2023 Content Planning

I cannot believe that we are already starting to think about 2023 content planning, but it is a topic which has cropped in conversation with my clients over the last few weeks. With just 75 days until Christmas (at time of writing), it might seem a little early to start planning for 2023, but there is a lot to prepare. In recent conversations there has been a lot of questions around where to start in writing a content strategy and in fact why do you want one? Below we share some thoughts to get started.

What do we mean by a content strategy?

Digital marketing has certainly moved to a more content based form of communication, so let’s start by defining what we mean by a content strategy:

“Simply, a content strategy is the planning, development and management of content.”

With content underpinning a lot of our marketing campaigns today, building a strategy around this enables us to plan our projects and ensure our marketing is goal-driven. Content can arrive in many forms, from video, posts, surveys, to written blog articles. It can be confusing to know where to start, so below we share seven tips to get you started.

1. Define your goals. It is important to know what you are trying to achieve with the content and marketing you generate. Are you encouraging people to purchase a product or service, read an article or engage with you? By defining your SMART (Specific, Measured, Archievable, Relevant and Timed) goals, it enables you to track the performance of your marketing and content.
2. Know your target audience. This underpins all marketing activity. By understanding who you are talking to, will enable you to tailor your content accordingly, generating information which is useful to them. Visit here, to read a little more around this key topic.
3. Create mini campaigns. I talk a lot with my clients about setting overarching themes each month, we look at them as mini campaigns. In January you might be thinking about goal setting and in May (mental health awareness month), you might be thinking about how this important topic effects your business and industry. Once you have decided on your mini campaigns, setting the campaign detail becomes a lot easier.
4. Do your keyword research. Once you have your mini campaigns planned out, you can start to think about your blog, email or social media posts. By conducting keyword research it will help you to refine your content to not only answer your audience’s questions, but also be found by the search engines.
5. Create a plan. It is important to know what you are going to create and when it will be delivered. Think about when you might boost your posts at certain times of year to tie into demand as part of your planning, with tight budgets we wish to ensure we being as focused as possible.
6. Select your media. We can certainly plan on sharing our content via our internal channels as a blog, via email or social media. What we might then look to consider is expanding the reach beyond our internal channels, by boosting a social media post, purchasing email data or setting up a partnership with a similar business, for example.
7. Measure success. As with all marketing, it is important to put the right tracking in place to measure our success so we know if something works. There are many tracking options available and could include likes, open rates, click through rates or simply visits to our website.

Once we have our content plan in place, we then need to building this into our wider marketing strategy and approach.

2023 Content Trends to watch out for

The marketing industry moves quickly, so it is important to be aware of the changes happening and as far as possible build them into our plans. We wanted to share four trends that we see on the horizon for next year:

1. Story telling. This has been used for years to help share and communicate a message or reason for something. Sharing your brand story continues to be important part of our mix, but it is no longer enough, we now need to share evidence and feedback to support it. Client case studies are a great example of this to help showcase our work. By describing the situation, challenges faced and solutions implemented; supported with the results can be incredibly powerful.
2. Better customer experience. I find that so often things are automated today. It is so difficult to find a person to actually speak to. By providing a good customer experience, putting the customer at the heart of everything helps you to stand out vs your competitors and be different.
3. Videos and podcasts. Many audiences now want information they can quickly absorb or listen to whilst doing something else; videos and podcasts are a perfect solution to these problems and will definitely continue to be on the rise as we move into 2023.
4. What is your why? It is no longer enough to just explain what you do and the benefits. More and more people want to know more about your why. Why do you do what you do? It is hard to articulate but once you do, it helps you to stand out from the rest. Here is a great video by Simon Sinek explaining more.
5. Personalisation. Everyone wants to feel unique and special. By personalising content and answering the questions or challenges faced by your target audience will help you to resonate with them and stand out from the competition.

Repurposing your blog can also be a really time efficient way of using something that you have already created, if you are keen to read a little more around this topic visit here. If you would like some help starting your 2023 content planning, get in touch to arrange your no obligation discovery call.