Evergreen Campaigns vs. Seasonal Campaigns: Which Should I Invest In?

In marketing, there are essentially two ways to categorize campaigns: evergreen or seasonal. Depending on the company goals and timelines for the marketing initiative, you can use an evergreen campaign or a seasonal campaign in your digital marketing strategy.

Continue reading to learn the difference between evergreen campaigns and seasonal campaigns—and find how you can utilize both to achieve your objectives.

What Are Digital Marketing Campaigns?

A digital marketing campaign uses online platforms and channels to engage with customers, increase brand awareness, and promote products or services. These campaigns are flexible and can be customized to meet specific company goals. Additionally, digital campaigns can often be fine-tuned based on real-time data and insights, making them exceptionally adaptable marketing strategies.

How Long Should Digital Campaigns Last?

Digital campaigns will vary in length of time depending on objectives. While some campaigns may last several months, factors such as marketing goals, seasonality, audience types, and the platforms in use may lengthen or shorten the campaign duration. Campaigns that have to do with relevant topics or a specific season or event may last for only a few days, weeks, or months—while “evergreen” campaigns could run for a much longer time period.

Advantages of Evergreen Campaigns

An evergreen campaign is a marketing initiative that maintains relevance without expiration. Organizations can continuously reuse the content within these campaigns to provide more flexible and consistent results. As a long-term marketing strategy, evergreen campaigns are typically an excellent option for companies to gain lasting benefits without recreating content. Evergreen campaigns provide several advantages:

Consistent Presence

One of the biggest benefits of using an evergreen campaign strategy is that it keeps your brand at top of mind. While more seasonal content is tied to time-specific restraints, evergreen campaigns maintain a continuous presence through various channels. According to HubSpot, the content used in these types of campaigns will typically last year to year, meaning the content will maintain a consistent presence on your platforms and channels. These types of campaigns also require fewer adjustments as trends change.

Steady ROI

Evergreen campaigns are not tied to the fluctuations commonly seen with seasonal demand; these kinds of marketing strategies offer a sustainable approach with a steadier return on investment (ROI). Evergreen campaigns typically contain content that retains freshness for longer periods of time. With steady traffic being directed to your website through an evergreen campaign, the ROI will consistently experience fewer peaks and valleys than that of a seasonal campaign.

Improved Data & Optimization

When a marketing campaign can run for a longer period, it’s able to collect data more efficiently and provide a better analysis of said data. While shorter, more relevance-based campaigns will also collect data, a longer run-time allows the campaign to capture more rounded and built-out information. This allows for better optimization and adjustments to be made to improve the campaign’s performance over time, while also providing data to influence shorter, more seasonal campaigns in the future.

Advantages of Seasonal Campaigns

Unlike evergreen campaigns, seasonal campaigns have to do more with time-sensitive or seasonal content. These marketing campaigns will typically last several days, weeks, or months. Seasonal campaigns will occasionally follow trends, holidays, or other events that are of high interest. Companies may look to include keywords that produce high search volumes in their strategies. Seasonal campaigns offer specific advantages compared to evergreen campaigns:

Focused Urgency

Since the nature of seasonal campaigns is often time-sensitive, customers may be motivated to act due to the fear of missing out, or FOMO, on these limited offerings. This creates a sense of urgency in customers which can help to drive sales of products or services during that time. Additionally, seasonal campaigns are typically geared towards a specific, niche audience, meaning the people who may engage in the campaign are more likely to act on the offering.

Tailored Relevance

While evergreen content can usually apply to any time period, seasonal campaigns are often aligned with a particular mood, need, or event within that time frame. This fosters a sense of relatability within the audience that points to their specific time-sensitive needs.

Regarding ranking, the niche nature of seasonal campaigns allows organizations to target long-tail keywords and increase the chances of a higher SEO ranking. With this, there’s typically less competition for seasonal campaign topics than with evergreen content, which often contains more generic topics that are harder to rank for.

Seasonal Spikes

In certain seasons, more topical content that relates to the current time may perform better than generic content. Events like back-to-school shopping, holidays, the weather, and so on may influence the kind of searches that customers are making. Organizations can take advantage of these seasonal spikes to create campaigns that target those time-sensitive topics. Where evergreen content is typically unable to speak to very specific subject matter like this, seasonal campaigns can take advantage of the temporary interest to serve a shorter, more targeted marketing strategy.

How Do You Choose?

Both evergreen campaigns and seasonal campaigns can be utilized to reach your company’s goals. However, they cannot always be used interchangeably; in some circumstances, more generalized content may better suit the current needs than time-specific content, and vice versa. Consider the following to decide which type of campaign would better align with your objectives.

Determine Your Goals

One of the most important factors in deciding between evergreen and seasonal campaigns has to do with your business’s goals. Once you pinpoint what you’re looking to get out of a marketing campaign, you can distinguish where your marketing efforts could be best spent. Common objectives include increased reach, more followers on social media, better website ranking, new email contacts, increased sales, and so on.

Consider Your Topic

Having a clear concept of the content you want to use in your campaign can guide your decision-making process in selecting the most suitable marketing strategy. For example, content that contains more generalized topics and does not fall into a specific time period can be implemented in an evergreen campaign strategy. More niche topics that focus on topical or time-sensitive content would be better applied to a seasonal campaign.

Identify Your Target Audience

Another important factor in deciding between evergreen campaigns and seasonal campaigns is your target audience. Identify who you want to reach in this marketing initiative, as well as which platforms that audience is typically active on. You should also consider the wants and needs of this audience that may coincide with your marketing campaign. Determine if your target audience’s current needs could be met in a specific time period, or if you could serve them year-round.

Use the Right Tools

The tools you use in your marketing strategy correlate directly with the type of campaign you select. A website page, blog post, YouTube video, and some types of social media content support evergreen marketing strategies, while temporary content like short-form social media videos, social media advertising, and others are better used with seasonal marketing strategies.

Invest in the Right Campaign

Evergreen campaigns and seasonal campaigns both have their place in an effective marketing strategy. Although it’s best practice to implement both types of campaigns in your marketing initiatives, certain topics, time frames, or marketing goals can influence the decision between the two for a given campaign.

At PHOS, we eliminate the guesswork in marketing and create a cohesive, results-driven marketing strategy that meets your business’s needs. If you need help creating and implementing effective marketing campaigns, reach out to our team at PHOS. We’re happy to help!