The term “evergreen content” has been around for a while. It’s a content strategy designed to create content that retains relevance over time, enriching your digital marketing channels with lasting value.
But what about the stories you tell about your brand? In case you haven’t caught on, brand narratives are the modern-day equivalent of what Walkmans did for personal space in the 90s: They encourage consumer buy-in.
Customers love a good journey, and evergreen stories play a role in creating high-impact, enduring material for brand storytelling, identity and marketing assets that you can use time and time again. Today, let’s unpack an evergreen story and how you can create one to enhance your brand image.
What Is an Evergreen Story?
An evergreen story is a narrative that stays relevant, valuable and engaging long after you release it into the world. Think human-centric journeys that resonate with audiences by speaking to connection, innovation, growth or trials overcome.
Content marketing always sets out to achieve a goal. Sometimes, that goal is to keep up with viral trends or react to breaking news, which you can achieve with timely content and stories. Other times, the goal is brand awareness, building trust or providing long-term, repurposable value, which is where evergreen content and stories come into play. Let’s break down the difference.
Timely vs. Evergreen Content
Like an evergreen tree that doesn’t lose its leaves, evergreen content is designed to stay current and drive value over time. It consistently attracts traffic, answers ongoing questions and builds authority for your brand long after it’s published.
Common evergreen content examples are:
- How-to guides.
- Industry terminology explainers.
- Beginner’s guides and best practices.
- Checklists and templates.
On the other hand, timely content focuses on current events, a trend or time-sensitive topics. It captures engagement in the moment and capitalizes on what your audience is searching for today.
Common types of timely content are:
- An industry news story.
- Product launches or announcements.
- Seasonal content (think end-of-financial-year or holidays).
- Social media trends and memes.
Subscribe to
The Content Marketer
Get weekly insights, advice and opinions about all things digital marketing.
Thanks for subscribing! Keep an eye out for a Welcome email from us shortly. If you don’t see it come through, check your spam folder and mark the email as “not spam.”
Brand Content vs. Brand Stories: What’s the Difference?
Where content is part of a digital strategy designed to inform, engage or convert, your brand story inspires connection and emotional buy-in. So, if you release an article about your new app features for 2025, that will be timely content. If you write about how your engineers designed a platform to solve a problem nobody else would, that makes up an evergreen brand story.
Bottom line: Brand content says what you do, brand stories show why it matters.
How To Write an Evergreen Story
1. Scour Your Origin for Meaning
Start with the why behind your brand’s conception. Was it frustration with the current market? Innovation? Life changes? The seed of a great story stems from a mindset rather than a business model. Think Jobs and Wozniak in the garage rather than the iPhone — this helps you capture the emotion and purpose that started the journey.
Pro tip: Try to anchor your story in a human problem or experience that still exists today.
2. Distill Your Mission Into a Human Truth
Strip your brand’s mission down to the core. Build it into something tangible that people can feel — often, the emotive appeal slots somewhere in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Do you empower businesses with automation software, or do you help people find more time in their days to do meaningful work? Your mission should provide some fundamental human relief to improve the lives of others.
Pro tip: If it’s not accurate or relevant in five years, it’s not evergreen enough.
3. Show, Don’t Tell
Bring stories that reflect your values and outcomes to the forefront. These provide the social proof that your brand delivers. Pick the ones that speak to your ideal customer and show transformation — but choose them wisely (more on this below).
Think of it like this: Joan of Arc (granted, she was a woman, not a brand, and she wasn’t acting commercially) is a known symbol of freedom and independence. When we speak of her, we discuss how she transcended humble beginnings to lead a momentous French Army victory during the Hundred Years’ War. We don’t, however, state that she was “ballsy” and leave the rest to guesswork.
4. Define Your Brand Archetype
Who are you? No, really. Who are you? The rebel, the sage, the caregiver — take your pick. Knowing your archetype directs how you tell your story, including the tone and your visuals. Harley-Davidson is the outlaw. LEGO is the creator. Dove is the nurturer. Lean into your archetype every time you speak.
Pro tip: Don’t dilute your brand to please everyone. Own your voice.
5. Make Your Values Actionable
Values stick when they show up in proactivity. Pick three to five core values and connect them to human behavior. For instance, anyone who knows IKEA knows it’s committed to the everyman’s DIY journey. When values are part of your brand culture, they become believable in your story.
Pro tip: Stories of living out your values make the best evergreen content, especially during success or crisis.
6. Create a Brand Story Playbook
Now’s the time to bring it all home. Build a document that outlines your origin, mission, archetype, values and customer-story templates. Use it to brief stakeholders to keep the story and values consistent. That way, when your brand story shows up in your content, you’ve got a stable, enduring truth to refer back to each time.
7. Build Content Around Your Evergreen Story
You have two options here: Make valuable content around your brand story to enhance identity and positioning, or weave your story into content already in the pipeline for awareness and authority.
Technically, you can integrate your message into both evergreen and timely content production. For instance, industry news articles, a case study or a thought leadership blog post can reflect your brand’s story just as well as promotional content on social media.
8. Track and Update Your Evergreen Story
Evergreen stories provide value over the long term. And the only way to achieve this is by tracking, analyzing and repurposing content over time. Here are a few ways to accomplish this:
- A/B test different delivery methods.
- Track search intent and alignment.
- Refresh content, including links and milestones, regularly.
- Track audience engagement with heatmaps.
Evergreen stories focus on brand recognition and identity, which can impact — but is not necessarily directly linked to — metrics like conversions. To gauge impact, measure brand sentiment, mentions and backlinks.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Evergreen Story Examples
Mission and Vision: Nike
Nike’s marketing success is no secret. As a brand long celebrated for the empowerment and self-belief it inspires among its audience, there’s no better evergreen story to dig into than its 37-year-running “Just Do It” campaign. The message encourages its audience to take action, overcome obstacles and pursue their goals. Few people on the planet — athletes or otherwise — couldn’t relate to this flavor of human-centric messaging.
Following a revenue decrease between 1983 and 1988, Nike launched this campaign to rejuvenate sales. In the subsequent 10 years, sales increased by 1000% and shares grew by 26%. The campaign’s deep emotional appeal, adaptability and consumer focus make it a goal post for brands looking to forge identity (and commercial success) through their evergreen stories.
Values: Apple
Apple values simplicity, user experience and innovation. Its origin story builds a vision of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering away in a garage, slowly birthing the PC revolution. While Apple’s origin is a story in itself, the deep and ongoing brand alignment with the values embedded in its inception differentiates the company, even today.
In 1997, following a 12-year hiatus, Jobs returned to Apple and later launched the Apple iPod in 2001. The product’s first commercial shows a guy using the iPod and saying, “iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket” — simplicity, innovation and user-focused design at its finest.
In 2007, the company released the first iPhone, featuring a touch-sensitive keyboard, internet connectivity and iPod capabilities in one package. This influenced a revenue spike from $37.4 billion in 2008 to $65 billion in 2010. Moreover, the iPhone is arguably the most valuable consumer product on the market. Apple is a stellar example of how values can feed into product, marketing and consumer touchpoints. People are not just buying Apple’s products — they’re buying into the story.
Case Studies and Customer Success Stories: Subway
Remember Jared, the Subway guy? He first appeared in the ads, showcasing how he’d lost nearly 250 pounds after consuming Subway, a fresher alternative in the fast food space, for a year. Subway demonstrated the results their product can achieve, and the 15-year campaign boosted sales by an estimated 20% shortly after the campaign began. Up to this point, this is a great example of an evergreen story from a marketing perspective.
However, that’s not where the story ends. Jared was later convicted of serious felonies. While the crimes weren’t connected to Subway’s brand, his position as a spokesperson for advertising campaigns intrinsically links him to the brand in the eyes of many consumers.
Ultimately, the lesson here is that customer success stories can lead to positive results in your marketing strategy. But when working with another person, you are putting your reputation, at least partially, in their hands. It does pay to have a contingency strategy to protect your brand in worst-case scenarios.
Showcasing Products: Toyota
Want your brand story to become a cultural phenomenon? Let’s head over to New Zealand and meet the country’s most complained-about ad of all time. Toyota released an advert featuring expletive local vernacular to showcase the Hiluxs’ performance in the backcountry: “Bugger.”
While this was controversial at the time of its 1999 release (hence the monumental 120 complaints submitted nationwide to the Advertising Standards Authority), the work it did for the Hilux’s local identity is second to none.
In spite of the backfire, Toyota’s understanding of its local audience’s “low-intelligence, foul-mouthed” humor, according to sources, crowned this ad as an icon in Kiwi pop culture references. Here, we see how Toyota stitched a line of its local story into the heart of a culture — timeless content that still resonates at barbecues and beyond, 26 years on.
Start Crafting Your Evergreen Story
Evergreen stories anchor your brand to what’s real. They give your audience something relatable through which they can connect with your brand; something to care about now and decades into the future.
Begin with the human truths, tell stories that matter and back them up with action. Do this well, and you’ll have something far more valuable than viral content: You’ll have staying power.