How to Best Incorporate Evergreen Content Into Your Marketing Strategy
Today, startups pour extensive resources into chasing the latest search trends and SEO tactics. While this strategy can yield benefits, it fails to account for the vital role evergreen content has in promoting a brand’s growth. Evergreen content, which remains fresh and relevant year-round, can be easily repurposed for a wide range of benefits.
Below, we’ll explore a few best practices to help extract evergreen gems from content libraries and effectively rotate them into current marketing campaigns. This tactic can not only help a business make judicious use of resources, but it can also build a brand’s authority.
Why Repurpose Evergreen Content?
In today’s rapidly evolving online marketplace, businesses most effectively rank higher in SERPs by maintaining relevance and offering value to customers. Using widely searched keyword strings, optimizing for mobile access and building a comprehensive linking strategy are all still important tools of the trade. However, these tactics pale in comparison to the power of delivering well-written, actionable content to users.
Although many businesses spend precious resources on developing and marketing new content each year, few realize the benefit of placing evergreen content back into the circulation. Evergreen content, as the name implies, retains its relevance to users throughout the year. It is not based on news stories, emerging trends or the latest innovative product. Some examples of evergreen content include:
- Frequently asked questions explaining complex legal terminology
- A collection of mouth-watering dessert recipes
- Case studies of best practices to build a successful small business
- How-to guides discussing several pool maintenance best practices
- A list of top 10 reasons to adopt a pet
Each article in the examples above delivers actionable information to a user no matter the time of year. This type of content tends to resonate with consumers and is ideal for placing into your ongoing content rotation. Below, we’ll explore three of the best practices for employing these gems in your social media marketing space.
1. Get Organized — Develop a Content List and Schedule
Do you have an easily accessible list of your business’s entire content library? Have you earmarked which articles, blogs and infographics contain evergreen material? If not, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities to deploy pieces when and where they are likely to gain the most traction.
Start by populating a spreadsheet with the titles, URLs and publishing dates of your content. Now highlight the articles that apply to your target audience throughout the year. These hard-hitting pieces are ideal for rotating back into your content marketing plan at regular intervals. Be sure to schedule the posting of this evergreen content wisely to avoid having it compete with new articles and blogs.
2. Highlight Your Related Evergreen Content in New Posts
In addition to putting high-quality, relevant evergreen content back into your advertising rotation, be sure to mention it in all newer posts. Highlight these articles as “related” or “featured” content at the bottom of newer blogs. Visitors to your site with an active interest in a topic can follow these internal links to gain additional insight. This tactic can even help establish your brand as an authority on a given topic and enhance your business’s reputation.
3. Use Plug-ins to Automatically Deploy Evergreen Content for Maximum Effect
You’ve established a comprehensive list of your content, determined a delivery schedule and built internal links to related articles. The next step calls for an active “fire and forget” solution to help automate the entire process by setting up plug-ins to post content on a routine schedule. A few examples of these powerful plug-in tools include:
- WordPress to Buffer
- Revive Old Posts
- Blog2Social
- Tweet Old Posts
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and more
Each of these tools allows businesses to tag content by categories, meta tags and titles to construct lists and quickly set up a publishing schedule.
