, even years later.
Plan to revisit and update content
All content needs an occasional refresh. This is true even from an SEO standpoint, because search engines like to see content updated now and then.
But revisiting your evergreen content every once in a while — and its related assets — also ensures that you’re catching any language, references, statistics, or claims that have become dated.
And you might also come up with new things to say that you didn’t know or hadn’t experienced when the evergreen content was first created. Maybe you have a new customer success story, or a new set of data. Maybe you had a breakthrough of some sort, or came up with a new way to explain something.
Updating content like webinars and videos is certainly more challenging than written content. But as long as you preserve the original video files, you can re-edit most presentations and make them seamless.
Feature it on your website
Lastly, it’s exciting to create evergreen content and see it start producing for your company.
But don’t forget to add references to it in the simplest place of all — your homepage.
If appropriate, create a new menu item for it on your main navigation bar, or add it as a subheading under an existing menu item. Create a graphic that links to the landing page for the evergreen content, and post that graphic on your homepage and other key pages. You might even want to use a tasteful popup.
This is the simple stuff that can be easy to overlook when you’re buried in social media, PPC, and all the other marketing efforts you might be using to promote your content.
Go get started!
So, hopefully you feel informed and empowered to get out there and start working on an evergreen content idea for your company.
Once you get a topic, the process for this falls into place fairly quickly, because it’s only slightly different from creating other types of marketing. But the differences matter, and now you have a good guide for what those are and how to implement them.
If you want help from experienced creators of evergreen marketing content, particularly of the digital and written variety, schedule a call with us and we can help you clarify your evergreen strategy and work with you on implementing it.
