It seems like brands these days have to pivot on a dime to stay relevant.
Hopping on trends or replicating a meme are fun, and often important, ways to get more brand visibility—but they expire quickly and don’t get across exactly what your brand does.
The core of your marketing strategy should be evergreen. This means the bulk of your strategy should stay relevant well beyond a few hours, days, weeks, or even months.
In this blog, we’ll cover what we mean when we say “evergreen marketing,” what doesn’t count as part of your evergreen marketing strategy, examples of evergreen marketing, and how the right leadership can help you.
What Does it Mean to be Evergreen?
In the same way evergreen trees stay green all year long, evergreen marketing keeps your brand relevant well beyond the usual (and short-lived) trend cycle.
While evergreen marketing doesn’t mean your marketing strategy will never change, it’s a much more sustainable way to keep your brand relevant. Rather than relying on an expiration date, running an evergreen marketing campaign, for example, means your company will fall back on ideas that are always true to your brand.
In a word, evergreen marketing should be the “heart” of your marketing strategy.
Now that you know what evergreen marketing is, let’s go over what it isn’t.
Related: Evergreen Marketing: The Timeless Way to Boost Your Business
What Evergreen Marketing is NOT
When you scroll your social media feed, you might see brands duplicating the same content format, using the same meme template, or using the same viral audio. Next week, you’ll see something completely different.
Alternatively, you might see a brand cycle out their social banners, use targeted messaging, and even change their colors in response to some shifting market demand (e.g., reacting to a competitor or launching a new campaign) every several months or even annually.
While all of these tactics certainly have a place in a brand’s overall marketing strategy, they’re also all time-sensitive and shouldn’t be the baseline of your marketing efforts.
Think of these actions as important add-ons rather than an alternative to evergreen marketing.
So, what does evergreen marketing look like in action?
Examples of Evergreen Marketing
When you’re looking to make your marketing strategy evergreen, what do you do first?
There are a few primary marketing efforts that count as evergreen marketing—things like your brand name, tagline, logo, and brand colors, for example. These will generally always stay the same and will make you identifiable in a slew of competitors.
While some of these things may change slightly on occasion, such as tweaking your logo or updating your tagline, they generally stay close to your original concept.
Another example of evergreen marketing is one you may never notice about another brand: keywords. Certain staple keywords in your industry will always be a priority in your SEO efforts. It’s not in a brand’s best interest to invent a new keyword that nobody is searching for, so the same main words will remain top-of-mind for companies regardless of trends.
Finally, your products count toward your evergreen marketing strategy. While you may come out with new products of services down the line, what your audience will know you for will generally remain the same.
It’s why you might remember the outcry over IHOP’s temporary rebrand to “IHOb” from a few years ago. Customers aren’t always receptive to dramatic change—especially if it seems out of the blue.
Related: The Whole Package: Evergreen Campaigns Maximize Marketing
Stay Evergreen With the Right Leadership
Regardles of your industry, your brand needs to have timeless appeal to last—but you may be struggling to identify what makes your company evergreen.
This is where marketing leadership can help you shine. But if you don’t have the budget for a full-time CMO, allow us to introduce you to fractional marketing.
With a fractional CMO, you get all the benefits of a full-time leader—expertise, unbiased guidance, strategic marketing insights, and more—without the compensation and benefits package you would generally pay.
And unlike an outside agency or consultant, a fractional CMO becomes an integral part of your marketing team, helping you develop and execute a marketing strategy and pivoting when needed.
If you’re ready to become evergreen, schedule a free, no-obligation call with one of our fractional CMOs, and we’ll be in touch to help you make a plan.