Interactive experiences Archives

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

Expert Panel®

Communications, PR, public affairs & media relations executives from Forbes Communications Council share first hand insights.

1. Interactive experiences encourage audiences to engage with your content

As traditional direct advertising continues to lose its luster with modern audiences, customers are seeking new, tech-based experiences. These technologies, like virtual and augmented reality, allow audiences to interact with their favorite brands in brand new ways. Brands that find ways to reinvent themselves in digital spaces are seen as forward-thinking and intriguing by millennials and Gen Zers. Content like BuzzFeed’s interactive quizzes has taken over social media, allowing audiences to personalize themselves through the brands they interact with online.

This past year, IKEA expanded upon the capabilities of its augmented reality app, allowing users to place multiple pieces of virtual IKEA furniture into their rooms, essentially “trying before they buy.” The ability for customers to easily visualize furniture in their own rooms helps them engage with IKEA on a more personal level, making their content and branding more accessible to consumers than ever before. By using immersive technologies like VR and AR, brands can position themselves as extensions of their consumers’ perceptions of the world.

2. Abstract visuals captivate audiences

Trendy branding is less about the services brands offer and more about evoking strong emotions, core values, and lofty ideas. Modern brand imagery has reflected this shift by becoming more abstract and dreamier than ever before. By utilizing more daring, eclectic, and post-modern imagery, trendy startups promote the more ethereal aspects of their brand in a time when these intangibles are more important than ever.

Skillshare, an online learning platform focused on the creative arts, has frequently used abstract imagery in its blog to promote its brand as a hub of outside-the-box creativity. The striking imagery showcases the creativity of Skillshare’s community, establishing its brand as a digital space in which forward-thinking imaginativeness is encouraged.

3. Animations cut through the static

Modern audiences are also moving beyond static imagery, which is evident through the massive popularity of GIFs on social media. However, GIFs are used so frequently now that they’ve become background noise, leaving their original purpose of getting the audience to slow down and engage with the content unfulfilled. To remedy this, successful brands have incorporated movement and animation into other aspects of their online presence in order to capture the attention of customers. By having charming animations littered throughout the UI of their digital space, brands can make interacting with them a more pleasant and uplifting experience for their customers.

Mailchimp is a digital marketing platform that uses quirky animations throughout its website to make its digital space inviting and non-intimidating. Rather than bombarding its users with statistics and figures, Mailchimp’s simple, dreamlike animations put customers at ease, encouraging them to check out the site and its features.

4. Eye-catching brand naming intrigues audiences

For startups, incredible products or innovative new services aren’t enough to stand out. Your business must establish a brand that’s compelling and electric, and the first step towards achieving this connection with audiences is through your brand’s name. A name can easily make or break your brand in the eyes of your audience, so deciding on a name that draws positive attention and sticks in your customer’s minds is essential to the branding process.

As modern brands are changing to become more personal, jarring, and disruptive, brand names are following suit. As more and more domains and naming trademarks have been filed, emerging startups have doubled down on striking, out-of-the-box names. Many names, like Discord (a social platform designed for gaming) and Slack (an instant messaging service made for the workplace) are powerful and unconventional despite their simplicity. Others, like the mattress company Purple, use offbeat names in combination with humorous and peculiar branding to gain enormous amounts of attention in industries with traditionally “boring” branding. Some brands even go as far as to use ironic names (like Elon Musk’s The Boring Company), combining wordplay with a name that would have previously been seen as counterintuitive in order to stick out from the competition.

If you’re drafting a name that’s considered unorthodox, make sure to do extensive audience testing to make sure your eccentric name is attracting customers instead of alienating them.

Audiences are seeking brands that align with their values

The main commonality between these four branding trends is the idea that startup brands should no longer revolve around their products or services, but on the intangibles — their mission statements, their personalities, and their entrepreneurial spirits.

As social media dramatically lowers the communication gap between customers and brands, audiences are looking towards brands that are more personable and human. They view them almost as “friends,” and like with any other friend, they hope these brands have ideologies that align with their own. Startup brands won’t make it far if their values or personalities fundamentally clash with those of millennial and Gen Z audiences. To avoid this, craft a brand that is socially conscious, effortlessly cool, and has a strong, unmistakable mission statement.

Feature Image Credit: Image credit: Getty Images