Content, the internet's hottest commodity. Creating content to market your business is an essential part of marketing. Whether you are creating social media posts, making blog posts, recording podcast episodes, or anything in between, you are practicing content marketing.
There are two major types of content marketing. Evergreen Content and Timely Content. Before you can decide what type of content you need to create for your business, you need to understand the difference between the two.
Evergreen Content gets its name from evergreen trees that retain their green leaves all year round. Like the evergreen tree, evergreen content never dies. It covers information that will likely never change. Evergreen content is defined by its ability to withstand the test of time.
Timely Content doesn’t remain fresh for long, but it positions you as an authority in your industry because you are someone who knows what’s going on and when. The purpose of timely content is to inform your audience of things that are going on in real-time. Breaking news, promotions, and trending stories are all considered timely content. Anything aligned with current events, holidays, and public interest is timely content.
Now that you know the difference, let’s dig in a little deeper.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content covers topics that will never go out of date and maintain consistent interest and search volume over time. If you write about a current event, there’s going to be a high search volume immediately, but it’ll drop off. It gives a high short-term impact. After an evergreen piece is published, its performance will keep increasing after it ramps up and not eventually drop like other content. It’s sustainable over time.
Evergreen content will continue to show up in search rankings, drive traffic for your company and create awareness of your brand. Evergreen content is extra valuable because it requires similar upfront resource investments as other content you create but has a much higher payoff.
Maintaining an evergreen strategy means that you have more content to share via social media, in a newsletter, or directly with clients and prospects. It gives you a bigger library to reference over time. More importantly, your evergreen content can and will continue to work for your business bringing results both now and further down the line.
Just because evergreen content has long-lasting results doesn’t mean you can publish it and never touch it again. Your personas are going to evolve over time, so you’ll probably need to adjust some of your content’s positioning so it stays relevant to your audience. For example, if you’ve shared a piece that includes statistics, you’ll need to regularly replace them with what’s up to date. Sometimes it’s beneficial to freshen up the visual appearance of a piece so it doesn’t look outdated.
Timely Content
Timely content relies on timing and trending topics. Creating content that highlights promotions, new product launches, or limited-time offers for your business is important for audience awareness. By promoting a new product to customers, writing a post with release dates and information about it will attract interest and new customers for your business.
Staying up to date with industry news and trends positions you as an authoritative figure. And the more active you are with timely content, the more SEO and Google will favor your website. The more engagement your content attracts, the more attention it garners. Shares that redirect users to your website are noticed by Google, which will increase your search engine result rankings.
Creating timely and relevant can be hard. It requires quick thinking, creation. You need to react to current events to prove your brand is more than just scheduled posts; it is up-to-date, relevant, and interesting. But if you can hit that sweet spot between perfect timing and captivating, your content will have an enormous organic outreach. Content that is funny, relevant, and moving has more potential to gain impressions from an audience beyond your network. This opens up opportunities to have multimedia coverage.
So what type of content should I use?
There’s no right or wrong answer here. For most businesses, the general rule of thumb is to have 80% evergreen content and 20% timely content.
Posting only pieces that are designed to last for months or even years can make your brand feel distant and outdated. But too much timely content is a double-edged sword. If everything you publish loses relevance after a few days, you’re doing your business and your audience a disservice.
By continuing to publish evergreen content alongside timely content, you’re laying the groundwork to extend your business's reach.
