Evergreen Marketing Vs Seasonal Marketing – Which One Do You Need?
Marketing has many faces. Evergreen marketing and seasonal marketing are two of the most popular ones among them. Marketers are torn between these two choices. With both bringing their fair share of advantages it is tough to choose one. But can you do away with evergreen marketing alone? Do you need to stress about seasonal content? We have all the answers right here in this blog.
Let’s deal with the basics first.
- What is evergreen marketing?
- What is seasonal marketing?
- 5 reasons why brands should focus on evergreen marketing
- 4 reasons why brands should focus on seasonal marketing
- So, which one should your brand focus on, seasonal marketing or evergreen marketing?
- Tackle both evergreen and seasonal content with Kimp
What is evergreen marketing?
Evergreen marketing is marketing that’s evergreen. As simple as that. It is a marketing strategy that is relevant no matter what time of the year it is. It is a marketing strategy that keeps your brand’s core branding and marketing goals in mind and focuses on the long-term effects of your content.
One of the main reasons why many brands love evergreen marketing is that this is not bound by time constraints. These strategies consist of content that works throughout the year. You do not have to fret over a drop in engagement because of missing the right window for posting the content.
Evergreen marketing includes content that represents your brand, niche, customers, or the values your brand stands for. These can be blog posts in your industry-specific topics – like lists, “how-to” guides, and posts that answer the why’s and what’s of topics in your industry.
Guides, e-books, webinars, or even video demonstrations that talk about using your products and services or provide instructions on how to place an order are also evergreen content.
Social media posts, flyers, brochures, or even personalized postcards with these ideas are also part of evergreen marketing. As you can see, these are the kinds of content you create once and use multiple times across different channels and on different occasions.
The below flyer is informational and is a good example of evergreen marketing.
What is seasonal marketing?
Seasonal marketing is where you use topical content or newsjacking to come up with strategies based on what’s trending. This could be trends in your industry or global trends or even some culturally relevant ones. And in all these cases, the topic that’s trending now might be forgotten tomorrow. So, it’s all about staying alert, grabbing the right opportunity, and cashing in on the traffic spike.
Seasonal marketing also includes the strategies that businesses use as they get ready for festivals and celebrations or national and international holidays. The key is to identify the occasions that actually make sense to the target audiences. These are also strategies that feel relevant for a short time period but you can always repeat them year after year, based on how much your brand has changed.
To explain the difference between seasonal and evergreen content better, let’s look at an example.
This post from Semrush on Instagram is a good example of evergreen marketing.
The post will be as relevant a few months from now as it is today.
And the below post for an Easter campaign on the same page is a good example of seasonal content.
Posting something about Easter in September will make no sense. That’s seasonal content – content that’s only relevant during a particular season.
Having established the difference between these two marketing tactics, let’s look at some of their advantages too.
5 reasons why brands should focus on evergreen marketing
1. Build your brand’s credibility
70% of consumers buy from brands they trust and ignore ones they don’t. And one of the best ways to build trust is to show your brand’s command over the niche. What better way to do this than with evergreen content?
While talking about SEO you might have heard about the significance of the E-A-T score. It talks about the “expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness” of the brand. Evergreen content helps establish all these factors.
We live in the age of online streaming and social commerce but “finding information” tops the list of reasons why people use the internet. And if that information comes from your website or social media page it is the first step to building your E-A-T score. Evergreen marketing is all about creating timeless content that adds value to your customers.
Let’s say you are in the fashion business. Marketing strategies that involve sharing your expertise in the field can be social media posts that answer common questions. Or blogs interviewing experts in the field or even answers from your team members who are experienced and talented fashion designers, for example.
For authoritativeness, you can share content like styling tips and outfit ideas. And to strengthen trust, you should also stay consistent with the recommendations you provide. If one of your blog posts calls a particular outfit style as less-flattering for a particular body shape and another talks about it as an option-to-try, you don’t exactly earn the trust of your customers.
Summing up, content that answers questions or challenges your customers’ perspectives, or helps them understand a topic better are all part of an evergreen marketing strategy. And this is the type of content that helps build trust.
2. Ample scope for content repurposing
Constantly looking for content ideas can be overwhelming. We know! Evergreen marketing rids of this anxiety by letting you repurpose content.
There are many ways to do this. Here are a few ideas:
- If you already have a high-traffic blog site, you can pick the most popular posts from there and create social media posts and guides with them. These can be single-image posts or carousels that capture the essence of the post. You can always link back to the respective post and further increase the back-and-forth traffic.
- Or you can use the idea to come up with a series of Instagram Story posts.
- You can conduct polls or post questionnaires on social media to strengthen the engagement rate. These are evergreen ideas and you do not have to wait for a particular season to execute them. With the answers or questions, you gather from these posts, you can create informative blog posts and articles to drive traffic to your website. Since you are providing answers to questions your customers already have, the response is going to be great.
While you can use some of these ideas for seasonal posts too, there is one strong difference – with evergreen posts, you can reference content from different timelines and still maintain the validity of the information shared.
3. Help strengthen branding
Evergreen marketing is about an idea that’s relevant all around the year. So, you do not have a preset emotional profile to fulfill. For example, around Christmas, it’s about giving thanks, and sharing love. For Halloween, it’s about establishing a spooky vibe. But for evergreen marketing campaigns, the only kind of emotions you wish to establish will be the ones that feel most relevant to your brand. It can be curiosity, or a change of perspective when you provide some new information or bust myths in your niche.
Therefore, all content that is part of your evergreen marketing strategy, will let your brand’s tone of voice dominate. What’s more? You can use your brand colors predominantly without worrying about the seasonal relevance of these colors. By letting you consistently use your brand colors and tone, evergreen marketing helps you strengthen your branding measures.
The above two designs belong to two different topics and for two different occasions. But they reuse similar color palettes and thus help establish the brand colors. However, you cannot do this with seasonal posts. You cannot reuse the color palette from your Christmas campaigns for your Halloween campaigns. They do not capture the spirit of the occasion. Therefore, when it comes to brand-building through the consistent use of brand elements, evergreen content is your best bet.
4. Save time and money
Creating content incurs cost- whether it is a blog post or a social media post or any other marketing design for that matter! Evergreen marketing ensures that you get the best bang for your buck. That’s because evergreen content remains relevant throughout.
For example, if you have an informative blog post on an evergreen topic like “tips to style a small bedroom” you can always reuse the post at a later time. The most it takes is to add new ideas or replace a few and you are good to go. And as we discussed earlier, evergreen content can be repurposed. So, you have a whole bunch of posts for different platforms all from a single idea. Thus you save time, money and energy too.
Here is a quick carousel shared on the Instagram page of Social Media Examiner. And below that is a snapshot of the blog that the post links to. That’s how you make the most of evergreen marketing. One idea, endless content options.
Kimp Tip: When you come up with social media posts based on an existing blog post, be sure to incorporate some of the visual elements from the referenced post. And if you choose a design subscription like Kimp, all your designs will be in one place.
Your team can help you add a few interactive visuals or an infographic to add value to your old blog post. Or you can create a carousel post for social media from the existing blog post. And for all this, you pay a flat monthly fee. So, why wait? Set up a call with the Kimp team and find out how subscriptions can benefit your evergreen marketing strategies.
5. Drive organic traffic – consistently
Organic traffic is every marketer’s dream. Naturally, a marketing strategy that helps you slowly but steadily build traffic to your website is a good investment. Evergreen marketing offers that advantage.
Posts and content that feel relevant to your brand at all times help improve brand awareness. Posts that feel relevant to your industry or create value for your customers help build the credibility of your brand. And both these are part of evergreen marketing and both these drive traffic to your website. Provided you find the right keywords and create content that provides unique and useful information.
4 reasons why brands should focus on seasonal marketing
1. Helps boost sales
Convincing customers that they need the product you sell is definitely an important step. But what’s even more important is to get them to buy the product immediately. When they postpone, they come across several more choices. This can either confuse them or take them to a different brand. So, the key to boosting sales is to convince customers to place an order without any delay. And that’s easier during the holiday season.
So, a well-planned seasonal marketing strategy can uplift your sales significantly. Customers have made up their minds that they would make a purchase. At such a stage it all boils down to giving them the most relevant options and telling them why these options are better than what your competitor offers.
Seasonal content tells customers that your brand is ready for the season and that you have the most attractive offers for them. In fact, something as simple as offering free shipping can increase your sales during the holiday season. But that’s not always the case with off-season strategies.
So, seasonal content that talks about limited-time deals can be your ticket to increased sales. Here’s an Etsy post for Halloween. Posts like these help drive sales to particular categories that are relevant during the season.
2. Gain brand visibility from temporary spikes in traffic
Did you know that newsjacking brings about a 0.7% increase in Twitter followers? And that’s just the tip of the seasonal marketing iceberg. There are campaigns and content you create for the holidays and trends too. When there is a topic trending on the internet, everyone’s talking about them. And people love to dig for more information and share information with their friends and family. That would be a good time to boost your social media reach.
For example, the hashtag #christmas sees about 120 retweets per hour. Trending hashtags like these can help your brand grab more eyeballs. Which means that seasonal content helps you increase your follower count, find new leads and even reach out to existing customers who have not yet connected with you on social media.
Even Google searches for these trending topics increase tremendously. So you are sure to benefit from temporary traffic spikes.
3. Holiday spending tends to be on the higher side
There is the intent to purchase and there is the willingness to spend more because people want to pamper their loved ones or themselves. Therefore, spending during the holidays tends to be slightly higher than spending during the rest of the year. And if you have the best deals to offer, people end up buying more. In short, you don’t just increase your sales volume but also increase your profits by creating efficient seasonal marketing campaigns.
It takes a good understanding of what your customers are looking for and the effective execution of your ideas.
Kimp Tip: The key to promoting your products or services as valuable purchases during a busy shopping season is to focus on the value they create. Or you can use lifestyle photos or simple animations to show how your products fit into the occasion.
For example, here is a post from Kylie Cosmetics promoting its Holiday Collection. The backdrop of gift boxes and the post description together help customers relate the otherwise generic product with the Holiday season. Or even to perceive it as a good gifting option.
Creating seasonal content, as you can see, is not that difficult after all. Get in touch with the Kimp team today for all your seasonal marketing designs.
4. Gain a competitive edge
49% of consumers choose to shop from brands that provide personalized offers during popular shopping seasons. So, even if you have a large customer base and if you have a well-established stance in your industry, you need carefully curated seasonal content to be sure that you are not outrun by your competitors.
Seasonal campaigns should include content that spans across digital and print platforms depending on where your target audiences are. That’s when the above benefit is valid. So, when you identify the right channel and come up with engaging seasonal content that feels relevant to your customers, you end up increasing conversions.
With personalized emails and exclusive offers on social media, you can be sure that your customers choose your brand over your competitors.
So, which one should your brand focus on, seasonal marketing or evergreen marketing?
Short answer – both. Evergreen content helps you build a strong brand, earn the trust of your customers and emerge as an authoritative brand in the segment and also bring steady organic traffic to your site. Seasonal content helps you increase your reach, strike conversations with your customers, and also stand out in the competition. So, you need a good mix of both these to grow steadily. That said, here are some tips to come up with content for both evergreen marketing strategies and seasonal ones.
Evergreen marketing tips
- Look for evergreen topics in your niche. You can find them in social media discussions and online forums.
- Customer reviews of your brand and those of your competitors help you understand the pain points of your customers. These can be excellent starting points for your evergreen content.
- Look for niche-specific keyword opportunities based on the volume, the competition, and other factors that determine the ease of ranking.
- Periodically check and update your content.
- When it comes to the design part, prioritize your brand colors, brand fonts, and other visual identity elements that define your brand’s persona.
Seasonal marketing tips
- Know the difference between fads and trends. If you do adopt quick trends, you can always create content for a more temporary space like social media Story posts.
- Just because the whole world is talking about a trend, you cannot adopt it if it is totally irrelevant to your industry or if it makes no sense to your target audience.
- When you follow a trend and create content for it, ensure that the approach does not deviate too much from your brand values. Customer engagement through trending content is good. But inconsistent messaging results in engaged customers who do not trust your brand.
- Personalization is the secret sauce that helps you make the most of seasonal campaigns.
Tackle both evergreen and seasonal content with Kimp
According to the State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report by Semrush, 31% of content marketers find it challenging to create content that resonates with their audience. Having a designated design team that regularly works on your graphic design and video content will be one of the steps to tackle this. That’s where an unlimited design subscription like Kimp comes into the picture. And since you get unlimited designs and unlimited revisions, you can focus on other types of content while the team gets the visuals ready for your campaigns. Evergreen marketing or seasonal, the Kimp team is here to help.
Register now for your free 7-day trial.