Does a new year mean new content marketing best practices? Well, yes and no.
Looking into the new year, there are new things to consider for your content marketing strategy, but not many things have changed.
Content marketing is still one of the best ways to ensure your brand remains relevant and continues to drive organic traffic to your site.
Content creation has taken many different forms, but there are still a lot of best practices that you need to make sure you implement if you want to be found.
This article will go over some of the best practices that content marketers should continue to do and some of the emerging hot topics in the content world.
Here are the seven best practices for content marketing in 2023:
- Use the voice of the customer.
- Create content with the pivot and talk content marketing model.
- Optimize your content for results types.
- Always measure your content for ROI.
- AI-generated content is here, but don’t fall for the hype.
- Re-optimize and repurpose outdated/poor-performing content.
- Dismantle barriers between your internal departments to move faster.
1. Use the voice of the customer in your content
Using the voice of the customer in your content will always be a best practice in content marketing, and it’s also the most important.
You need to make sure your content matches what the customer is actually looking for.
Without doing this, you may never be able to reach your target audience, even if they are looking for something you offer.
Keyword research is the bread and butter of creating any content, and a big part of creating relevant content is making sure you’re using the terms that people are actually searching for.
2. Create content with the pivot-and-talk content marketing model
Google has always been concerned with ranking websites that appear to be authoritative on a particular topic.
What better way to show Google and customers that you know what you’re talking about than by creating tons of content on the topic?
One of the best ways to do this is with a pivot and talk content marketing model. This content marketing model is all about using the voice of the customer because you need to make sure the content you write has demand first.
This isn’t a new paradigm for the world of content marketing, but it’s a necessity and it’s not going anywhere.
With the hub-and-talk model, you can build authority around the hub, which is usually one of your main lines of business or services.
The speaker content usually consists of questions related to the hub or different parts of the buyer’s journey that relate to the hub.
This way, you can target users at their different stages of search and make sure that Google understands that you know what you’re talking about when they come to your site.
By creating topic-centric and speaking content, you become more trusted about a topic in the eyes of Google, which can help increase the amount of organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions for your business.
3. Create content based on results types
We’ve known for a while now that Google is no longer ten blue links.
However, new types of results appear on Google all the time. As a result, search engine results pages have become extremely crowded with a wide variety of different types of results.
Similar to making sure that the keywords we target have search volume, we also need to make sure that we organize our content in a way that is appropriate as Google will want our content to appear and show us.
Some types of hits have become very popular this year, the biggest being short videos.
Short videos are usually 10 to 30 seconds or up to 5 minutes long.
With the advent of TikTok and Instagram Reels, short video content is becoming more viral and is starting to show up on Google as a type of hit.
When creating any content for your site, be sure to take a look to see what is already showing up on Google and what competitors are doing.
Visual content or images can make content more understandable and enticing to share on social media. This is also a great way to get featured on Google Images, the second largest search engine after Google’s home search page.
Audio content, like podcasts, has also become a great way for people to consume content nowadays.
When you create content, you need to understand how Google feels that users are consuming that content based on what appears on page 1 of Google. Then assess if you can create content for this media.
4. Measure your content for ROI
This isn’t necessarily a new trend, but one that will always be a content marketing best practice.
It’s hard to tie ROI to anything in SEO or the organic channel, unlike paid media or email marketing which is usually more straightforward with accessible CPC, conversion rates, and other key metrics.
This is why it is essential to clearly define how your content will measure ROI and demonstrate that it is driving the organization’s results.
The best way to get more buy about SEO or why content is useful is to report how the content will bring more users to the site or help them convert.
Reporting, either using an enterprise SEO platform or smaller tools, is recommended prior to content generation so you can measure the performance of your content, such as targeting keywords now rank on page 1, which will lead to increases in organic traffic and conversions membership.
By doing this consistently, you can tell a story about how important it is to be proactive with your SEO because you bring users to the site today and continue to drive traffic to that same piece of content indefinitely.
5. AI-generated content is here, but don’t fall for the hype
Everything happens! Artificial intelligence-generated content is finally reaching the masses, but don’t get caught up in the hype.
There have been a lot of acronyms recently, whether it is VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which people believe will break through and become the future.
However, none of them became the main cause of the disorder with which they were described. At least not yet.
Artificial intelligence will be around for the long haul because it can make life so much easier in so many different ways.
There are use cases for using AI services like ChatGPT to search or generate a schema or idea for content, but it is not recommended that these services write your entire content.
Google recently updated its EAT guidelines to include an extra “E” for experience. This shows that Google continues to focus on authoritative content, and it is imperative that you show the user that you know what you are talking about.
The new “E” about experience appears to be a take on AI-generated content because Google wants to ensure users are getting the right information from trusted sources – similar to updating the YMYL algorithm back in the day.
Google’s Useful Content Update is finally gone and affecting websites with unsatisfactory or unhelpful content. This is because many websites are beginning to create content primarily for search engines and not for humans.
Humans need to write content meant for other humans.
Use AI to help create content but be careful not to do it en masse like CNET has, as they have already backed away from the effort after people noticed many different errors in the content itself.
6. Re-optimize and repurpose outdated/poor-performing content
New year, new content? Well, not always.
By observing how the existing content on your site is performing, you can determine if there is potential to re-optimize or repurpose content that may be outdated or poorly performing.
One of the best ways to do this is through a content audit to better understand what content is doing well and what might need a little refresh or some love this year.
There is no point in reinventing the wheel, especially if the content is already of good quality but could benefit from other target keywords.
By evaluating your existing content, you can identify content gaps where you may need to create new content or look for content that can be combined so they work better together.
When working with clients in the past, there have been countless times when we’ve discovered three different blog articles focusing on the same topic, and none of them did well. Instead of wasting time and energy creating new content, try reallocating some of your existing site content to make it better.
Reviewing the content on our site will always be a best practice, and it’s a great process to follow as you can uncover a lot of hidden gems while also identifying other content updates, improvements or a network of new builds that the site can benefit from.
7. Divide silos between teams internally (if you haven’t already)
This is not a best practice for content strategy, but it is a best practice for any company that creates content.
Creating content on your site involves a lot of moving pieces. Most people think that it is only the job of the content team, but there are also design/product teams, development teams, legal teams, and even SEO teams.
In any company, especially organizations, you need to make sure that all of these departments work together toward the same goal – getting more people to your website and getting them to convert. There are many ways to improve your organic marketing operations to be more efficient.
Meet regularly with other departments and create processes to create new content and improve existing content. You can promote efficiency and ensure that everyone understands their responsibilities throughout the process.
If you don’t pre-define each team’s responsibilities and explain why they are necessary, this section may not prioritize the right things, which can lead to delays in the content creation process.
The best content marketers work to break down these silos to ensure effective content dissemination. Communication, education and organization are a big part of this.
In conclusion
By following these 7 best practices, you can ensure that your content will be in good hands in 2023 moving forward.
In general, you should be proactive with the ideas you find when creating content and communicate with internal teams about how we may need their assistance in the process.
Content marketing is one of the best ways for any organization to bring traffic to their site because it helps to continue to educate consumers about the benefits of certain lines of service and make them trust that your brand is the right one for their needs.
AI is going to be a hot topic this year, but don’t do anything radical about this development yet when it comes to content creation. At the end of the day, it is important to ensure that the content is accurate and written by humans.
These best practices are likely things you may have already heard of, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
Instead of focusing on the hot new thing every year, focus on getting those basics right first.
More resources:
- 6 best content calendar templates to use in 2023
- 8 elements of a successful content strategy
- Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
Featured image: Jirsak/Shutterstock
