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 many things haven’t changed. Content marketing is still one of the best ways to ensure your brand remains relevant and continues to drive your site’s organic traffic. Creating content has taken on many different forms, but there are still a lot of best practices you need to make sure you are implementing if you want it to be found. This article will review some best practices that content marketers should continue to follow and some hot topics emerging in the world of content.
Here are the seven best practices for content marketing in 2023:
- Use the customer’s voice.
- Create content using the hub & spoke content marketing model.
- Optimize your content for result types.
- Always measure your content for ROI.
- AI-generated content is here, but don’t fall for the hype.
- Re-optimize and repurpose your outdated/underperforming content.
- Break down the silos between your internal departments to move faster.
1. Using The Customer’s Voice In Your Content
Using the customer’s voice in your content will always be a best practice in content marketing, and it’s also the most important one.
You need to make sure you are matching your content to what the customer is actually searching for. Without doing this, you might never be able to reach your target audience, even if they are looking for something you provide. Keyword research is the bread and butter for creating any content, and a big part of creating relevant content is by making sure you are using the phrases that people actually search for.
2. Create Content Using The Hub & Spoke Content Marketing Model
Google has always cared about ranking websites that show they are authoritative around a particular topic.
What better way to show Google and customers you know what you’re talking about than creating a lot of content around the topic? One of the best ways to do this is the hub and spoke content marketing model. This content marketing model is related to using the customer’s voice because you need to ensure the content you are writing has demand first.
This isn’t a new model to the world of content marketing, but it’s essential and isn’t going anywhere.
Using the hub and spoke model, you can build authority around a hub, which is typically one of your main business lines or services. The spoken content is usually composed of questions related to the hub or different parts of the buyer’s journey that connect to the hub. This way, you can target users in their different stages of searching and make sure Google understands you know what you’re talking about when they come to your site. By creating a hub and spoke content for a specific topic, you become much more authoritative around a topic in Google’s eyes, which can help increase the amount of organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions for your company.
- Create Content Based On Result Types
We’ve known for a while that Google is no longer ten blue links.- However, new types of results appear on Google all the time. As a result, the search engine result pages have become very crowded with a variety of different result types. Similar to making sure the keywords we are targeting have search volume, we also need to make sure we are structuring our content in a relevant way where Google will want to surface and show our content.
- 4. Measure Your Content For ROI This isn’t necessarily a new trend, but it’s another one that will always be a best practice for content marketing. It’s challenging to tie ROI to anything in SEO or the organic channel, unlike paid media or email marketing which is usually more clear-cut with accessible CPC, conversion rates, and other key metrics. This is why it’s essential to clearly define how you will measure your content for ROI and prove that it drives the organization’s results. The best way to get more buy-in around SEO or why content is beneficial is to report on how the content is bringing more users to the site or helping them convert. It’s recommended that you set up reporting, either using an enterprise SEO platform or smaller tools, prior to creating the content so you can measure how your content is doing, such as target keywords now ranking on Page 1, which will lead to an increase in organic traffic and organic conversions.
- AI-generated Content Is Here, But Don’t Fall For The Hype
It’s all happening! AI-generated content has finally arrived to the masses, but don’t fall for the hype.
There have been so many acronyms recently, whether it’s VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), that people believe are going to break through and become the future. However, none have become the mainstream disruptors they were pitched as. At least, not yet. AI will be around for the long haul as it can make life so much easier in many different ways.
- Re-Optimize And Repurpose Your Outdated/Underperforming Content
New year, new content? Well, not always.
By monitoring how the current content on your site is performing, you can identify if there is the ability to re-optimize or repurpose content that might be outdated or underperforming. One of the best ways to do this is through a content audit to better understand which content is performing well and which content might need a little refresh or some love this year. There is no point in reinventing the wheel, especially if the content is already good quality but could benefit from other target keywords.
- Break Down The Silos Between Teams Internally (If You Haven’t Already)
This isn’t as much of a best practice for content strategy, but it is a best practice for any company creating content.
Creating content on your site involves a lot of moving pieces. Most people think it’s only the content team’s job, but there are also design/product teams, development teams, legal teams, and even the SEO team.
In any company, specifically enterprises, you need to ensure that all of these departments work together to achieve the same goal – bringing more people to your website and getting them to convert. There are many ways to improve your organic marketing processes to be more efficient.
Meet regularly with other departments and establish processes for creating new content and optimizing existing content. You can boost efficiency and ensure everyone understands their responsibilities throughout the process.
