Should Seasonal Content Be a Part of Your Strategy?

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Should Seasonal Content Be a Part of Your Strategy?

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Should Seasonal Content Be a Part of Your Strategy?

Content marketers tend to build their strategies around “evergreen” content; as the name suggests, this type of content is relevant indefinitely, year-round, without being tied to news, events, or seasons. This content is frequently viewed as inherently more valuable than seasonal content, because it stays relevant far longer, therefore yielding more value for the same level of effort.

However, seasonal content can have a place in your content marketing and social media strategy as well—you just need to know how to use it effectively.

Types of Seasonal Content

Let’s start by exploring the different types of seasonal content that exist:

• Responses to seasonal changes. This is literally “seasonal” content. The idea here is to write about topics that are only relevant during one season, such as covering the best home maintenance strategies to employ during fall months.
• Holiday-specific content. You can also write content that’s tied to a specific holiday, such as Christmas, Halloween, or Easter. These articles may only be relevant for one month out of the year, but they’ll be especially relevant during that time.
• Event coverage. If you cover an annual or recurring event on your blog, that could also be considered seasonal, since it may not be relevant during the rest of the year.

The Advantages of Seasonal Work

Evergreen content is advantageous because it stays relevant for a longer period of time, but seasonal content has advantages too:

• Less competition. While your competitors are scrambling to produce as much evergreen content as possible, they won’t be investing as much time or money into seasonal works. This could give you a key opening to capitalize on your shared audience.
• Higher relevance. Seasonal content doesn’t stay relevant for as long as evergreen content, but its peak relevance is much higher. As long as you’re in the right season or timeframe, your work stands to attract much more attention than an evergreen counterpart would.
• Cyclical traffic. Seasonal content doesn’t stop being effective once its core season is over—so long as there’s another season in the future, its value can be resuscitated.

Tips for Success

If you want to be successful with your seasonal content strategy, make sure you follow these important tips:

• Maintain high-quality Treat your seasonal content like you would any of your other evergreen articles—quality needs to be your top priority. You might get some quick relevance bonus points by covering a seasonal topic, but that won’t take you far unless you have some well-researched, well-written material to back it up.
• Understand your industry and niche. Understand your business’s role in your industry and niche. Not all businesses stand to benefit from seasonal content, so if there’s no natural fit for seasonal content in your organization, don’t try to force it. For example, a retail company could easily write a gift buying guide around Christmastime, but a gear manufacturing company might not find much value in targeting any specific season or holiday.
• Create content far in advance. Content marketing is a long-term strategy, so if you want to make the most of your seasonal content, you need to get it written and published far in advance of the season you want to cover. For example, if you want to write about how to prepare your home for winter, a December publication date would be far too late. A September or October publication date would be far more reasonable, which, depending on your editorial calendar, may necessitate you writing that content back in July or August.
• Target specific keywords. If you want to capitalize on an audience that craves seasonal content, you need to choose specific keywords that cater to that audience. For example, if you’re writing about how to throw a Halloween party, you can’t use a title like “How to Host an Incredible Party” and expect to get Halloween-centric attention for it. Something like “How to Host an Incredible Costume Party This Halloween” makes it instantly more relevant (and better optimized for search engines). The more specific you are here, the better.
• Reuse previous years’ content. Instead of focusing only on creating new seasonal content, take the time to revitalize and reuse last year’s. Create an archive of previously published seasonal content, and distribute it on social media in the weeks or months leading up to your target season. It will boost interest in your new content, and get more value from your old content.

Seasonal content isn’t right for every business or every industry, but it can be an effective tool for the companies that stand to benefit from it. Whether your goal is to undercut the competition or just take advantage of a popular holiday, as long as you’re using smart tactics and keeping your audience in mind, you should see a positive ROI.

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September 10, 2018 at 06:17AM