MATT-ROBINSON.UK

Every business aspires to be relevant to its audience. However, maintaining in step with their needs, requirements and expectations is far from guaranteed.

In 2023, organisations looking to elevate their marketing programmes — to boost engagement and accelerate demand — need to reappraise their content strategies. Ensuring you and your business are up to date with the latest innovations, developments and opportunities ahead, will be essential to ensuring success and a critical commercial edge.

Read on for seven ways you can ensure your content strategy is set up for success for the year ahead and beyond.

1.      Insight-driven decision making

You might have a clear view of the story you’re looking to tell. You may have a wealth of messaging and positioning documents. Or even a number of customer-facing presentations eloquently describing the services you offer and the potential value they could bring to their organisations.

However, translating that content into a compelling narrative requires a consideration of the language and tonality for your audience, alongside an understanding of the market and channel variability of your activation strategy. This approach, in accordance with insight into what your competitors are saying and/or doing, is fundamental to determining an effective approach; one which will deliver meaningful cut-through, satisfy sales targets and help secure your next campaign budget request.

Qualitative approaches, such as digital ethnography and topic modelling, can be a highly effective way to gain greater understanding of the language and priorities of your target audience. They’ll also reveal how that audience has changed, or are changing, over a given period, alongside specific content resonance that incentivises demand and how best to engage influencers.

This insight will continue to gain importance and necessity in 2023 to help inform campaign narratives and content assets with a greater level of confidence. It will also ensure that they’re well attuned to the prevailing mindsets and pain points of the target personas, translating into higher CTRs, a lower CPC and ultimately a value set of leads for pipeline acceleration.

2.      Harness the power of creative storytelling

Effective and creative storytelling is commonplace in B2C marketing and advertising. However, it is just as important to brand building in the B2B space and, if harnessed correctly, can help you navigate the limitations or constraints of your brand.

With brands increasingly doubling down on purpose-driven marketing, and assessing ways they can scientifically capture more eyeballs on their brand or messaging post-COVID-19, marketing needs to focus on balancing these much more closely this year. Greater focus therefore needs to be applied to creating truly engaging marketing output that breaks new ground, whilst remembering to engage target audiences in truly meaningful and inspiring ways. Ways in which they may not expect.

However, even being armed with rich audience insights is often not enough to add flair to your stories or campaign narratives. You must be willing to take risks. Test and track different approaches, and consider how the outcomes you offer can be translated into themes, topics or concepts. If you don’t, you can bet one of your competitors will.

That may take you down a path that feels uncomfortable at first. It might even lead to ideas that initially appear leftfield, especially to colleagues. However, when these ideas are appropriately supported by strong narratives, pulling on specific threads of your service or solution offering, it’s likely to stop people in their tracks and compel them to click to find out more.

3.      Embrace AI technologies

Whilst the core components of your content output will unlikely alter in 2023, the tools you use to create it will likely become more sophisticated. Qualitative studies will continue to help sharpen the language and composition of the stories you choose to create, whereas the art of production can and will be enhanced through developing technologies. Particularly those which can help speed up the creative process, generate new ideas faster and ensure all content is hyper-personalised.

Much has been written about ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), the trained language model chatbot developed by OpenAI that launched at the end of November last year. With some commenters fearing this spells the end for content creators. Yet, as with many other innovations throughout history, perceived threats often prove unfounded, with the reality usually resulting in bolstering or supporting the services or industries they’re threatening.

It will inevitably shape and change the way brands and agencies approach and view the creative process, it can and should be seen as a valuable asset in sharpening focus and aiding a development. Especially as everyone faces increasing pressures on their time and squeezing budgets.

Tools like ChatGPT will certainly be used to add a dimension to creativity, but will unlikely replace the creative process entirely. The nuances that help ensure content remains focused and relevant to a specific set of requirements takes time to finesse and refine. Artificial Intelligence may well inform title creation for example, as well as provide guidance on how pieces can achieve greater impact, by providing perspectives or viewpoints the human brain couldn’t dream up — especially in the face of looming deadlines.

4.      Focus on customer centricity

The customer has always been important, but 2023 will see marketers increasingly look to orbit their approaches more around their needs and requirements, making them the focal point of hyper-personalised campaigns and activation strategies. Personalised messages, which are clearly tailored to what the audience is most interested in, will naturally yield better results. But the way audiences experience your content and interact with it needs to be as seamless as possible and enrich their lives in a meaningful and simple manner.

Expectations have never been higher in the post-COVID-19 world, so ensuring user experience is baked into the content creation and distribution process is essential. You may have the best content in the world — but if the way your audiences have to consume it constitutes a bad experience, it simply won’t perform in the manner it was intended.

Content creators therefore need to work in collaboration with digital teams to ensure mobile instances are optimised. Page composition will be paramount, from image quality to carefully considered placements intended to highlight stories in clear and compelling manner. And all integrated in parallel with a clear, cohesive style and tone of voice.

5.      Change the way you view and approach search

No matter how good you think your website content is, if people are not reading it, engaging with it, or converting to the level you aspire to, something has clearly gone awry. With competition for attention intensifying, you can guarantee your competitors are sharpening their resolve to ensure they accelerate up the search rankings.

Search engine optimisation has often been decoupled from the creative process, operating more as a functional way to drive web traffic and page conversions based on a specific set of keywords. That needs to, and will, change considerably in the year ahead. Brands need to locate ways to optimise their on-page web content and campaign creatives to ensure they continue to drive the necessary cut through to perform well in search results. This will help ensure that it actually excites and delivers in a more emotive and engaging way so that helps accelerate funnel advancement.

Microsoft’s significant investment in ChatGPT, and commitment to integrating it with Bing, will add fresh weaponry to the search battle. Google’s dominance may hardly be challenged in the short term, but balancing a broader search strategy to ensure potential opportunities are not lost or displaced as technologies sharpen their resolve, will be more critical as the year progresses.

6.      Maintain consistency and quality, over quantity

We all expect more for less nowadays, especially as world events and the impact of the pandemic continue to place pressures on our everyday lives. But when it comes to content, it’s important to remember: less is often more. Audiences expect and want to remain up to date with latest trends and innovations that can help elevate their business operations and commercial activities. Yet they are unlikely to give much care for your latest product announcements.

If you’re investing heavily in your content programme, then it’s important to make sure that the content you produce is optimised to great effect. Ensuring you have a regular content publishing scheduling, which your audience can familiarise themselves with, will help establish greater affinity between your brand and your customers.

Consumers lost trust in brands and institutions during the pandemic. Consistency is something they’re craving right now, so give it to them in the form of regular and relevant content creation. The last thing you want to do is promise your audience fresh content, only to disappoint them when you fall behind.

Your brand should post at least a handful of times per month. That should be enough to guarantee quality, but also maintain a position of top of mind with potential customers. But if your content team can handle a faster cadence, go for it. Just avoid overworking your team or overwhelming your audience with too much too quickly. In 2023, striking a balance is key.

7.      Maintain a balance of content types

Video matters and will continue to dominate content strategies in 2023. Especially with regards to short-form pieces with clear and succinct stories. Written content can and will always have a value in communicating specific messages to audiences at a given moment. But video provides a richer storytelling technique, allowing you to go further and deeper without people drowning in a torrent of words.

Whatever format you choose, you need to make sure this content needs to be a mixture of reactionary, which respond to emerging news items or conversation topics and showcases your broad opinions in a timely manner. Alongside planned and scheduled pieces, which addresses key topics your audience are interested in and want to read about.

These pieces are the hero pieces in your strategy. They help elevate your position as a thought leader and are where you can provide critical insights and offer advice — focusing on adding value and educating customers on what they need to do to fulfil their ambitions and objectives.

The way you tell these stories will largely depend on the creative approach you have chosen, alongside the insights you have obtained about messaging and channel placement, as well your search agenda and content scheduling plan. Uniting these elements together, with careful consideration of the wider narrative you are looking to tell, will help ensure a consistent and clear narrative. It will enrich the end user experience, and ensure your customer is at the centre. Meanwhile, you will ensure you and your business are on the receiving end of engagement metrics that deliver the value you need to prosper in an ever-complex, evolving and complex market landscape.

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