13 Content Marketing Trends for 2023
Keeping an eye out for content marketing trends can give you an inside advantage to the best practices you should implement to keep your brand top of mind. In this post, we discuss some content marketing trends that will dominate 2023 and shape the future of marketing.
Why Your Business Needs Content Marketing in 2023
If your business isn’t already using content marketing. It’s time. Content marketing will never go out of style for multiple reasons. Below are just some of them.
Lead Nurturing and Generation
Valuable content helps you guide your existing and potential audience through their struggles without asking for anything in return. Almost 80% of brands use content to generate and nurture leads.
If you provide helpful content long enough, your audience will grow fond of your content and want to stay connected with your business. When the time is right, they will be more willing to exchange their money for your products and services.
Creates a Sense of Community Around Your Brand
Everyone is looking for people with similar goals and problems. Content marketing is one way to connect people with their peers.
As they interact and exchange information that benefits one another, it helps create emotional attachments between customers and your brand (brand affinity).
Your business will be at the center of it all, creating and building connections between community members to increase sales and customer retention.
Connects and Converts Customers
Authenticity is a primary ingredient in content marketing. The more you engage with your audience, the more your personality, value system, and approach to customers’ challenges will shine through. These aspects of your business will help you connect with (and convert) customers that share your perspective.
Builds Trust
Every content asset you create reinforces your knowledge of customers’ goals and pain points. Your proposed solutions will demonstrate how knowledgeable you are, all of which helps you establish credibility and trust in your industry.
Develops Relationships
Every relationship comes down to the exchange of values and trust. Few things are more valuable to customers than a brand that consistently helps them solve their problems.
Content marketing helps you develop relationships with customers, keeps them coming back, and turns them into advocates for your brand.
Cultivates Brand Awareness
Consumers are quick to pass quality content around online. This sharing increases awareness of your brand. Plus, the distribution strategies you use will help you reach new audiences and expand your brand reach over time.
And because you’re addressing the real problems people face — not trying to sell your audience on something — they’ll be more open to what you have to say.
Improves SEO
Search visibility is a major content marketing play. By creating and optimizing valuable content for customers and search engines, your content will appear in favorable positions when your ideal customers search for keywords related to your business.
The Importance of Keeping Up with Content Marketing Trends
Content marketing trends aren’t just something to discuss as a new year rolls around. They’re worthy of understanding, studying, and applying. Here are some reasons to keep up with content marketing trends.
Helps You to Stay Ahead of the Competition
The reality is your products or services are probably not so utterly different from your competitors. How you run your business and market your products sets you apart. Jumping on the right content marketing trend will help you seize your audience’s attention.
Keeps Your Content Focused in the Right Direction
Your customers change too. That’s why and how trends develop. Understanding your customers’ changing consumption patterns will help you create content specific to their needs and deliver content accordingly.
Provides Opportunities for Your Brand
Keeping up with content marketing trends also opens you up to changing customer demands and behavior. It can force you to find new ways to continue to meet your audience’s demands. Implementing new processes also can spark ideas that may move you ahead of the curve or make you a trendsetter.
Produces Relatable Content
You shouldn’t make long-form videos your bread and butter if Instagram reels are the most popular content for your target market. Reviewing and considering trends helps you produce content in the format that best serves your audience and gets you the most attention.
Content Marketing Trends You Need to Know in 2023
Now that you understand why you should keep up with the trends and how they can potentially help your business, let’s look at what we expect in 2023.
1. Short-Form Video
Video isn’t going away anytime soon. Video in slightly different formats seems to make this list every year. Videos have always commanded more attention than any other content format. But short-form content is currently hitting the right notes, so it’s not surprising that social media platforms like TikTok have risen to fill this niche.
2 reasons short-from videos will trend in 2023:
- Shrinking Attention Spans. Attention span now stands at a lowly 8 seconds.
- Engagement. Videos are more engaging, thanks to their visual cues and incentive for participation.
Short-form videos enable brands to deliver a straight-to-the-point version of larger content assets. And thanks to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, creating and consuming this type of content is easier than ever before.
Tips to make your videos more evocative in 2023:
- Focus on Visuals. The visual nature of video is its appeal. Center on it right from the beginning. Make the first few seconds count with visual appeal.
- Optimize. Just like with everything else you do in marketing, you need people to see your video. Optimize it for relevant distribution channels.
- Add Music. Use background music to make it lively.
- Make It Accessible. Many people watch videos with the sound off. Add subtitles to make your video accessible to everyone.
2. Strategic SEO
Search algorithms will continue to evolve in 2023. Your search visibility will depend on a strategic plan to get your content as high on the search engine results page (SERP) as possible.
Do you remember when having a sheer volume of content was enough to rank high on Google? Google’s emphasis is currently on Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT).
Your best bet in 2023 is to find ways to satisfy user intent and search requirements on an ongoing basis, which comes down to on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
Want to learn more about SEO? Read our posts on SEO Content Marketing that Works and Simple SEO Solutions to Propel Your Site Traffic.
3. Voice Search Tactics for SEO
Voice search has been around for over a decade, but customers are beginning to embrace its ease of use in new ways. By allowing customers to speak into their smartphones to find information online, searchers can bypass the struggle of typing or spelling words correctly.
That’s why no fewer than 40% of internet users in the U.S. rely on voice search for question-and-answer type searches, like locating the nearest car dealerships, restaurants, etc. That’s also why Alexa or Siri now comes pre-installed on most smartphones.
If your content isn’t optimized for voice search in 2023, your website will not appear when people voice-search relevant keywords.
To integrate voice search into your 2023 content strategy:
- Use Local SEO Tactics. Optimize for local SEO. Voice search is most accurate with local searches.
- Think About Questions. Think about how people ask questions. Focus on question type and long-tail keywords. They are easier to find with voice search.
- Use Snippets. Leverage Google featured snippets so voice searchers can find your website through short but exhaustive answers.
- Focus on Speed. Optimize your website for speed to improve your website’s user experience.
- Optimize for Mobile. Most voice searches come from mobile devices.
4. Humanizing the Content Experience
Customers have massive content choices, so the emphasis on user experience will be more significant in 2023.
Consumers process their interactions with your brand in more micro-interactions than you think. So, personalizing their content experience across all marketing channels will help you harmonize their experience throughout their interactions with your brand.
Analyze your customers’ thought patterns and behaviors. How do they receive, feel, and respond to your content? Use this information to shape their content experience.
Customer journey maps help to improve content experiences throughout the buyer’s journey, but creating all these interactions can get overwhelming. The Content Journey team can help map your customer journey and give you everything you need to keep them hooked to your brand all year round.
5. Visual Content
A picture is still worth a thousand words, and people continue to focus on visual content. Visual content is effective for customer education, with about 65% of consumers admitting to learning better with photos and graphics.
Videos, infographics, charts, images, etc., can communicate multiple ideas to make complex ideas understandable. That’s why consumers are 37% more likely to engage with visuals than other content types.
Add visual content to your 2023 content strategy to offer consumers a more immersive experience.
6. Storytelling
The facts are clear. The concept that stories sell is as correct in 2023 as it was in 2003. When you consider how marketers bore people with facts, figures, and statistics, you’ll understand why the businesses that emotionalize the data with stories build better connections and increase sales.
One way to leverage stories in 2023 is the good old user-generated content (UGC). This strategy allows you to amplify customers’ success stories with your brand.
By documenting their struggles before using your products or services and your role in their resolution, you’re showing — not telling — your potential customers how they stand to benefit from your brand.
In 2023, use storytelling to sell your products. If that will be a problem, consider hiring a content marketing agency like Content Journey to help you leverage the power of words, story angles, and distribution systems to shape your narrative and brand perception.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence took a leap with the launch of ChatGPT toward the end of 2022. Now armed with Natural Language Proficiency, AI can help with audio, video, and written content creation and distribution.
Even though it lacks the much-needed human touch, it can give you what you want if you know how to guide it. It can analyze search intent to target your customers with relevant content.
To get the most out of AI in 2023, be sure to:
- Know the Purpose. Understand the problems you want to solve with it and whether it’s up to the challenge.
- Use as a Supplement. Determine how your team will use it as a supplement to maximize its potential.
- Gather Data. Organize your data in one place for AI to work with.
- Focus on Tools. Don’t look to AI to replace current processes or people, but to enhance your toolkit.
8. Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) has become increasingly popular. Its use of computer-generated images to create an imaginary view of the world around users allows brands to showcase their products and bridge the gap between customers’ in-store and virtual shopping experiences.
Social networks like Snapchat, Pinterest, and now, Metaverse have made augmented reality easier to use and access. Since Snapchat bought Looksery in 2015, it has provided marketers with AR ads and lenses that help marketers build deeper connections with their audience.
AR is helpful for:
- Attracting awareness-stage buyers
- Establishing positive opinions about a brand
- Encouraging potential buyers to move forward with a purchase
To maximize AR in 2023, you must:
- Focus on Goals. Establish how it ties back to your marketing goals. Don’t use a new tool just to use it.
- Know Your Audience. Understand if your audience’s content consumption behavior will benefit from AR solutions.
- Use Storytelling. Improve your ability to use explainer content with storytelling and appealing visuals to persuade consumers to try your products.
- Sell Directly. Use simple and direct calls to action to close the deal.
9. Social Media as a Customer Service Tool
Customers love to engage their favorite brands on social media. And 81% of millennials, the highest spending age group, are active social media users. What does this mean for your business?
Optimizing your social media pages with content that engages your customers will help existing and prospective customers find you when they need you most.
One way to maximize this is to moderate your social media comment section. Promptly attend to their concerns to improve their brand experience.
Here’s how you can make the most of social for customer service in 2023:
- Choose Strategically. Focus on the right channels. You don’t need to be on every social media outlet, but you must show up where your customers are.
- Respond Readily. You need to actively engage on the channels you choose for your business. Respond to customers on time.
- Move Offline. Be responsive, but don’t hash out customer issues in public. Know when to take a customer’s issue offline for expedited resolution.
10. Podcasts
The demand for podcast content blew up in 2020 and continues to increase. About 62% of Americans listen to one of the two million active podcasts.
Podcasts are easy to consume because your audience can listen while cooking, exercising, or driving. They are also relatively easy to create. So, it’s not surprising that consumers and marketers have found them valuable.
To benefit from podcasting in 2023:
- Know Your Target. Study your consumers’ needs to know what to address in podcast episodes.
- Focus on Presentation. Determine how you’ll present your episodes to appeal to your audience.
- Embrace Promotion. Take advantage of your customers’ networks to promote your podcast.
11. Blog Repurposing
Repurposed content takes less time to consume and helps you engage people that might otherwise be too busy to read the full post.
Your old content assets do not have to gather dust in 2023. By breaking a piece of content into bite-sized chunks, you can get more content to share on social media or other marketing channels to reach new audiences.
12. Data Privacy
We talk about customer data a lot in marketing. Data helps brands understand and personalize their customer experiences. On the other hand, it also leaves customers more exposed to fraud. Every data breach makes customers more apprehensive of the bits and pieces of their information businesses collect.
That’s why people are getting more interested in how their data is processed and used.
So, what does this mean for your business? Strive to comply with ethical data collection methods like cookie-free advertising and be transparent about it. It will inspire confidence in your customers, and they will want to keep doing business with you.
That also means more work for content marketers, who will need to add data portability and localization to their responsibilities.
13. Interactive Content
You won’t get away with boring one-way communication in 2023. Communication, by itself, is a two-way street. But content marketers have traditionally spoken at — instead of speaking with — their audiences without giving them room to respond for far too long.
Static posts and similar non-interactive content only communicate a brand’s ideas to consumers without giving them room to respond. Expect a greater emphasis on content that involves your audience in the conversation in 2023.
This involvement could be as little as clicking a button or asking their opinion on an issue using polls, quizzes, games, and live events to enhance customer participation.
What’s Not Changing in 2023
While many things are changing in content marketing, many other tenants of the discipline will stay the same in 2023 and likely beyond.
Backlinks Are Still Key
Google still rates helpful content above anything else, and backlinks are one way it understands the value of your content.
Since any site that links to yours gives you a vote of confidence, it tells search engines what they need to know about your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Expect backlinks to remain valuable in 2023.
Mobile Optimization Matters
More than half of global traffic comes from mobile users. What does that tell you? Failure to optimize your website for mobile will cost you half of your potential customers in 2023.
Thankfully, there are several mobile optimization solutions to help you optimize your website for mobile access.
How Content Journey Can Help
A new year means identifying what is changing and staying constant. As content marketing develops and changes, success can be a moving target. At Content Journey, it’s our business to stay current on content marketing trends that will help you grow your business. Book a call today to begin your journey to content marketing success in 2023.
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