Timely vs evergreen content: dividing your content budget

Timely and evergreen content both deserve a place in your finance content marketing mix. How much of each you create in a given budget period depends a lot on your business objectives and supporting content strategy. At The Dubs finance content marketing agency we propose four key considerations for striking the right balance between timely vs evergreen content.

Every financial brand needs evergreen content – a reliable, quality bank of information that never goes out of date. Whether it’s guides, webinars, tips or lists – you build them up over time to address the most common problems experienced by your audience.

As we highlighted in an earlier blog, there is great value in content that lives on and is perennially useful for educating your audience. When it’s optimised to answer the most-searched questions by individuals, you can create SEO value and boost your brand authority. You also attract backlinks.

As an example, LinkedIn’s The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn is still one of their most important touchpoints for lead generation, more than five years after it was first published.

By contrast, timely content – weekly market updates, latest statistics or responses to news alerts, can be used to capture attention and extend reach when shared and amplified over social channels. Reacting to trends, opinions and industry debates, or supporting your new products with topical resources can help drive traffic and leads in a small amount of time.

So how do you decide how much time and budget to devote to each? There is a rule of thumb that says most business blogs should have 80% of evergreen content and 20% of timely content, which is sensible. But you know what they say about rules… Here are four considerations to help you make a decision that will serve the specific needs of your business.

1. The objective of your content strategy

What are your key business and customer needs? What are the key objectives of your content marketing strategy? If you’re looking for new audiences for instance, then draw them in with content based on highly-trafficked seasonal events and topics, e.g., stock market movements or interest rate rises. Just make sure you give your content a point of difference from the inevitable deluge of content around the same topic.

If brand loyalty is a major goal, then a series of friendly, comprehensive guides or videos can win customers over from the earliest stages of their buying journey.

2. Your audience’s expertise

If most of your readers or viewers are already knowledgeable, e.g., if you’re dealing with institutional investors for instance, then timely content is probably going to be more relevant. Give them perspectives from your experts on trends or market performance.

Evergreen content generally is more suitable for communicating more basic, static principles for beginners.

3. Your budget

If your budget is limited, then putting more evergreen in the mix will help you punch above your weight. The great thing about timeless content is you can amplify one piece of content multiple times – over months or even years. There are always new people joining your audience for whom it will be fresh, and others who may have missed the original post.

It gives you a valid reason to push people to your website and gives your social media manager more meat to grind through their posting schedule.

One thing to bear in mind with evergreen content is that often the really timeless topics have been done to death by your competitors. It’s your job to come up with a spin that’s uniquely yours and fits with your brand strategy; and to update aspects of the content as they get out of date.

4. Your content team / your compliance team

If you have writers or experts inhouse who keep abreast of what’s happening in the world, and who can respond quickly to events or news with content that reflects your organisation’s unique perspective, then you’re in a position to ramp up topical content and get the benefits from that – engagement, credibility in your industry, even earned media. But only if your compliance and risk team are able to approve content quickly.

Ultimately you’ll get the best results from experimenting and measuring different content types. A clear content marketing strategy and an established hierarchy based around Hero, Hub and Help content are hugely important in guiding decisions like this.