A new year always brings new opportunities and challenges. 2023 is no different. The economic slowdown of 2022, coupled with the possibility of a deeper recession still to come, has resulted in a lot of uncertainty and angst for businesses.

More and more businesses are looking at content marketing strategically during crises. This is due to the continued rise of digital consumers and content marketing’s potential for lower cost and better results than other marketing strategies.

As a content marketing leader, the current environment presents an opportunity to rise to the challenge and prepare your team to make a greater impact for your organization. This article identifies emerging priorities for content marketing in 2023, along with tips to set up your team for success.

Priorities for content teams

Doing more with less

Source: Marketoonist

Improving results despite reduced budgets, smaller teams, and higher goals appears to be the mantra for 2023. Content leaders should prioritize projects with the highest ROIs as well as focusing on segments that drive the greatest business impact. Many are looking at the 80:20 rule: the 20% of activities that yield 80% of results.

Content leaders also aim to leverage technology drive higher efficiency and greater impact. In a recent article by the Content Marketing Institute, Cathay McPhillips, Chief Growth Officer at Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, pointed out, “Marketers will continue to do more with less, and marketing teams must work harder to balance customer needs and experiences with business goals. Content marketers can prepare by working with their technology partners and customer success managers to find out if they’re using the right capabilities of the technology, if the partner is the right fit, and if more intelligent solutions are available.”

Thinking out of the box

The Digital Marketing Institute predicts the content-creator economy is poised to continue its explosive growth. More and more brands have invested in filling content gaps and tapping into the latest trends to provide greater value to their audiences. Audiences have a wider choice, and brands must fight against the diminishing attention spans of their audience.

Content leaders seeking to cut through the clutter recommend out-of-the-box strategies for content topics, formats, and campaigns. Zontee Hou, Marketing Advisor at Convince & Convert, highlights the need to reinvent content strategies and double down on key audience segments. She says, “With a possible recession looming, many marketers might face tightening belts, which can often lead to teams cutting advertising spend or testing. Instead of tightening belts across the board, it’s more important than ever to revisit your understanding of your key audiences, make sure that you double down on content specifically for them, and create more actionable, short-form content for them. Whether providing daily tips via SMS or creating TikTok videos that educate, content that’s short and sweet ­— and demonstrates relevance — will keep those most loyal customers engaged.”

Focusing on robust, original, and high-quality content

In a crowded landscape, original content helps your brand have a unique POV and establish credibility. Your brand can build trust or reinforce your position as a trusted source of information and ideas. This also improves your brand’s authority in a particular field, helping with search engine rankings and driving more organic traffic to your website. Original content can also help set your brand apart from its competitors and build deeper engagement with their audiences.

“As writers, we also need to add as much media to our pages as possible. That means adding audio, video, images, diagrams, infographics, photos (original, not stock), and other media formats to the pages we write where it makes sense. We need to make our content pages as robust as possible. For instance, Google understands photos on a deep level. That’s why adding original photos matters (vs. stock photos). Google can tell whether a photo shows a dentist or a dalmatian. Google knows!” says Sherry Bonelli, a Google Business Profile Product Expert and SEO geek.

4 tips for setting up your team for success

Align on vision goals and priorities

Content marketing leaders and their teams must agree on a clear and compelling vision and goals that ladder up to that vision. This becomes even more important during challenging times when an organization re-evaluates its plan and possibly updates its goals, priorities, and tactics. Communicate the market challenges, any pivots, and how this would impact their day-to-day activities. By rallying your content marketing team around a shared vision, you can foster a positive, productive, and collaborative team environment and ultimately lead to more successful content marketing outcomes in 2023.

Revisit your plan, processes, and more

As a content leader, now is a good time to step back and revisit your current plan to ensure that the content marketing function reflects the current state of the economy and your business. Adjust your content marketing goals, segments, and KPIs as appropriate. Look at metrics that can help align your content marketing efforts with business goals. Also, re-evaluate your content marketing stack, the content creation process, distribution channels, and success metrics, then make changes to streamline and optimize these areas. Changing times may call for a swift change in strategies and tactics to stay current and relevant.

Encourage new skill development

As organizations prepare to navigate slowing markets, upskilling gives your team the skills and knowledge they need to adapt to new, “do more with less” realities. Offer training and education opportunities to help your content marketing team boost productivity and stay current with the shifting trends, techniques, and technologies. If you’re not already doing it, foster collaboration with cross-functional partners (e.g., channel, data science, design) to help your team learn from their perspectives. Content marketers enjoy creative assignments — encourage your team to experiment with new tools and content formats and constantly test and iterate their output.

Collect and act on feedback

By getting feedback from your content team, you can identify gaps and take corrective action to ensure everyone is aligned, especially if the shifting landscape has resulted in any changes affecting team members. One-on-one discussions can help you gain in-depth feedback and address specific concerns or challenges. You can also field anonymous surveys/feedback forms to gather their thoughts and opinions, or on specific topics you wish to assess.

Use insights to improve planning, internal processes, and your marketing stack and weed out any blockers to efficient content development processes. Budget and other constraints may prevent you from acting on ideas that benefit your team. When this happens, share this with your team and your desire to implement feedback-driven improvements should resources become available. Letting your team know why potentially-helpful feedback isn’t being implemented will mitigate any disappointment and keep them motivated to continue providing feedback in the future.

Summary

To set up their teams for success in 2023, content marketing leaders must revisit their priorities and assumptions and listen to and invest in their people. Doing so will give your team the best chance to maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges inherent in any new year, especially challenging ones.