Content is considered the king in creating brand awareness and generating quality leads that contribute to healthy sales growth. Effective Content marketing plan and strategies can improve your brand’s connection with prospects and customers. It helps companies in nurturing and converting leads and accelerates Marketing & Sales Funnel process.

With the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the year 2023 would witness several advancements in content marketing strategies. This new year would be all about advanced internet, technology, artificial intelligence & virtual reality, automation, cybersecurity, and global connectivity. Moreover, with a rapidly changing technological environment, businesses would require effective content marketing strategies to overcome ever-increasing competition & reach their target customers.

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” 

                                                                                                                 – Andrew Davis (Keynote Speaker & Author) 

In this article, we have covered several content marketing strategies that businesses must look out for in 2023. 

Short-form videos to showcase content in a new way.

Video-based content offers a high engagement factor and plays a significant role in conversions. As per estimation, the average conversion rate for websites using video is 4.8%, whereas it’s less than 3% for those without one. With the growing popularity of short-reel-based video content, businesses should focus on creating quality videos for better customer engagement. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are getting traction as popular advertising formats for businesses. 

Apart from a high customer engagement rate, short-form video content offers several other advantages, such as – 

  • More impactful and memorable for the audience.
  • Ranks higher on search engine results pages.
  • Enable marketers to share their message in an engaging way.
  • Offers good Return on Investment (ROI). 

Increase Engagement on LinkedIn 

Brands have a stronger opportunity to broaden their organic reach on LinkedIn. To become viral on LinkedIn, though, your material must be compelling and educational, just as on other social networking platforms. Unlike, other social media platforms such as Facebook, on which the organic reach of posts is limited, LinkedIn enables brands to increase their organic reach.

Businesses can post testimonials from clients and can frequently share recent developments by the companies and update relevant information on their LinkedIn profiles to increase brand visibility.

Focus on Brand Partnerships & Collaborations

One of the leading trends for content marketing in 2023 is promotion through brand collaborations and influencers. Brand collaborations are intended to increase brand exposure and drive sales. Co-branding campaigns are designed to help both the organization and complement each other’s products and services.  

With the growing popularity of YouTube for Video Content Creation, influence marketing has become a necessity for marketers. Influence marketing can help business to increase their brand awareness. Influencers create user-targeted ads that tend to better resonate with consumers, which, in turn, can enhance brand visibility. Influencers are segmented into three key groups based on the size of their audiences.

According to their audience size:

  • Micro-influencers: Influencers who have less than 10,000 followers. These influencers are suitable for reaching niche audiences.
  • Power middle influencers: Those having 10,000 to 250,000 followers comes in this category. These influencers have a network of close and engaged audiences who trust their recommendations. 
  • Macro influencers: influencers with more than 250,000 followers. Instagram and YouTube celebrities are categorized as macro influencers. They offer wider reach, but may not have the exact authenticity and credibility as the other two categories.

Personalized & user-specific Content.

Personalization & user-specific content delivery is emerging as key for creating long-term customer relationships. Personalization enables brands to increase their customer engagement and help in creating a loyal customer base that leads to repetitive sales. 71% of consumers want companies to personalize their interactions.

Personalized content works based on specific information about consumers to create a personalized and unique experience between an individual and a brand. Personalized marketing content strategy offers several benefits for brands.

  • Understanding of customers’ requirements.
  • Customer engagement and feedback
  • Builds Loyal customer base.
  • Shorter Sales Cycle

Content optimization as per Emerging Search Trends

With the rapidly changing search trend scenario, search is also carried out through voice and images. Therefore, it is essential for brands to optimize their web content as per the new search trends. Including relevant Keyword research is critical to gain insights into what and how your target audience is searching for suitable products and services. 

Moreover, AI-driven personalization tools can be employed for a brand’s marketing messages, content, products, and services using machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, etc. With the help of this technology, organizations may engage with customers in new ways that lead to more lucrative customer journeys.

Interactive Content 

The use of interactive content including quizzes, polls, games, and webinars promotes involvement and response from the targeted customers. As per estimates, by 81% of marketers, interactive content effectively captures users’ interest more quickly than insert material. In addition, the interactive nature of the information keeps viewers interested in a long time. Even in real-time, it can be heavily customized.

As businesses are realizing the benefits of interactive content over traditional advertising, and with increasing digital transformation, more businesses are preferring interactive content for marketing their products and services.

The future of digital transformation lies in virtual reality.

Virtual reality is disrupting the way a brand interacts with its customers. Over the years, many brands have been using virtual reality tools to create unique customer experiences and achieve high levels of consumer engagement. For example – Marriott Hotels created VR “tangible experience” that enables viewers to virtually explore the hotel and destination.

Content Marketing with augmented and virtual reality allows brands to craft experiences, engage consumers, and encourage conversions in interesting ways through storytelling. 

Use of automation tools and applications

Through the Application of Content automation, the brand can save a tremendous amount of time, resources, and effort by reducing the need for human intervention. Numerous automated tools and programs are already available to assist you in determining the content’s relevancy and target audience, as well as the variables and metrics that influence the results. When developing a content marketing plan for 2023, be sure to point out content domains that may be completed without your direct involvement while still producing acceptable results.

Content automation contributes as a powerful for marketers in many different situations –

  • Content Generation
  • Content personalization  
  • User Engagement Tracking
  • Proofreading and editing 
  • Performance Analytics 

Increase focus on Data Privacy  

As customers nowadays are more skeptical of the vulnerability of cyber frauds and the collection of their personal data, brands must focus on data privacy and ethical collection of data. In order to stay ahead of the curve in content marketing in 2023, marketers must follow the rules and laws that have been set forth, as well as collect data in an ethical manner and notify their customers about it.

The rise of the Podcast

Podcast-based content marketing deals with the marketing of products and services by creating and distributing unique audio content. This content is shared with listeners to influence and inform them about products and services being offered by the company through various social media channels. 

Incorporating a podcast into content marketing strategy would enable brands to increase their current audience reach, and boost brand awareness and loyalty in a cost-effective manner.

Conclusion

An increasing number of internet users worldwide and the growing emergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality technologies would drive digital transformation in the digital marketing space. In order to be ahead of competitors, content marketers need to focus on integrating these technologies to create and deliver customer-focused content to enhance their brand visibility and customer engagement.