Even if you’re new to the content marketing game, you’ve no doubt heard the terms “seasonal” and “evergreen” content. These buzzwords are often thrown around, but what do they really mean? And when should you use one versus the other?

These two crucial components of your content marketing strategy both have value. Knowing when and how to integrate them into your content schedule will allow you to maximize the benefits of both.

Seasonal

What is seasonal content?

Some content just isn’t valuable or relevant to users throughout the whole year. Seasonal or topical content focuses on something currently trending, like industry events, specific seasons or upcoming holidays. It’s all about the “right now.”

Seasonal content can build off of things like seasonal occurrences (hunting, fishing, major league sports), holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, recipes) or events (presidential elections, Coachella, back-to-school).

When to use seasonal content?

Inject some seasonal content into your content marketing strategy when you’re looking to immediately satisfy your consumers’ current needs and interests. Capitalize on holidays and trends that go beyond just the major ones marked on your calendar. Know your consumers’ interests and be aware of events, themes and trends that fall within them. Tools like Google Trends and Google Adwords are great for finding what time of year certain subjects peak or seasonal patterns. 

Why use seasonal content?

With the constant battle for leads, traffic and attention, seasonal content allows your brand to be relevant and timely. It helps capture audience attention and adds a sense of variety to the content you produce. Since it focuses on topics already on the minds of your consumers, this content is highly shareable which helps bolster brand awareness.

Seasonal content proves to your audience that your brand produces content that is relevant and useful to their daily lives. This helps build a sense of trust and loyalty. Seasonal content showcases your brand as current and in tune with current trends.

Evergreen

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is relevant no matter when it is published. It is not dependent on current events, breaking news, time of year or things of that nature. This type of content is timeless.

Common types of evergreen content are product reviews, how-to guides, infographics and thought leadership pieces.

When to use evergreen content?

Evergreen content is perpetually relevant. Utilize it when you’re looking to to reach longer-term goals as this type of content has long-term relevance. The majority of your content strategy should involve evergreen content, but exactly how and when to use it is subject to your business and your consumers’ needs. Do some research and use evergreen content to increase your rank for specific keywords that are relevant for your business. This provides a foundation for a content strategy that, overall, creates sustainable traffic, brand growth and increases the domain authority of your site.

Why use evergreen content?

Since evergreen content continuously provides value to readers regardless of time, it can generate steady traffic for your brand. It is more likely to be shared across social networks, helps build a long-term SEO strategy and increases your website’s rank. To utilize this content to its full potential, however, it needs to be continuously available to new customers. This can be done through repurposing older content or linking back to older content through derivative content (e.g. social posts from an infographic), periodically promoting via social, highlighting that content with banners, etc. 

 

Make sure to mix it up!

Solely posting evergreen content would prevent your brand from utilizing industry current events and trends to pique consumer interest and add variety to your brand. Your content needs to look relevant and timely. If all of your content was updated years ago, your brand’s image would appear dated. On the flip side, only posting seasonal content would be too demanding. Brands need to find the right mix that caters to their specific audience and continues to bring potential consumers back to their site or sales funnel.

By utilizing both types of content in your brand’s content marketing strategy, you can stay top-of-mind and also provide sustainable content that remains relevant long past its original publication date. According to a number of studies, it’s better to have more evergreen than seasonal content. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. Just be sure to tailor how often you use each based on your business goals, audience needs and important industry developments.