Content marketing is like a four-year-old who has had too much sugar – it just can’t stay still. And as professional content marketers, it’s our job to stay on top of the latest industry trends, even as they shift, move, and completely transform from year to year.
2023 has been no different, and in fact, this year has already seen some big game-changers in the way we approach content marketing. Our friends over at Semrush have put together a report called “The State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report”, and our team have found this to be a fantastic resource that outlines the latest trends in content marketing. Here’s some of the content marketing trends for 2023 that stood out to us the most.
Understanding Your Audience’s Needs and Values
Content marketing has always been about offering value to your audience, but after the latest Google Helpful Content update, this has become even more important. Kyle Byers, the Director of Organic Search at Semrush, writes about this trend in the report, saying, “Google’s helpful content update shows how important it is to understand your audience needs, challenges, and pain points.”
In other words, your content should always be created for a purpose that benefits your audience. And to discover what that purpose is, you need to do some research into the behaviours, wants, and needs of the people searching for your content. Once you know their search intent and the specific answers to questions they are looking for, then you can tailor your content to zero in on their wants and needs.
At BeKonstructive, we get right to the heart of what our clients’ audiences are looking for. We use keyword research tools to dig deep and discover the precise search terms that audiences are typing into Google.
We then leverage this information to create engaging content such as blogs and FAQs that directly addresses the audience’s wants and needs. And, because of Google’s latest algorithm update, these pieces of content are more likely to rank higher on search result pages. Learn more about our Brisbane SEO services here.
An example of our method in practice would be an article we recently wrote for our client Overseas Packers & Shippers – an international removalist company based in Brisbane. The article is called “Shipping Appliances and White Goods”, and we landed on that topic based on the keyword research we had conducted.
We found that people were looking for specific information about shipping appliances and white goods overseas, and our client did not have any content on their website addressing this topic. We wrote them an engaging and informative article about the subject, and they now have quality written content that provides value to that segment of their audience.
Improving Content Quality
Adding more value to your content is also going to help that content come off as more authentic and compelling. Margarita Loktionova, the Content Marketing Lead at Semrush, wrote that “it doesn’t matter if you head up a Fortune 500 company or run a small family business—you can create content that offers real value to your audience. Get it right and you’ll see more website visitors, click-through, and conversions.”
Authenticity is one of the main ingredients of quality content marketing. Audiences want to consume content that feels like it was written by a human, for a human. And with the rise of advanced AI text generators, this is true now more than ever. As copywriters and content marketers, we then have a responsibility to really find and elevate that “human touch” element for each piece of content we create.
One way that we do this at BeKonstructive is to include real-life examples and case studies into our content to add more validity to the topics. A recent example of this would be our own article: “How Long Does SEO Take? A Quick Explanation for a Long Process”. In this piece, we look at three different SEO projects we have worked on to highlight the length of the SEO process and how different variables can affect it.
We then turned the information from that article into content for our email marketing campaigns, as well as videos for our social media channels.
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We do similar things for our clients. By including real-life examples within our copywriting, we are making the piece of content read more authentically which helps its audience to better connect with its message.
Proving Return on Investment
2023 has proved that organic search traffic continues to dominate as the most valuable form of digital marketing for businesses. According to Michael Brenner, the Content Marketing Agency CEO at Marketing Insider, “in every industry—ranging from technology to manufacturing and non-profits to pharma—the answer is: organic search and referral traffic. And it’s all generated by content marketing!”
We see strong ROI in our content marketing services with our clients. We have a client in the travel industry who invested in many traditional and digital marketing channels – including print, media, digital, and organic marketing. Through their Google Analytics, we have discovered that their SEO marketing has proven to be the most successful from an ROI and conversion rate perspective.
Image shows that organic search traffic has a significantly higher conversion rate and a higher number of goal completions. This is despite other channels like social and paid search (Google Ads) sending almost twice as much traffic to the website. With this kind of data we can start to compare the value of different sources of website traffic, and determine the ROI of our SEO and content marketing activities.
One of the most important ways for our team to capitalise on the SEO potential of a client’s content is to make sure we do enough planning and strategising before we dive in. We do SEO planning with nearly all of our clients, using keyword research software and industry-leading SEO data to inform the direction and purpose of each piece of content we create.
Here are some examples of the SEO-targeted content we have created for our clients to maximise their ROI:
- 4 Reasons You Need Regular Commercial Air Conditioning Maintenance – targeting the keyword “Commercial Air Conditioning Maintenance”
- 3 Tips for Moving to New Zealand on a Budget – targeting the keyword “Moving to New Zealand on a Budget”
- The Benefits of Working with a Local Branding Agency in Brisbane – targeting the keyword “Branding Agency Brisbane”
Reliability Over Fads or Novelty
As AI-assisted written content becomes a bigger player in 2023, businesses are going to be able to create content for their websites and social media accounts quicker and easier than ever before. But it comes at a cost. According to Julie McCoy, the VP of Marketing at Content at Scale, “there will be mass production of non-original, fluffy, and inaccurate content. Humanly-researched, high-quality, unique content will stand out more than ever in 2023”.
On top of this, the ever-shifting algorithms that dictate our search engines and social media feeds are delivering less-reliable results for businesses. Customers are searching for stability and relatability in their content. They want to engage with content that they can trust, and that will provide them with reliable information on a topic, question, or purchase query they need answering.
We recently wrote an article titled “E-commerce SEO: More Than Just Backlinks” for our client and Brisbane-based web development agency One Click Media. For this piece of content, we interviewed the client directly to source valuable information on the topic that only they could provide. We then fleshed it out with further research, so we could succinctly write about any technical terms in an easily-digestible way for their readers.
The result? We wrote an informative long-form article that justifies its word count by thoroughly addressing its topic, without ever relying on “padding out” the content. We were then able to pull out half a dozen social media posts for our client’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, with each post driving customers back to the One Click Media website.
This piece of informative, reliable, and well-written content wasn’t just a useful way to educate readers on an important topic. It was also a sales piece for One Click Media to showcase their authority in Australian e-commerce web development.
Click-Throughs Over Rankings
Content marketing provides a lot of growth opportunities for businesses. Organic traffic is definitely one, but visibility and engagement are now just as, if not more, important. Andy Crestodina is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Orbit Media Studios and, according to him, “in 2023, the biggest trend will have nothing to do with how your content ranks. The biggest trend has everything to do with click-through rates”.
Being number one on a search result page is no longer the number one priority. Instead, click-through rates, total page views, brand mentions, and other metrics should be your focus moving forward.
This image shows that despite the fact that BeKonstructive ranks in position 23 (page 3 of Google) for the phrase “SEO Brisbane”, that keyword generates the same amount of traffic for our website (5.88%) as the phrase “Digital marketing strategy Brisbane” which is ranked in position 9 (page 1 of Google). This is because we have a higher click-through-rate for SEO Brisbane.
Our SEO packages address a lot of these different things. We include FAQs to important web pages for our clients as these improve their chances of appearing in the featured snippets and knowledge panels of search engine result pages (SERPs). Our larger SEO packages also allocate time for off-site activities, including brand mentions and discovering valuable guest posting opportunities.
Contact BeKonstructive Marketing
BeKonstructive Marketing stays on top of all the latest content marketing trends in 2023 and beyond. To make use of our high-quality, informative, and value-adding content marketing services, contact us today!
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