As the end of the year approaches, the time for goal-setting begins. Perhaps you’d like to increase qualified leads, accelerate the growth of your business, or simply improve your revenue in the next quarter. Regardless of your goal for the new year, one thing is for certain – it’s difficult to reach an audience and achieve success without a great content marketing strategy. With that in mind, here are some essential steps you should take to prepare a killer content marketing strategy and start 2023 off on the right foot:

Establish clear objectives

Along with your main business goals, each piece of content you put out should have a defined purpose as well. Having clear and specific objectives in mind will allow you to develop a more detailed content marketing plan and put you on the right path toward reaching success. Start with a mission statement to keep your team focused on what’s important, including your target audience, content plan, and its benefits and values. Make sure your content marketing objectives align with your business goals to strengthen your strategy, whether that means raising brand awareness or boosting social media engagement.

Focus on the right channels

You likely already know which channels your audience prefers due to their digital engagement, shares, and likes. While it might be tempting to establish a presence on all online platforms, it’s recommended to keep your content strategy focused on what matters most – the channels that already give you great results. Consider which platforms are generating the most conversions, whether your focus is on visuals or text, which channels are your competitors using, and whether you have the time and resources to be active on several channels. Answering these questions will help you select the best channels for your marketing needs, leading to a more concentrated content strategy.

Perform a content audit

Don’t overlook the content you’ve already created either. It likely contains some positive and negative aspects, as well as high-performing pieces. You can’t know what’s currently working without conducting a content audit. You can use easily accessible online tools to automate this process, logging all your content from blog posts to podcasts. This will give you unique insight into your content’s performance, audience preferences, areas of improvement, and new SEO opportunities. With this information, you will be better equipped to close any content gaps and devise a more successful strategy for the following year.

Select your content types

Content can come in numerous forms, from the blog and social media posts to infographics and email marketing. You don’t need to create all content types to ensure an effective strategy; just focus on the aspects that are more likely to bring success. Long-form content is quite popular at the moment, making it a preferred solution for articles and blog posts. In 2023, engaging images and videos are expected to rise as well, being a great content option you can easily create yourself. For instance, you can buy Canon cameras online and shoot your products, workplace, employees, and more. This type of unique visual media tends to be favored among audiences.

Do some keyword research

Search engine optimization (SEO) is still a key factor in expanding outreach and driving leads. Apart from strong linking strategies, keywords are still as important as ever here. Do some keyword research, choose the most relevant ones to your business, and implement them into your content through text, descriptions, titles, etc. With the use of mobile devices and smart speakers rising, it would also be wise to optimize for voice search in the years to come. This means prioritizing natural language and aiming to answer potential questions your audience might be asking with your content.

Prioritize personalization

Personalization is another critical aspect to focus on in 2023 as audiences begin demanding more customized experiences. A personalized content strategy will enable you to deliver better and more unique experiences to your audience, giving your brand a competitive edge and increasing your chances of success. You can do this by creating customer journey maps, understanding what users need from each piece of content, and then aiming to fulfill their requirements through targeted keywords, automated content suggestions, personalized email marketing strategies, and similar tactics.

Tailor content to the UX

Another factor that is still vital to success is the user experience (UX), which ensures your audience remains engaged when visiting your content pages. This includes important website-specific aspects you should aim to enhance, such as making your website mobile-friendly, increasing the site loading time, and using a great web-safe font. Don’t overlook any page-specific optimizations either if you want to strengthen your strategy. Smaller paragraphs, bulleted lists, and visuals can all aid in providing a better experience.

Finally, leverage analytics tools to track your performance and make any changes along the way, if needed. With high-quality content and the helpful advice mentioned above, your content marketing strategy is bound to bring success in 2023.