You’re likely familiar with the idea of evergreen content: content you can share regardless of the time of year and which is always useful.
Evergreen content doesn’t require a lot of maintenance – you can periodically share it across your social media channels or in an email to direct traffic to your website. Sometimes though, things change enough in the world that you need to rethink some of your evergreen content. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people have had their worlds turned upside down, and normal is something like a memory. Here are our top tips for pruning content that’s no longer useful and knowing when to update the content you have to make it more relevant.
Monitor Your Engagement
Choose a piece of content and look at the metrics you’re getting from it; check out who is engaging with your posts and how. If someone shares your post, that post has the potential to reach a wider audience than when someone simply likes it. By monitoring your engagement, you can tell when a piece may have run its course. Are people visiting your website from that post? If no one is sharing your post, commenting on it, or liking it, it’s a good sign that it’s time to look at the content and the way that you’re sharing it to see if it’s still relevant.
Read Your Content in Light of the Pandemic
Unfortunately, some pieces of content are reliant on the reader living in a pre-pandemic world; reposting or sharing them now may make your customers think you’re a little tone-deaf. Instead, look for ways to modify some of your content that is performing well for you to include the current situation. As an example, if you frequently share content about home organization, you might take one of your previous blog posts and add information about how to organize masks for your family. If you share financial information or tips on budgeting, see if you have a piece where you could add a section about budgeting for health supplies during the pandemic. In this way, you don’t have to change your entire brand message to be pandemic centric, but you also won’t risk sharing out of date content that ignores it.
Change How You Share
When sharing content from your website across your social media channels, you have the option to write text and include a photo alongside the link you’re sharing. It’s a good idea to hint at the updates you’ve made to your content in either the text or the picture. If you would normally share a post with the text, “Have you tried these ten ways to declutter your home over the weekend?” you might pair it with a photo that includes masks.
Continue to Monitor Your Engagement
If you’re still not getting the level of engagement you want out of your pieces, study your metrics and try to find out why. It may be that you’ve had to change your tone or priorities as a brand lately, and if some of your older evergreen content no longer reflects your brand identity, it’s okay to retire it for the time being. You can also do some simple a/b testing to see what gets the most traffic to your website. Do you get more engagement when you add a pandemic related photo to your posts?
It’s important to realize that, for better or worse, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is going to be a part of everyone’s daily lives for the time being. By embracing that, you can do yourself a great service and prove to your customers that your business can pivot in times of hardship to roll with the punches. In so doing, you may also help people embrace their own current circumstances as much as possible.
Always remember that Zephyr Digital Design is here to help your brand strike the right tone for all of your content. Contact Zephyr Digital Design today to see just how smoothly updating your evergreen content can be.