Evergreen content refers to the content you’ve produced that stands the test of time. It’s not a press release, a blog post commenting on a hot news item, or a snippet of product information that could change with your next round of updates. It’s something people will always need to know, and because of its continued relevance, it often amasses quite a readership and can even land you in the top of search engines for your own place on Google history.
If you’ve created this type of timeless content, there are things you can do to make it work harder for you. And since we know marketers are all about squeezing as much ROI as possible out of existing collateral, we rounded up some ways that revitalizing your evergreen content can actually get you more leads. Combining just a few of these ideas will take very little time on your part, while giving you an impressive boost in your lead count.
Update Your Most Popular Content
If an older piece of content, say a blog post, was very popular upon its first launch, continue to update it as new information becomes available. If the content was successful a few years ago, it will probably still be interesting now. To squash any weird feelings you might have about doing this, remember that 1.) not everyone that would benefit from reading it has seen it yet, and 2.) truly evergreen content warrants more than one read. You can also add an introduction that tells your readers that the content originally appeared elsewhere on your site at a previous date, and has been updated to reflect a few industry changes. Be sure to also freshen up your call-to action and offer; unless your offer is equally evergreen, you’ve probably come up with something more relevant and successful in the past few years!
Link to New Content
If a piece of content is consistently doing well, you don’t even have to update it to squeeze more leads from it. Just leverage its success by linking to new lead generation content you’ve created that you want to promote. The great performance of your evergreen content will help boost the success of other new content you link it to.
Change the Content Asset Type
If the angle with which you approached a particular topic was very popular, take advantage of the fact that not everyone consumes content in the same way. There’s likely a segment of your audience that prefers podcasts to blogs, or videos to ebooks. Take the topic you’ve successfully created content around, and just recreate the content asset type in a new form to capture leads that would never have consumed your content in its original form.
Reformat Content Into an Offer
If people love certain pieces of content from you, they’re probably willing to fill out a form to retrieve it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep the original piece up on your site for all to see; it just means you can reformat the content in that piece into a downloadable offer to feed your lead gen machine. For example, if you wrote a successful how-to post, take that post and turn it into a checklist or a step-by-step guide that people can download and refer back to time and time again. All it takes is a little reformatting with your WYSIWYG editor and you’ve created a relevant offer to attach to your evergreen content with a proven track record of success.
Make the Topic Relevant to Niche Audiences
The more specific you are, the more useful (and thus successful) your content. Take that best practice and apply it to your evergreen content. Let’s use HubSpot as an example. Over the past few months, you may have noticed some of our ebooks changing a bit to target different levels of inbound marketing knowledge: introductory, intermediate, and advanced. You can create this level of personalization for your content, too. Take a piece of evergreen content that’s rocking, and create other pieces of content around it targeted to things like skill level, industry, or job description. Promote them in segmented email campaigns with targeted landing pages and offers to see better conversion rates.
Re-Market It
Remember that not everyone finds you the same way. Say your evergreen content is being found in search engines due to a great long-tail search phrase with which it’s associated; initiate a campaign to get it out on social networks and published on other sites so more people can find it. You can market it as old content, too. Say something like “Our CMO wrote this prediction post 1 year ago, and everything except #2 and #9 came true.” You’re opening your evergreen content to a whole new audience, and thus a whole new bunch of visitors you can convert into leads!
Optimize and Test
Maybe your evergreen content is performing well right now as a lead generation mechanism. But could it do better? Test different offers, offer copy, landing pages, and titles to see if any changes make it more effective. You should also take the opportunity to give its performance a jolt by doing some basic optimization. Audit your page title, header tags, image alt text, copy, and meta data for proper use of keywords, and see if there’s anyone in your network from whom you can request an inbound link. If you do nothing else on this list, making sure your evergreen content is rocking harder than Springsteen is the most important and quickest way to improve its performance and generate more leads.
What do you do to make your evergreen content keep working for you?
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