What Is Evergreen Marketing?

I was researching some marketing strategies and thought, huh, need a definition for evergreen marketing, will just pop on the interwebs to grab one. Much to my surprise, this stable, solid marketing concept is not defined ANYWHERE on the internet!

Since we have to do it ourselves, let’s start with what evergreen is… according to Miraim Webster, evergreen is defined as, “retaining freshness or interest : perennial”. That is nice! So if you are doing something in an evergreen way, it will keep coming back again and again each year to help you.

Evergreen marketing is producing a basic marketing idea, plan or concept that will last beyond the next couple of hours, days or even years, perennially providing you with new sources of sales or prospects!

What Are Some Evergreen Marketing Concepts?

Great branding – so some years ago I had a client who had grown up on certain street in New York and had HUGE ties to that area. Thinking she would name her writing business, 38th Avenue or something along those lines seemed to make a whole lot of sense from an emotional standpoint. But what about as an ongoing business model? As small business owners, we do not have time (or huge marketing budgets) to get people to associate street names, personal names, etc. with a product (at least not if you want to come out of the gate running!)

Name your company or product something with the name of what you do in it to increase brand recognition immediately!

Your Logo – we all want to change up our logos after a time. Playing around with colors and fonts and pictures is FUN! But, what about all that time you have spent marketing your brand, colors, etc. All down the drain for the thrill of the new and shiney. UNLESS you logo was designed in Word or by a child, try to stick with it and focus on important things like making money and getting new clients!

Your Keywords – Now that you have what your brand looks and sounds like, you need to have a REALLY firm grasp of what your product offering are. If you are a hair salon, don't get cute and call it a hair studio, no one is looking for a hair studio, they are looking for hair cuts, or hair color, or hair salons in your town! Back in the day (like 10 years ago), it was popular to try and rank for HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of different keywords. There was SERIOUSLY less competition then and it made sense. Fast forward to today when there are a million social media sites, video, websites and blog sites competing for your prospects attention.

To me this is the biggest one! Don't listen to the hype that says SEO is dead or that the latest social media craze is going to kill google. PLEASE remember at the end of the day, the internet is a just a big database, indexing sites and properties by using words. Maybe in the future there will be something else, but for the foreseeable future, there is still a huge benefit to knowing the words that people use to search for your product or service.

So, that means that you need to pick 3 keywords and stick to those before branching out (I am talking about talking about nothing but those three words or phrases for 6 months to a year to get a firm foothold!) My three words are small business marketing, entrepreneur marketing and realtor marketing. I have been focusing on those for years and not surprisingly, rank highly for all three!

Your Products – Because I work with Entrepreneurs, I know the allure of shiney objects. Many of my coaching clients have ideas in a number of different industries for a wide range of different products. That does not work! You need to do some serious soul search and pick ONE BUSINESS to focus on, with a suite of 3 types of offerings or lead gen types and stick with that for at least 3-6 months. If you have a business that is rock solid and profitable and THEN want to branch out into a new product or service (ONE, not 17) then you can, doing the same 6-12 months to master that, and so on and so on.

Let me give you a real world example. One of my clients owns a retail store selling, say shoes (names and industries are changed to protect the super nice!). So she hires us to market her retail store, BUT unknown to us, her heart is REALLY in gelly gloves, a direct sales product produced by ACME, Inc. Unsurprisingly, her retail store sells more of these gelly gloves than actual stock. Each time a client comes in, she does at least acknowledge that they may be looking for footware, but then starts going to about the benefits of a gelly glove, forgetting that her main goal is to sell shoes.

It is this fracturing of your product and service offerings that can kill a company. To my way of thinking, she should stop selling the gloves in her store OR stop having a store and focus on selling gellys as the two are similar but definitely do not match!

What Evergreen Marketing Is NOT!

Evergreen marketing is not Pinterest or Facebook, having a blog or a website, the latest mailing or postcard, your shopping cart, an email campaign or anything else that is a changeable, uncontrollable aspect of your marketing. I PROMISE you, having 10,000 connections on LinkedIn or a gagillion followers on Twitter, doesn't mean a thing if you don't have a rock solid product line, solid lead generation tools and a followup system that gets you new customers.

Evergreen marketing is not online or offline. It is not having a yellow page ad or a google local listing. It is a sincere focus on your brand, and how you intend to present that brand, product or service to the world. If you are not TOTALLY SURE about all of your brand…make sure to find a coach or expert (I know a great one!) to help you get that focus and clarity!

The Definition of Evergreen Marketing

So if you made it down here and are doing a term paper or other thing that needs to have actual definition, here is my take…

Evergreen marketing is implementing the marketing concepts and practices that transcend the latest fad and providing long lasting, duplicatable expertise which will work across a variety of marketing platforms and mediums.