How and When You Should Refresh Your Marketing Content?
Generally speaking, as a marketer you should always try to create as much evergreen content as you possibly can. This term is used to describe certain types of stories, like blog posts or other pieces, that will be every bit as specific, relevant and valuable five or even ten years from now as they were on the day that you wrote them and put online for everyone to see.
This is a good idea for a number of different reasons, chief among them the fact that evergreen content tends to perform infinitely better on search engines than topical, short-lived pieces. There are certain questions that your readers are always going to have, particularly about how your product or service works, how to extract the most value from it, or why your company does what it does in the first place. The answers to these questions rarely change and, as a result, are the foundation upon which a lot of your evergreen content should be built.
But not all marketing content needs to be (or even should be) evergreen.
In an effort to create content that is as specific and timely as humanly possible, sometimes you’re going to have to craft a piece that is short-lived by its very nature. That also comes with the acknowledgment that at some point, to allow that material to keep being effective, it’s going to have to be refreshed.
If you’re wondering whether or not you’ve reached that particular stage, there are a few key warning signs you’ll want to watch out for.
Refreshing Your Marketing Content: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
The most obvious sign that your content is due for a refresh has to do with the fact that it’s just not as effective as it used to be. So you’ve got a particular piece of content that isn’t getting as many views, generating as many leads, creating as many conversions, etc. as it used to. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to completely toss it out and start over again. You just have to get a bit creative with things.
Case in point: maybe that very specific 1,000-word blog post you wrote a year ago still contains valuable information, but people have stopped responding to the format. In that case, you might want to take a tool like and convert it into something like an infographic, instead.
The structure of your infographic is already provided for you in the story that the blog post was built around. Likewise, you already have all of the research and data points you need to get started. Because these types of tools don’t require an expensive design degree and are so easy that anyone can use them, you can tear that blog post apart, rebuild it as an infographic and get it back onto the internet in a minimal amount of time—all while giving your audience something that feels totally fresh and new, even if it technically isn’t.
Or maybe the problem is that your old content isn’t nearly as visual as the modern audience demands. In that case, you would want to go through every line of text in that blog post with a fine-toothed comb and see which parts of the story you can pull out and tell with pictures instead of words.
If there’s a paragraph or two that talk about a particular set of data, consider repurposing it as a graph and adding it back into the blog post. Not only will you strengthen the blog because it’s now shorter, but you’ll also make it easier for people to engage with because it’s far more visual as well.
Voice and Narrative Need to Evolve
Finally, you’ll always want to go back and take a look at most of your stories if either your brand or your audience has gone through a major change since they were created. In the past, we’ve talked at length about how the best content is always written for a specific user—describing a buyer persona is always incredibly helpful to that end.
But if your buyer personas change, the voice your stories are “created in” will need to change, too. If your company has evolved to the point where it no longer resembles the organization you were running a year ago, this is likely the situation you’re going to find yourself in. Likewise, if you once used to target 40-year-old single mothers and are now going after millennials, you’ll run into similar problems.
You don’t necessarily need to start from scratch, but you do need to rebuild all of that marketing content to make sure it falls in line with the voice required to speak to people today and not a year ago. The story you’re trying to tell is strong enough to live on—but how you tell that story is the factor that is malleable and, as a result, will need to be refreshed.
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