This is one of the most common questions we get asked, and the honest answer is more often than most businesses think, but probably not for the reasons you’d assume.
It’s not really about your content “getting old” in a stylistic sense, although that does happen. Hairstyles change, office layouts get renovated, that one team member left eighteen months ago and is still on your homepage. It’s more about relevance. Content that was shot to reflect where your business was two years ago often doesn’t reflect where it is now, and your audience can tell, even if they can’t articulate exactly what feels off.
As a rough guide, here’s how we talk clients through it:
Every 12 months, at minimum. Even if nothing dramatic has changed in your business, a year is long enough that your content starts to feel slightly dated, particularly on social. Platforms reward recency, and audiences respond to it too.
Any time something material changes. New premises, new service offering, rebrand, new key team members, a shift in who you’re actually targeting. Any of these is a trigger for a refresh, not a “we’ll get to it eventually.”
Around major campaigns or seasons. If you run seasonal offers, launches, or campaigns, that content has a shelf life measured in weeks, not years, and needs its own shoot cadence separate from your evergreen brand content.
The mistake we see most is businesses treating a shoot as a one-off milestone, something you do once, tick off, and revisit only when it feels embarrassingly out of date. That’s the expensive way to do it, because by the time something feels obviously stale, it’s usually been quietly underperforming for months.
The businesses who get the most value out of their content budget tend to think of it more like a subscription than a purchase, a smaller, more regular investment that keeps the library current, rather than a big spend every few years that’s already half out of date by the time it’s fully rolled out.
Practically, this doesn’t mean a full production every quarter. It can mean one solid shoot day a year supplying the bulk of your evergreen content, with smaller top-up sessions around anything that changes in between. That’s usually the sweet spot between staying current and staying sane on budget.