Unlocking the Power of Evergreen Content for Healthcare Companies

Content teams have so much on their plates, from creating the content to actually bringing leads to their website. What if there was a way to escape that content treadmill, which demands  publishing brand new content weekly just to keep traffic up? A way that compounds and generates even more engagement over time?

Evergreen content is just that; it’s content that stays relevant over time. Like an evergreen tree holding onto its leaves season in, season out, evergreen content holds audience engagement for months and years on end—for any brand.

Evergreen content is accessible and valuable for any industry, including healthcare and its various sectors. Recurring topics like back-to-school and flu season keep people coming back year after year to read educational content from companies they trust. Here’s how you can use evergreen content to build that brand authority for your business.

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Why does evergreen content matter?

Evergreen content is important because it continues to be relevant long after it’s originally posted. It’s material that isn’t tied to specific news events or short-lived trends (Pokémon Go or Ice Bucket Challenge, anyone?).

Evergreen content is “future-proofed” and versatile for scheduling, so you can plan confidently and with cushion for timely opportunities that spring up.

Evergreen content provides additional benefits for your content team:

  • Exponential impact over time. Optimizing and refreshing evergreen content ensures the heavy lifting has already been done, and only a fraction of the work is needed to maintain it over time.
  • Perfect pinch-hitter content. When your content calendar gets hijacked by last-minute topics, evergreen content can be slotted in later without a total rework.
  • Quicker SEO gains. Iterating and improving on past evergreen content sees quicker SEO gains than publishing new content. If a piece has been on the internet longer, refreshes and improvements on that information will register more quickly to search engines than net-new content (which can take as long as three months to begin ranking).

With an existing content archive, there are plenty of places to start with content ideation. Generating new ideas and identifying new opportunities for content can be time-consuming, but if you approach your existing archive with an opportunistic eye for evergreen topics, you’ll never be short on ideas. Some brands even refresh the same batch of evergreen content every six to 12 months!

What does evergreen content look like in healthcare?

Even in an industry prone to regular upheaval and development, there are plenty of topics that remain relatively constant year to year. Through this lens, healthcare is a unique industry in which evergreen content is readily available, just under the surface. Common examples include discussing the benefits of superfoods, side effects of certain medications, symptoms of diseases, and how exercise prevents heart disease.

Here are more healthcare-specific, evergreen content ideas:

  • Food: foods rich in certain vitamins and minerals, foods a bad fit with certain medications, diets that work with given health conditions.
  • Historical context: advancements in medicine, lessons from past epidemics, a chronology of the first instance of a condition.
  • Exercise or fitness: the importance of weight training, what motor skills to expect at a child’s different developmental stages, a list of stretches to rehab from an injury.
  • Symptoms and treatment of conditions: what you can treat at home and when you should consult your doctor, lesser-known symptoms of a given condition in certain demographics, how to support a loved one or yourself undergoing chemotherapy, medication information.

To create valuable educational content for any of these topics, consider your audiences and tailor your writing accordingly, from teens and parents to those suffering from chronic illness, etc.

Also, remember that evergreen content can be seasonal. Holidays, recognition days, seasonal health matters, weather, and back-to-school transitioning all present opportunities to repurpose evergreen content.

Repurposing extends the shelf-life of evergreen content even further. A good rule of thumb: have the mindset that you’re publishing information not just for today’s readers, but for your children’s children to read.

Four examples of inspirational evergreen content for healthcare

Jobson/WebMD

Jobson Medical Information provides healthcare content and marketing services worldwide. They were recently acquired by the healthcare giant WebMD, and together they share loads of valuable, evergreen content with readers.

In their archives are countless articles about what to expect with medical procedures, afflictions, and healthcare challenges, from pink eye to wisdom teeth removal for teenagers:

(Source: WebMD)

Banner Health

Banner Health, a nonprofit health system that operates across six states in the U.S., capitalizes on human interest content to entice potential patients. Their podcast Bedtime Stories uses storytelling from patients’ real experiences to inspire, intrigue, and tug at your heartstrings to further their brand identity. Evergreen content doesn’t have to be dry.

Many healthcare brands use similar approaches no matter the time of year—audiences are always interested in human stories in the form of videos, patient testimonials, or reviews.

(Source: Banner Health)

Healthline

Evergreen content can take various forms, as high-quality internet healthcare information provider Healthline demonstrates in an infographic.

It’s an age-old question: “What color should my pee be?” This image results in the “People also ask” section on Google, applicable today as it will be years from now:

(Source: Healthline)

Questex

Questex is an engagement platform with dozens of sub brands, including Fierce Healthcare, which provides education, insights, and forums on healthcare topics and consumerism. 

At first glance, some of their content may seem less than evergreen, especially that related to COVID-19. That said, because the pandemic has become such an evolving topic with wide-ranging implications, it makes sense to roll out “special reports” like the one below to continuously update their audience:

(Source: Fierce Healthcare)

Using clever titles—How COVID Changed Everything—makes the content applicable over time, as it highlights broad trends in healthcare and consumerism. As such, this webinar might be relevant to audiences in coming months and years, even though the “original” event happened in April 2021.

(Source: Fierce Life Sciences)

Get more value from evergreen content

Because of non-stop advances in medicine and the release of new studies, it can be a challenge to create and leverage “timeless” content for the healthcare industry.

However, using tools purpose-built to support every aspect of your content strategy, you can expedite a well-oiled, informed, and self-sufficient evergreen content program.

Parse.ly’s Evergreen Report can identify which content is continuing to accrue significant attention after publication launch. Eliminate the guesswork of which content performs and easily filter by the parameters influencing your goals.

(Source: Parse.ly’s Evergreen Report)

Schedule a demo to see how you can foster a robust evergreen strategy that delivers engaging content to your audiences year round.