As content marketers, we’ve all learned the importance of creating evergreen content – that’s content we know will always be of interest and relevance to our customers. Why? Because evergreen content is not only highly cost effective, it can also deliver traffic and ensure a high ranking in search results for months or even years if it provides real value to your audience.
But you shouldn’t just post and forget. Your evergreen content could still need some TLC. Here’s why.
1. Your content doesn’t meet modern audiences’ visual expectations. We’ve all now come to expect rich visual experiences when we consume content. We respond so much more powerfully to images and graphics that enhance and bring to life the written content. If your evergreen content is a wall of text with only a single stock image, your users will move on.
2. Your users are mobile. In just the last year, mobile web traffic exceeded that of desktop, which is all the more reason to avoid that wall-of-text. Mobile users want short, snappy, bite-sized content that’s optimized for their devices.
3. It’s not optimized. Maybe you’ve redesigned your site; perhaps your tagging strategies have changed, you have a new CRM system or maybe those keywords are no longer as strong as they could be. For your content to be discoverable, check in on your evergreen content and its place in your content ecosystem.
So let’s say you’ve had a content program for some time now. What’s the best way to find the underperforming pieces? We’d recommend the same approach we adopt for our clients—a thorough audit of all your content.
At Imprint, we’ve found ourselves spending a great deal of time assessing and auditing our clients’ content that’s already available, from the merely ancient to the simply miscategorized—and then working with our clients to optimize it for audience expectations, accuracy, timeliness and revised messaging approaches.
If you’re going about an assessment and audit on your own, make sure to count assets and formats, and most importantly, figure out which content your users are engaging with most of all. Also try to review what exists for subject matter, effectiveness, timeliness, and relevancy to the goals and the audiences you’ve defined.
At the end of the day, we’ve often found that many of the wordier, older pieces of content on a site can be transformed with appropriate visual additions into more concise and engaging pieces of snackable content. Much, if not most, older content can be revamped in this way. Then, all that’s left is to map out where these new versions and their promotions fit with your current content calendar.
When marketers only have so much bandwidth and budget, refreshing existing content can conserve resources and drive ever greater engagement.
