Share this post:
When someone recommends “content marketing” as part of your digital marketing strategy to you, what kind of content comes to mind?
For many businesses, “blog posts” or “infographics” might be the first items to come to mind. For others, “white papers” or “research articles” might be relevant.
No matter what it means to you, “content marketing” is the process of creating content that generates value to draw in your target market through strategic inbound marketing. Marketing agencies, use editorial calendars to plan and strategize their content months in advance, to capitalize on the hottest trends and the latest news.
But here’s a question to ask yourself – is it right to only be trendy?
At the end of the day, customers come to you because you are the expert in your industry. Yes, this means that you would be one of the first to report on trending news or the latest research – but that’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Customers come to you to help them solve a specific problem
Customers come to you because your business and brand help them solve a specific problem, regardless of trends or news. Yes, trends are important to stay on top of – but are your newest, uneducated customers going to have an opinion about the latest news in your industry?
With evergreen content marketing, you are the first to deliver the best, freshest, most thorough information on the first search that new customers make.
Enter Evergreen Content Marketing
Rather than focusing on seasonal content, let’s take a different approach to content creation with evergreen marketing.
The concept of “evergreen content” stems from evergreen plants, which retain their leaves throughout the year regardless of the season. Just like with these plants, the evergreen content you create can also generate traffic and leads regardless of seasonality.
You can recognize excellent evergreen content if it fulfills the following criteria:
- It solves a question that is asked by your new clients on a monthly basis, in a more straightforward and thorough manner than your competitors.
- It creates a body of research or a fresh perspective that others can draw from to help solve a problem (proprietary research, white papers or infographics serve this purpose well).
Evergreen content forms a basis of a good SEO strategy, that strategically optimizes for a specific secondary SEO keyword (these are also known as “long-tailed keywords”).
How To Execute Evergreen Content
Your customers are the greatest source of feedback and ideas for content that you can get. Use digital marketing techniques such as review mining to find the questions and values that your customers are already looking for, then perform a Google search to find the top sites that rank for that particular keyword or phrase.
What’s the #1 piece of content? Why is it at the top? Is it something you can do better? Are there gaps in the explanation that you can help fill?
The best evergreen topics usually fill the following criteria:
- It is optimized for a search term or phrase with low competition
- It is super targeted and relevant to a specific question
- It is strictly tied to a visitor’s action intent to purchase, sign up or learn more
If you can create a piece of content that provides more value than the top-ranking post on Google, your content may naturally rise to the top of search results. This will net you incremental traffic for months – even years to come.
The Benefits Of Evergreen Content Marketing
We’ve seen evergreen content perform for our clients, for years on end. Often, the topics that we optimize for are searched on a monthly basis, or cyclically on an annual cycle.
For example, we created a blog post in 2016 for one of our clients in regards to some specific tax questions that their customers were curious about. This blog post now generates over 8% of all Google search traffic during the tax season for our client, bringing in thousands of entrances and enticing users to stay on the website for at least 5 minutes per session.
The engagement rate on these evergreen content posts is very high, as users tend to stay on the site and want to learn more (eventually making their way to topical content posts).
Blog posts about eternal pain points work particularly well – nearly 23% of all Google traffic for one of our clients, stems from a single blog post addressing an eternal pain point that customers search for on a monthly basis. Sessions from this particular blog post-net visitors that stay on the site for over 4 minutes per session, to learn more about other services.
When strategically executed, evergreen content results in strong conversion rates that provide benefits for years to come. However, just like with a variety of plants in a garden, the best kind of content marketing strategy combines both types of content – evergreen content as well as topical content.
Execute Content Marketing With An Editorial Calendar
The best way to strategize for evergreen content is to plan ahead with an editorial calendar.
Our editorial calendars offer a combination of topical and evergreen content, to help you produce industry-leading content that drives sales and addresses topical trends on a regular basis. It’s difficult to execute effective content marketing with just white papers and infographics, for the same reason that it’s difficult to execute content marketing with just topical content and memes.
Engagement, reach and quality go hand-in-hand, which are all addressed within a single editorial system.
Having these marketing systems in place, is one of the key reasons why our clients work with our digital marketing agency. We do this by executing an agile system of marketing, and propagating content across various online platforms that ultimately help you drive sales.
Are you interested? Contact our marketing agency in Vancouver today to learn more about how we can help your business grow!