Sourced from Forbes
One of the best tools in a marketer’s tool bag is evergreen content.
Because this type of content can be used again and again, year after year, it helps keep marketers from stressing about filling their content calendar, and it also allows them to focus on creating high-quality topical or time-sensitive content more regularly.
However, when used too often or for too many years, evergreen content can start to become stale, and your audience may notice you’re recycling content without any relevant value. Thankfully, keeping evergreen content fresh doesn’t need to take up much time. Below, 13 members of Forbes Communications Council each share one effective way to ensure any evergreen content you reuse in your marketing or communications stays fresh and valuable for your audience.
1. Adapt It To Your Audience’s Most Current Pain Points
Evergreen content thrives on empathy. Check the pulse of your audience’s pain points through continuous evaluation. It’s about deeply understanding your audience and adapting your content to reflect their most pressing issues. How they articulate their challenges evolves, so your content must too. Speak to their current emotions and aspirations, and your message will always resonate. – Sahil Sethi, Freshworks
2. Encourage Engagement And Interactive Experiences
Incorporate quizzes or polls to refresh evergreen content. This strategy revitalizes material and invites active participation, transforming static info into a dynamic experience. Engaging users directly creates memorable, personalized interactions, boosting interest and retention. This keeps your audience invested and eager to engage repeatedly. – Resha Chheda, Safe Security
3. Align It To The Company’s Latest Offerings
To keep evergreen content fresh and relevant, we align it with the company’s latest offerings. This ensures it stays up to date while directly supporting our business goals. This approach works well because it makes the content more engaging for our audience and creates a seamless connection between valuable information and our current strategy. – Jessica Wong, Valux Digital
4. Collaborate With Industry Experts And Influencers
Collaborating with industry experts or influencers to periodically update or comment on evergreen content adds new perspectives and relevance. This enriches the material with fresh insights and enhances its appeal, leveraging the experts’ credibility to keep the content engaging and aligned with current trends. – Cade Collister, Metova
5. Update It With Current Trends And Insights
One way I ensure evergreen content stays fresh for its audience is by regularly updating and contextualizing it with current trends and insights. Evergreen content is valuable because it’s timeless, but to keep it relevant, I revisit it periodically to add new data, examples or perspectives that resonate with today’s happenings. I call it falling forward. – Shanita Akintonde, ShanitaSpeaks, LLC
6. Embed Practical Use Cases
We ensure evergreen content stays relevant by embedding a practical use case, like a course, calculator, matchmaker or checklist so clients can consistently return to it for value. This approach works because it’s timeless and addresses ongoing problems everyone faces. This way, we ensure the content remains valuable and always worth revisiting. – Alaattin Kilic, Visa Franchise
7. Run An Annual Case Study Or Consumer Survey
Run an annual case study or consumer survey with consistent data points or questions; it will pay off big. This allows you to structure content to be updated in a new annual report each year. It will also allow you to link back to the prior year’s report to show changes over the course of time. Make it part of your annual content calendar to ensure consistency in the timing of annual reports. – Esther Bonardi, Yardi Systems
8. Focus On Deep, Authoritative Coverage Of Topics
We ensure evergreen content stays fresh by focusing on deep, authoritative coverage of topics. Rather than chasing trends, we minimize the use of easily outdated statistics, placing time-sensitive data in just a few sections. This approach keeps content relevant longer, requiring only minor updates, and allows us to maintain its value and longevity without constant revisions. – Kurt Uhlir, Ethereal Innovations, Inc.
9. Transform It Into New Formats
Most brands possess a wealth of content that remains accurate and valuable for driving company goals and revenue. Refresh this legacy content by repurposing it into different formats. Video content is particularly versatile and easily adaptable to various lengths and channels. AI tools can further enhance this by efficiently and effectively creating new clips from multiple sources, including text. – Kerry Curran, Revenue Based Marketing Advisors
10. Conduct Quarterly Content Audits
Content teams often get caught up in creating new content to meet the needs of the latest campaigns. However, an important part of content governance is to conduct quarterly content audits. Regularly evaluating the most popular content to decide whether it should be deprecated, updated or retained ensures that evergreen content remains fresh and relevant. – Rekha Thomas, Path Forward Marketing LLC
11. Take Cues From Your Core ‘Why’
Your evergreen content comes straight from your core “why.” It’s the reason that got you started, the one that will always be valuable. But it’s not about repetition. Generate a sentiment people will recognize, in a space where you are the undiscussed authority, and they will see that your brand is always on, always listening, always relevant. They will thank you for it. – Matteo Atti, Vista
12. Integrate Content Lifecycle Management
Integrate content lifecycle management into your broader strategy with a roadmap that includes scheduling updates, repurposing content and optimizing for SEO and performance metrics. Track performance, identify trends, incorporate user-generated content and automate updates for a proactive, data-driven approach that maximizes reach, engagement and ROI while keeping content fresh and relevant. – Mark Rainey, inQUEST Consulting
13. Focus On Stories That Reflect Your Brand Values
Evergreen content enables deeper audience engagement by focusing on stories that reflect your brand values, not just fleeting trends. This content showcases your unique position to target audiences and can be reused across various channels, from blogs to social media. By linking it to new topics, you conserve resources while maintaining strong audience resonance. – Alyssa Kopelman, Otsuka Precision Health
Feature Image Credit: Getty
Sourced from Forbes
Communications, PR, public affairs & media relations executives from Forbes Communications Council share first hand insights.
