Evergreen Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Brand

Your Guide to Content Marketing For Small Businesses

Introduction to Organic Marketing: Understanding the Basics and Importance

Ever wonder why marketing seems opaque and overwhelming to a small business owner? Passion-driven career paths are typically a result of your natural abilities and creative vision expressed through what you create. 

It’s emotional and deeply personal, which leaves many artistic types at a loss for words when thinking about what to write about to connect with their audience on topics that matter. Add the extra pressure of sales, and you have a recipe for overwhelm that gridlocks many makers in their marketing efforts. 

Not only that, but evergreen marketing strategies seem complicated and technically scary, especially without formal training. Chasing social media trends with promises of quick success or throwing money at the problem with ads seems more approachable and easier.

While a viral post or ad spend can give you momentary spikes in traffic, the lasting effects to benefit your business are fleeting at best. 

This guide is designed to simplify organic marketing tools like SEO and content marketing for long-term brand building and sustainable growth for your small business. Read on to unlock the potential of search and discovery platforms, customer journey mapping, blogging, and beyond to ensure your brand captures and sustains attention.

Walk away with a better understanding of implementing enduring organic strategies by leveraging methods for mapping out your customer’s journey to create legacy content that resonates with your audience for years to come. Done right, these ensure a seamless and engaging experience for your website visitors, increasing conversions and optimizing your online presence to rank higher on search engines. 

a graph the typical trend line showcasing the lifecycle of evergreen content versus trend-based content.

What Is Evergreen Marketing?

Before we dive into the specifics of how organic marketing strategies work for small business owners and creatives, it’s important to understand some of the jargon and why they matter.

Organic Marketing and Evergreen Content: 

What it is - Marketing efforts that attract your dream customers over time without the expense of costly ads. 

Why it matters - The SEO-optimized content assets you create on your website become permanent traffic sources because your content stays relevant and consistently provides value, unlike paid advertising, which stops generating traffic when you stop paying. 

Content Marketing Funnels:

What it is - The marketing funnel model helps you understand the process of converting a prospect into a customer and optimizes the post-purchase experience. 

Why it matters - Content marketing funnels lead to improved customer conversion and retention by understanding the full customer life cycle through journey mapping to ensure your content aligns with their desires at every stage. The automated nature of this process provides a consistent source of new leads and repeat sales that is more hands-off without constant promotion.

Visual examples of evergreen content pieces that have successfully driven engagement and sales for jewelry brands.

Businesses who have a Content Marketing Strategy 49% see an increase in their rankings

Customer Journey Mapping:

What it is - Creating a visual representation of a customer's psychological process to prepare for and commit to a purchase, from initial awareness to post-purchase.

Why it matters - Customer journey mapping allows you to understand different customer personas and craft more personalized, relevant experiences at each stage of their journey. Understanding the questions, concerns or challenges of potential customers when considering options is essential for creating targeted marketing messaging and driving improved conversions. 

A graph showing the impact of optimized content marketing with lower costs while delivering three times the number of leads

Content marketing costs 62% less while delivering 3 times the number of actual leads

A chart highlighting the correlation between evergreen content and website traffic growth over time.

47.8% of all web traffic comes from organic search

  • 10.2% comes from paid search

  • 8.8% comes from organic social

  • 7.7% comes from paid social

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

What it is - The practice of improving a website’s ability to increase its visibility for people searching for information on products or services related to the business in search engines.

Why it matters - Optimizing content for search engines helps improve organic rankings and visibility, allowing potential customers to discover your brand when searching for relevant topics related to your products or services. This increased discoverability can drive more qualified traffic to your website over time.

Content Marketing:

What it is - A marketing strategy focused on creating valuable, relevant, and customer-focused content to attract your dream customers. 

Why it matters - When done right, organic strategies like content marketing drive more qualified leads because they provide valuable information that directly addresses the interests and desires of your target audience to guide them through the buying process gently. Compare that to interruption-based advertising, which forgoes building a relationship with your audience before asking for the sale.

A meter showing an increase in engagement to illustrate the effectiveness of content marketing for jewelry brands.

Businesses who have a Content Marketing Strategy 53% see an increase in engagement

Search and Discovery Platforms: 

What it is - Online platforms where users can search for and discover content, products, or services. Examples include Google, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Why it matters - Platforms like Pinterest, Google, and YouTube act as gateways for new audiences to discover your products or services, especially at the awareness stage when your ideal customer is researching to gather ideas, inspiration, or information to accomplish a goal or desire. Publishing on these platforms allows you to leverage the evergreen nature of search and discovery so your content can be discovered for years after posting.


Case Study

Eliza Page Engagement Ring Marketing Messaging Case Study

Client website with a successful full funnel marketing plan implemented

What Makes Marketing For Jewelers and Creatives So Difficult?

There are three main reasons why thinking about marketing is difficult for creative small businesses.

  1. Your art is central to your brand. You didn’t start your business to solve a pain point. You started it to express your gifts and skills.

  2. Your work comes from your emotions, so your customer's needs don't drive your concern. You aren’t responding to market demand for certain types of products or solutions.

  3. If your emotions and desires overlap with your customers, this can result in a happy accident of a few sales, but it's not typically a result of strategic product development.

Creatives start businesses based on passions, not pain points. Passions, it turns out, are much harder to pin down, which makes it more challenging to measure success. With Pain points, there’s a measurable result from the solution your business provides.

But what many miss is pain points don’t have to be painful. This marketing lingo is a catch-all for unfulfilled emotional triggers covering the entire human experience spectrum.

A wheel of emotional touchpoints with the human experience: Identifying and optimizing key touchpoints to enhance the customer experience and drive conversions.
Examples of unfulfilled emotional triggers to personalize marketing campaigns based on different emotions to directly address in marketing messaging to increase customer engagement and increase conversions

Once you shift your perspective to understand that what you create does address many touch points along the spectrum of the human experience, it becomes easier to think about your marketing. Everybody wants to be a unicorn in some area of life, whether it’s feeling confident on a first date, running a marathon, or feeling unforgettably beautiful on your wedding day.

Appeal to this with your customers, and you’re on your way to effective marketing. Once you align your messaging with the desires, wants, challenges, ambitions, and needs that drive these pursuits, it becomes much easier for your marketing to resonate with your target audience.

A common reference to illustrate this concept more clearly is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid with examples for each level

If you’re unfamiliar with Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs, it can be a powerful framework for developing effective content marketing strategies. Here are some key ways it factors into your creative small business marketing:

  1. Identifying audience needs and motivations: Understanding where your target audience falls on Maslow's hierarchy helps you create content that resonates with their current needs and motivations. For example, makers and artists address emotional triggers that typically fall under self-actualization or esteem.

  2. Tailoring messaging and tone: The level of needs you're addressing should inform the tone and framing of your content. You wouldn’t talk about your art in the same manner as a home security company. You would use more aspirational and inspirational messaging to emotionally connect with your dream customers. 

  3. Choosing relevant topics: The hierarchy provides guidance on what types of topics and themes will be most appropriate to your audience. As a creative business owner, you would probably steer away from practical content and focus more on inspirational topics. 

4. Creating emotional connections: Understanding the psychological desires of your audience allows you to craft content to form deeper emotional connections by speaking to their core motivations. Items like jewelry will never be the tipping point to your survival but the feeling of belonging everytime you notice your wedding ring can change your world.

5. Measuring content effectiveness: The hierarchy provides a framework for assessing how well your content is meeting your audience’s needs, wants, or desires to motivate them to take the desired actions and move them closer to purchase.

6. Evolving your strategy: As your audience's needs, wants, and desires change over time, Maslow's hierarchy can guide how you adapt your content marketing messaging approach to ensure it continues to resonate and inspire.

So there you have it, a useful framework to get super-targeted in your marketing messaging that perfectly aligns with the deepest desires of your ideal customers. When you understand what motivates people, you have a better chance to connect with them in a way that is authentic for better relationship-building and marketing results.

What you create will fulfill one or more of Maslow's human desires.

Identifying which ones will help you communicate what you create in a way that will help your ideal customers make a purchase decision.

A visualization of a yarn chart with vocational representation of creative fields and how they relate to one or more of Maslow's human desires

Benefits Of Creating A Product-Based Retail Customer Journey Map

Customer journey mapping is the secret sauce to removing overthinking when it comes to your organic content marketing. It simplifies the process of creating highly targeted, relevant content that aligns with their audience's concerns at each stage of the buying process. Here are some key ways journey mapping factors into organic content marketing:

1. Identifying content gaps and opportunities: By mapping out the customer journey, you’ll see more clearly opportunities for content topics you haven’t thought about to assist your ideal customers in achieving their goals specific to each stage of their journey.

2. Aligning content with search intent: Understanding what concerns are relevant to your customers at each stage of their journey helps you create content that matches their search intent, improving SEO performance and organic visibility.

3. Informing content formats and topics: Journey mapping reveals what types of content and topics are most helpful and valuable to customers at different stages to take the overwhelm out of your content creation efforts.

4. Optimizing for conversion: Mapping the journey allows small business owners to strategically guide users closer to purchase with calls-to-action, linking to valuable resources, or providing the next logical step with more thoughtful content.

A visual content customer journey template, helping jewelry designers plan and organize their content strategy.

8. Informing content distribution: Knowing where customers are looking for information at each stage helps determine the best channels and platforms, like Pinterest, for content distribution.

9. Measuring your content’s impact: Journey maps provide a framework for tracking how effective your content efforts are at turning clicks into a commitment to see where your content can be optimized for better conversions.

10. Creating a cohesive content strategy: Rather than posting ad-hoc content without reason, journey mapping allows for a more strategic, integrated approach to organic content marking.

The benefits of customer journey mapping are clear. Performing this exercise for your small business not only puts your customers in a starring role in your organic marketing efforts but actively engages them with helpful content that utterly convinces them your brand is the best option for them.

A detailed chart outlining the different stages of the customer journey to inform custom content creation for increased conversions

5. Improving user experience: Journey maps highlight a clear path in addressing your customer's concerns throughout the process of justifying a purchase. These opportunities make it easy for your potential clients to find what they need quickly and efficiently, which can boost engagement metrics and SEO performance.

6. Personalizing content: Understanding different customer personas and what motivates them enables you to create more personalized content and messaging. For example, if you have stock lists, your wholesale customers would be looking for different information than someone looking to buy a gift. 

7. Developing content clusters: Journey mapping helps identify related topics and themes to build a thorough ecosystem of content clusters that keeps your customers engaged and boosts organic search visibility

Examples of engaging content from successful jewelry brands who implement a customer journey approach when crafting their content bubbles of related content topics

Related Resource

Ready to be actionable? Empower your business with content that turns visits into value with every click

A visual customer journey and content workbook, helping jewelry designers plan and organize their content strategy.

The Best Search and Discovery Platform For Visual Creative Small Businesses

The biggest takeaway from organic marketing is setting up a permanent evergreen pipeline directly on your website that consistently generates new traffic to foster a better connection with your audience and improved visibility on search engines. 

But why stop there? Now that you have tailored content that meets your audience right where they are, why not amplify your messaging on platforms great at connecting your target audience with your solutions? 

In fact, this is the proper way to think about your marketing distribution. Your best content should live on your website, which is your property and not owned by big businesses. The best part, however, is once you have created valuable content, you can easily repurpose it for other platforms to scale your reach and increase your traffic referrals, not just from search engines but from platforms with users actively searching for inspiration and ideas to pursue a new idea.

Pinterest acts as a visual search engine, allowing users to discover your content by searching for topics related to the products and services you offer. Unlike social media platforms, where content sinks to the bottom of feeds like a cement block, pins on Pinterest have a much longer lifespan. They can continue driving traffic months or even years after posting. This means that, like the content on your website, it stays discoverable for years. Talk about a win-win.

Getting inside your ideal customer's head to create custom content that converts means you'll have a huge advantage over your competitors who skip these steps. Remember, the internet is getting crowded, and customers go through a journey or process to make a buying decision.

This is especially true for users on Pinterest, who typically begin in the awareness phase of the buying process by searching for specific ideas for inspiration. Returning to their boards containing their saved Pins to refine their ideas into plans moves them into the consideration phase. From here, the magic happens when Pinners begin to make purchasing decisions by clicking through to your site to read a blog post or check out a product page.

Examples of successful pins from jewelry brands, highlighting what makes them effective.

Still don’t believe me?

The proof is in the data, and the date doesn’t lie. These are results when I understood the tremendous benefits of content marketing, specifically when it relates to the mindset of a Pinterest user. Knowing Pinterest is perfectly primed to expand your reach with your existing content; it seems silly not to double-dip with its traffic referrals in addition to search engines.

Ready to tap into the advantages of Pinterest?

High Purchase Intent 

Your audience is hanging out on Pinterest, with 70% of users searching for jewelry and accessories and 83% of weekly users making purchases based on content they saw on Pinterest.

SEO Benefits

Pinterest acts more like a search engine than a social platform, offering significant SEO opportunities. Google frequently places Pinterest pages at the top of search results, including in SERP features and image search results.

A flowchart to illustrate how your content is distributed across the channels of your brand to maximize the effectiveness of organic marketing

These are two examples of top-performing Pins I published on Pinterest. The one on the left is to promote a blog post that offers a solution to a commonly searched problem. The right one is promoting a product.

Because Pinterest is a search and discovery platform with 97% of searches being unbranded, the majority of users are not likely to be familiar with your brand when they first encounter it.

It's much easier to address how you can instantly improve a user's life than it is to ask them to spend money on an unfamiliar brand.

Offering value first to build a relationship will always be the most effective strategy for conversions.

Many product marketers fall into the trap of “selling the product, not the experience.” No one wants your product. No one wants any product. They want a solution to their problem. They want to feel relieved. Excited. Confident. Secure. Safe.

Sound familiar?

A flowchart showing the results of repurposing content on Pinterest and the success metrics that resulted directly impacting website conversions

Visual Discovery

As a visual discovery engine, brands effectively reach new audiences through compelling imagery, with 77% of users discovering a new brand while browsing Pinterest. The platform's visual search capabilities uniquely suit the visual marketing efforts of small businesses. 

Long-Term Growth

Unlike paid advertising, which stops delivering results when you stop paying, organic Pinterest marketing can create permanent traffic sources for your website over time. Consistently pinning will build a sustainable channel for attracting qualified visitors to your site.

Cost-Effective 

Organic Pinterest marketing is affordable for businesses with limited resources. You can achieve meaningful results by creating strategic content on your website and repurposing it without costly ads.

By following these steps and using Pinterest strategically, you can create a sustainable and effective marketing channel in addition to your evergreen content funnels on your website for your product-based business. Pinterest’s long-term potential for driving traffic and sales makes it an invaluable tool for any business looking to grow online. Happy pinning!

An expert coach explaining funnel marketing strategy services to a group of small business owners.

Ready to convert your traffic?

Discover how targeted content can help you build meaningful customer connections and lasting growth for your small business.

  •  A content funnel ensures each visitor receives relevant information at every stage, creating a personalized experience that’s more likely to result in a sale.

  • My on-page SEO strategies improve your search visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find your business.

  •  We’ll audit and refine existing content, then integrate it into a seamless customer journey to maximize its effectiveness.

  • The quiz captures valuable insights, segmenting your audience and allowing us to target specific content that speaks directly to their interests and needs.

  • Yes, each package can be tailored to your unique needs. We’re happy to discuss additional customization options. I also offer any service a la carte, including customer journey mapping, individual content campaigns as well as a holistic end-to-end marketing strategy.


plant illustrating growth from implementing funnel marketing strategies for small business expansion.

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