What are some content marketing best practices?
From enhancing accessibility in your content to marketing to technical people, here are 12 answers to the question, “Can you share your best practices for content marketing in 2023?”
- Make Your Content Accessible
- Create Interactive Content
- Feature Other People in Your Content
- Spice Up Your Content Formats
- Experiment With AI Tools
- Harness the Power of AI-Generated Content
- Know Your Audience
- Assume Your Competition is Using Schema
- Create Authentic Engagement
- Evangelize Content Inside Your Organization
- Skate Where the Puck Is Going
- Market to Technical People
Make Your Content Accessible
According to the WHO, about 15% of the world’s population has some sort of disability. When you multiply that by the number of people who have access to the internet and the fact that they are potential customers, you cannot ignore their needs.
Therefore, it is important to consider accessibility when creating content in 2023. This means making sure your website is ADA-compliant and has features such as alt text for images, captions for videos, and audio descriptions for multimedia content.
Additionally, use fonts and colors with a good contrast ratio to make your content easier for people with vision impairments. Doing this will help you reach more potential customers and let them experience your content with no obstacles.
Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing & Outreach Manager, UK Passport Photo
Create Interactive Content
In 2023, a key strategy for successful content marketing will be to focus on creating both personalized and interactive content. By tailoring your content to the unique needs, interests, and pain points of our target audience, we will be able to effectively connect with them.
Interactive content such as quizzes, polls, and surveys can further engage our audience and spur them to actively take part in the content. Furthermore, interactive content is more likely to be shared, which can help boost brand awareness and lead generation.
Georgi Todorov, Founder, ThriveMyWay
Feature Other People in Your Content
Using quotes, data, or other original insights in your content can help your content reach a wider audience. The people you feature might feel inclined to share your article on social media and/or link to it, allowing you to capitalize on new traffic sources without paying for ads.
Also, featuring other people can make you appear like a credible source. Your readers may view you as a community and partner rather than a “fluff generator” and may even reach out to see how to get themselves featured in your content. This is a great low-lift way to keep creating new content at a very low cost and with high impact.
Alli Hill, Founder & Director, Fleurish Freelance
Spice Up Your Content Formats
There are four different learning styles:
- Visual learners prefer the use of images, graphics, etc.
- Auditory learners learn most effectively by discussing or listening, e.g., video, live video, audio chat, podcasts, etc.
- Reading and writing learners enjoy written content formats, such as blogs, articles, posts, etc.
- Kinesthetic learners prefer hands-on activities; think step-by-step how-to’s.
Our audience consuming content will comprise each of these different learning styles. Marketers who create content that is an excellent mix of various formats will have better results from reaching a wider audience.
Michelle Raymond, LinkedIn B2B Strategist & Trainer, Good Trading Co
Experiment With AI Tools
The capabilities of AI to generate videos, words, images, and music, among many other things, from simple text prompts will revolutionize content and creativity in 2023. We will see a significant rise in vendors and capabilities this year.
Content marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs alike will experiment with and take advantage of the flexibility of artificial intelligence to save time and resources to optimize their content marketing strategies in 2023.
Nick Allen, Founder & CEO, SportsLingo
Harness the Power of AI-Generated Content
While we have a way to go before humanity is driven into a barren wasteland and the robots fully take over, we are moving closer to content generation, becoming deeply automated and of higher quality.
Depending on the space (B2B, B2C, B2B to B2C) there will vary levels of competency in content generation, but we should all be prepared for a world where AI can better replicate the fluency of human dialogue and ultimately provide generated content that is scary good.
Marketers will need to understand and embrace AI-generated content and spend more time building personas and understanding the nuance of H2H (human-to-human) marketing to continue to provide value.
Amy Croghan, Sr. Content Marketing Manager, Marqeta
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is a huge foundation of content marketing. I think this best practice continues to be more important every year because of the sheer amount of content that exists today.
In order to break through the noise, you have to know your audience so you can speak their language and catch their attention. The more you know about your audience, the better you can create content that meets their specific needs.
Dana Farese, Sr. Manager, Content Marketing, CrunchTime
Assume Your Competition Is Using Schema
Even if your content is well-researched and professionally written, contains high-value elements such as lists and images, and otherwise engages your readers as intended, you may leave money on the table if you’re not also using schema.
Simply put, the schema is “micro-data” you can add to your posts in the CMS that verifies your use of helpful (i.e., good for SEO) elements within your post to Google. Several tools are available, including the Schema Builder plug-in for the Chrome browser, to walk you through the process and generate code that you add in the CMS.
For example, it can help elevate the fact that your page or blog post contains a step-by-step list, reviews, videos, or whichever elements are present that can help you outrank the competition. Nothing replaces the hard work of actually providing useful and professionally presented information to your intended audience, but schema will give you better-looking SERP snippets and can bump your ranking.
Steve Tanner, Editor, Writer, & SEO Strategist, Freelance
Create Authentic Engagement
One of the best practices for content marketing in 2023 is to focus on being personal and creating authentic engagement with your audience. With the rise of social media and the abundance of online content, it’s more important than ever to establish a connection with your audience and build trust and relatability so everyone can resonate with your marketing.
This can be done by creating content that addresses people’s pain points by being transparent and authentic in your messaging, and by actively engaging with your audience and responding to their comments and feedback.
Ralitsa Dodova, Content Writer, BuzzLogic
Evangelize Content Inside Your Organization
When you think about content distribution, remember you have a captive audience: your colleagues. Are you helping them understand what’s appropriate to use and share, when, and most importantly, why?
I send a biweekly company-wide email that serves as a guide for using content. Select what you want people to share, tell them why they should share it (and where!), and provide a quote or key learning to cut and paste.
Get that internal army working for you! If email isn’t the best channel at your org, create a quick video or use Slack or Teams to provide all-important context rather than just a link.
Sarah Sheehan, Sr. Manager, Content Marketing, Within3
Skate Where the Puck Is Going
Keyword research tools are hugely helpful, but they shouldn’t always be the source of truth. With a rapidly changing marketing landscape in 2023 (ChatGPT, anyone?), listening to your instincts is equally important. If specific search terms aren’t yet ranking, but you have a strong hunch they’ll catch up, take a leap of faith, and hit publish anyway. Being ahead of the curve can be risky, but it can pay off!
Lia Zneimer, Head of Brand & Content Marketing, Teal
Market to Technical People
If you’re marketing to a technical audience, resist the temptation to hit the reader early in a piece of content. Realize that they are generally very deeply suspicious of marketing folks, having been burned by products and services that didn’t live up to the hype.
That’s why you should try never to get promotional until you’ve interested them and paid off on that interest by teaching them something they didn’t already know or hadn’t considered. THEN, and only then, will readers relax their guard and let you market to them.
Lisa K Stapleton, Content Director, Domino Data Lab
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