HOW TO CREATE AN EVERGREEN CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY – THAT WORKS
Are you exhausted creating content for instagram and not seeing much results? As much as we believe in growing your social media views and engagement, we also believe that a healthy content marketing strategy doesn’t focus solely on short-form content. When you think of instagram and tik tok – it’s all abundantly clear that these platforms are focused on that short form burst of quick content.
But the issue here is that the content you work tirelessly to produce, in today’s algorithm, has a very short shelf life. So we want to invite you to think a little differently about how you are creating content marketing – and let’s actually try to take IG off of a pedestal and put some emphasis on evergreen content for your website as a priority. Why is this important you ask? Because when you create long form content for your website on a consistent basis, google will begin to see your site as a reputable source of quality content for the topics you write about. Thus helping the users on google find the answers they are looking for by referring to your website pages. This, my friend, is called creating evergreen content – content that doesn’t depend on a quick-fix algorithm, but that can keep bringing in visitors for years to come.
So from now on, I want you to start your content marketing schedule by first thinking about what long-form content you will produce first – this can be minimum once a month (suggest 2 or more) and then find the mediums to publish your content – this can be either your website’s blog, a youtube channel (video) or a podcast (audio) – From there, we can repurpose your content into bite sized pieces for your other social channels. Want the steps? Read on.
STEP 1 – CREATE YOUR MONTHLY LONG FORM CONTENT
The first thing you are going to go in this step is actually to think of a list of highly relevant topics that your potential audience is searching for. For this, you can use a tool like answerthepublic.com, search for topics in Youtube search bar or good, or even write out a list of FAQs that your clients have. You are going to pull inspiration from these topics and develop your own unique way of creating a piece of long form content about this topic. So think of key ways you can give quick wins to your audience that are relevant to your business and what you are selling!
From here you will select the format of your long form content (written / video / audio) and you will get to work. You can select one, two or do all three – lots of people start off by recording youtube videos, then transcribe them into blog posts and pull out the audio for podcast episodes. This is a great way of repurposing content – but you have to have time to dedicate to this or have a great team around you (like us!) to help you get it all done. So if you are just starting out, we would suggest picking one – like a blog post – and simply focus on this to start – the goal is to be consistent no matter what you decide.
(Keep in mind that no matter what you choose to do as your long form content, you need to transcribe it into a blog post format (text) for your website so that google can read and begin to index it.)
*IMPORTANT – When you are publishing your blog post to your website, or planning out the titles and descriptions to your youtube or podcast episodes, ensure that you think about titles that will hook and intrigue your audience that also make use of keywords that they would be searching for answers to. You can add as many keywords as you’d like in the descriptions too – formatting is key to help people find your content, so don’t skip over this step when publishing your long term piece of content.
STEP 2 – REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT INTO BITE SIZED PIECES
This is called fanning out your content. You want to take what you created as a long form content and then create different ways to make them into bite sized posts for your various social channels. So think of reels for tik tok or instagram, carousel posts, facebook posts and even pins for Pinterest!
The idea here is to see how many ways you can divide up the content into smaller bits…example, in your blog article or youtube video, you said something amazing that could be pulled out as a quote – so take that text and make a gorgeous graphic on instagram that could be both a quote static post AND another moving IG Reel with audio behind it. Another thing you can do is either chop up your long form video into smaller reels directly, OR use the topics and ideas in your long form content to record shorter 60 second clips about the same information to repurpose for Youtube shorts, IG Reels, Facebook and Tik Tok. The goal here is that you are not searching for all these new ideas, but that you are constantly leading your audience BACK to your website to the main source of your content – and thus leading them to your product offering. To help fan out your content, this is the perfect opportunity to enlist the help of a Virtual Assistant to work on these tasks for you.
Now, this is not the only content you are prepping for your social channels – you will also be sprinkling in other pieces of content to complete the pillars of your brand – such as behind the scenes, testimonials, other quick tips, product posts, freebies or new launches – but throughout your calendar, the large bulk of your content will come from repurposed long-form content, which lives EVERGREEN on your website.
Doing this will help you streamline your time, and ensure you are creating content for social media that has real purpose – not just likes and comments – but invite your followers to take action, click a link and get more information about the subjects you are so passionate about.
And once they are on your website, well guess what – there’s a freebie offer to sign up for, or a new product or service you are selling that would be perfect for them. It’s a beautiful way to increase traffic to your website as well as help conversions – a win-win effort.
STEP 3 – EMAIL YOUR AUDIENCE AND KEEP IN TOUCH
The last thing we want you to do is to ensure that you are nurturing your email audience. This is by far the most important thing you can do with a business online. You want to grow your email list and provide amazing value to the people who are following you. If one day your locked out of your instagram account (god forbid it’s happened to people we know) and you don’t have access to those thousands or hundreds of followers – how are you going to reach out to them? Building an email list is the best way to ensure that you have a beautiful list of people you can reach out to at any time, who love your brand!
Back to the 3rd step, every month, whether this is weekly, biweekly or monthly (minimum), you should be creating a beautiful email to send to your subscribers which will include (you guessed it!) information pulled from your piece of long form content (which your audience WANTS to learn about because you created it with them in mind) so you can have a blurb about the piece of content, and a direct link to the article, Youtube video or Podcast episode for them to read or listen to in full.
Within this newsletter, you can also include news that you wish to share about your brand and other great offers for your audience. The key is that you think about the best way to add VALUE into their lives by sending this email. It’s not a promo fest about you and your business, it’s about them – and how you are serving them.
So we hope this helps you to understand that content marketing should be thought of as an evergreen strategy to help your content live longer, encourage more site visits from search and discovery tools like Google, Pinterest and Youtube – and help you to position yourself as a leader in your niche by producing top quality content that is of great value to your audience. You don’t need to exhaust yourself creating a bunch of posts for instagram and feel like you don’t see any return on your time investment. Now you KNOW that no matter what, you’ve created solid content that will live on your website for years to come and general visitors long term.
If you read all the way here and thought, “wow this is great but I need a team to help me get this done” – we are here to help you!
Simply click HERE to see all the amazing ways we support entrepreneurs like you and then CONTACT us and let’s book a call to discuss your unique business.
The BLOOM Team