In marketing, the focus is always on the next shiny new tactic, tool or toy that promises to increase conversions, capture attention spans and blow our audience’s minds. But constantly developing and producing new content requires a lot of manpower and big budgets. When you’ve invested so much of your team’s creative energy, its time and its budget to produce catalog content that works, you don’t have to put it in a box at the back of the closet after it’s been used. A lot of content you create has more mileage in it than most marketers first believe. Content is a lot like fashion trends. It can be relevant and trendy in one decade and just as relevant and trendy in the next. Thankfully, marketers don’t need to wait a decade for their content to become relevant, trendy or even useful a second time around because of the wonderful power of “evergreen content.”

 

Evergreen content is any piece of marketing material that can be brought back to life and given a new lease on the marketing world for your business. While you could simply reprint a product catalog, that’s not exactly what this blog post is suggesting. Evergreen content does require a bit of upcycling strategy before it’s ready to be used a second time around. How do you know which content is evergreen?

 

The easiest way to tell is by the piece’s timeliness. Does the material contain information about a product that has been outsold and reinvented? Then it’s not evergreen. Evergreen content continues to be relevant and valuable for your audience into the future; months or even years. If you sell fine art frames for example, sidebar content that provides tips for the best at-home wall galleries is valuable and relevant no matter what month or year it happens to be at the time, and it gives your customers ideas on how to use your product.

 

Popularity will always be a tell-tale sign of success. Remember in grade school when the popular kid came to class with the latest gadget, and then all of a sudden every kid in the school had to have one? Same idea. Go back through your analytics, your data, your campaign metrics and find those catalog content pieces that proved to be marketing superstars. What content did your audience respond to really well in the past? What content seemed to drive traffic, calls, purchases or interest? Maybe there’s a piece of content that told your company’s origin story or the successes of a customer who used your service—dust off those old gems, put them front and center, and give them a spotlight again.

 

Evergreen content isn’t lazy marketing. It’s smart marketing. Paying attention to what drives your customers to decisions and purchases, what content piques their interest and then leveraging what you already have in your toolbox is efficient and effective. You don’t need to rack your brains trying to come up with new ways to do things when many of the ways you’ve already devised are waiting for their chance to shine again. Take a look at the catalogs you’ve designed in the past, analyze their success rates, then reuse and recycle, and see a return on that investment.