The ultimate guide to content marketing trends in 2023

In a landscape where online businesses are vying for attention on the internet, companies employ unique content marketing trends to improve their online presence. Nowadays, you can find unique approaches to selling their products and services to stand out. In this guide by QWERTYLABS, we’ll share content marketing trends that can change your business and help you learn the ever-shifting market. 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that brands use to produce and distribute content for consumers to promote their products. The types of content can vary from writing articles, producing videos, creating illustrations and social media posts.

The goal of using content marketing is the following:

• Attracting new consumers
• Retaining current consumers
• Showing authority on a topic
• Establishing an online presence
• Encourage brand awareness.

Brand websites, pages, links, and affiliate sites will commonly have content marketing for the brand while partnering with other websites to increase consumer views.

What are content marketing trends?

Trends are actions or styles many people look for, despite coming and going with the times. This is especially true in online casinos, where sites are keen on staying updated to keep up with consumer expectations and remain competitive. To fully gain from these benefits, advertising measures like better and seamless production are implemented alongside Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts like ensuring that articles and websites have high rankings in search engines.

The result of all these efforts can be seen in benefits like building brand awareness, increasing web traffic, and attracting more consumers are only some reasons why brands have been paying more attention to this branch of marketing. When employed properly, content marketing allows your business to adapt to consumer behaviour and, in turn, use this to generate income. 

Why keeping up with content marketing trends is essential 

Improvement in the field of content marketing is an essential part because the market always changes. Here are some of the factors improved with updated content marketing trends:

It helps you stay relevant 

Keeping up to date with content marketing trends ensures you’re relevant in your market. This will help your audience stay engaged with your content. For example, adding elements such as short video clips in your casino guides will offer a fresh perspective to your readers. 

It gives you a competitive edge 

Thinking out of the box and offering something new to your audience helps you stand out. By staying updated with trends, you can incorporate things they don’t find elsewhere, putting your business in a better position than competitors.

A study by Microsoft shows that people's attention span has dropped by 8 seconds. This means that brands have 8 seconds less to either gain a new consumer or lose that consumer’s interest. That’s why when it comes to content creation, you have to offer something to give the audience more reason to engage with your page.

Top content marketing trends for 2023

The 2020s can be considered by many as the age of multimedia consumption, where people consume content from videos, streaming, and clips from social media apps like TikTok and Instagram. With the wide variety of content formats available, marketers, advertisers, and content creators from brands have to collect stats to attract other audiences better and engage current consumers. To keep on top of this and remain competitive, let’s look at some top trends in content marketing in 2023:

Video content marketing 

Social media has become a place where video content thrives, especially since the 2010s. The widespread adoption of the internet and social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok help solidify online video content creation as a necessity in marketing and advertising. Although not one of the latest content marketing trends, it’s still relatively new compared to writing and image forms of content marketing.

Through these videos and platforms, online personalities and brand ambassadors have a direct voice they can use to address and engage with customers. This results in many brands creating collaborations and sponsorships with different influencers and celebrities to capture their people’s attention and potentially convert them into customers. 

Interactive content marketing 

Interactive content marketing combines quizzes, polls, surveys, and games to form a two-way relationship with customers and potential clients. In addition, this type of content makes consumers feel like they’re a part of something bigger and gives them a sense of importance. As such, there’s been growing importance on customer retention, attention, and engagement.

Marketers need to tap into their creativity and resources when doing interactive content marketing because it needs to represent the brand well while also making an unforgettable, fun, and seamless customer engagement experience.

Some of the examples that marketing and advertising specialists use are:

1. Gamification by using leaderboards, progress bars, and badges as a reward for interacting with a site or promotion.
2. Integration of games and polls into social media posts.
3. Addition of audio-centric content like podcasts and music streaming.

For example, if you have an online casino, you can integrate leaderboard games, fun quizzes and surveys to keep your players engaged. If you want more site engagement, this is one of the best content strategies you can do.

Content marketing personalisation 

The main goal of content marketing personalisation is to make buyers feel seen and heard by being relatable and understanding their experiences. You can do this by creating dynamic content.

Dynamic content refers to a website, email, or general part of a page tweaked according to a user’s preferences. An example of this is the recommendations you might get after browsing several clothing items or hobbyist items. The information needed for this can be acquired through context and user behaviour. 

Marketing personalisation tools have become so complex that product suggestions are more geared towards a user’s tastes as it keeps learning about the user. It then becomes more likely that the consumer will buy that product, which tells companies that demand for that product is growing. 

AI and content marketing 

Experts say the future of content marketing is AI due to its convenience, smart suggestions and speed. Using AI technology in collaboration with marketing tools opens many opportunities to improve efficiency, ease of use and response. Many see the integration of AI technology into this industry as one of the vital content marketing future trends today.

One of the AI implementations is the chatbots that consumers can see on a brand’s website. These chatbots have been fed facts about the brand and questions that buyers may ask. These bots can quickly and effectively address queries that users give them. In short, it can accommodate more customers.

Smart chatbots have been present for quite some time and have proven successful. Because of this, experts say that the next step for AI will become more advanced when tied with metaverse technology as it experiments with technologies like VR, animation and blockchain.

Creating a successful content marketing strategy

Creating a content strategy needs an open approach and an open mind. Conducting thorough research, cleanly processing the data, and planning based on solid information is the key to modern-day marketing. 

Those working in the marketing and advertising field make it sound simple, but the reality is that brainstorming a strategy alone is a challenging and extensive process. While there’s no definite recipe for integrating a content strategy, here are a few things to help you get started:

Setting goals and KPIs

To start your marketing strategy, you’ll need some guidelines. Good content marketing strategies need to have metrics and goals so that you can measure how well the targets were reached. 

KPIs can take many forms: sales volume, online and offline impressions, follower growth, and return on investments (ROI) milestones. Identifying your KPIs can also help you build a basis for what your brand or article needs to do to achieve business goals. Some of these goals include reaching a target market, differentiating yourself from the competition in the market, or building more authority on the subject.

Developing a content calendar

After establishing your goals for a project, a content calendar is needed. Content needs to be spaced out through a business timeline for a few reasons like engaging your audience, keeping a topic on track and helping build order within published content types. 

Developing a content calendar also allows marketing teams to collect information and valuable data to increase the prospect of best attracting consumers. These pieces of data are then given to creators like illustrators, writers, and animators to incorporate into their content. Additionally, having a content calendar allows you to allot a specific amount of time on how long you’ll spend on content creation. 

Identifying your target audience

Knowing who your target audience is to make a successful content strategy because it helps content creators know who they’re writing for, what style and tone to use and how best to approach a topic.

There are three essential steps to identifying your target audience, and these are the following:

1. Recording data like demographics, preferences and market segmentation
2. Collecting customer opinions and feedback
3. Using all the collected data to build buyer personas.

Content distribution

After determining your content’s audience and when to publish it, all that’s left is finding out how to share it. 

Since everything is hyper-connected thanks to the internet, it’s not hard to have multiple distribution channels, albeit more competitive. With this in mind, businesses must produce web content for sharing on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For example, if you want to disseminate your casino content faster, you can use Instagram or Twitter to announce promotions or important events. 

Tips for creating high-quality content

Written content for digital marketing is simple at first glance because so many types are available online. However, when it comes to professionally written and branded content, writing techniques like proper structure and good use of grammar need to be polished so that the right information, tone, and voice are carried through to the reader. 

Learning and building expertise about the core information of a brand is needed by writers to write about the topic properly, but that’s only the beginning. Here are some of the tips you can try for high-quality content:

Understanding what your audience needs

Your target audiences will have various reasons for wanting to learn and interact with a brand. This could be with the intention of buying, doing market research, or simply learning out of curiosity. Because there are many reasons, it’s essential to understand what your specific audience needs and wants out of your business.

Brands with an existing customer base can analyse their characteristics and significant traits as a reference point. If not, conducting surveys and polls can help build a basis. 

We’ve previously mentioned buyer personas when discussing identifying the target audience. Defining buyer personas can help discover user intent because there’s already an image and understanding of this group of customers. For example, an older buyer persona will be more responsive to buying health products and marketing strategies aimed towards their mobility and comfort.

Optimising content for search engines 

Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines have become more complex over the past decade. This is due to more complex user searches and the sheer number of websites, articles, social media platforms, and business pages being published daily. Using SEO and content marketing trends together helps your articles and pages rank higher in search engines, meaning more visibility, page clicks, and potential customers.

It’s important to optimise, organise, and improve your content through search engine optimisation (SEO) to stand out from the many brands that also use search engines. Here are a few steps to help you get started:

1. Brainstorm a topic that you or the brand would like to discuss
2. Use keyword research tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to find words and phrases linked to your topic of choice.
3. Make a structure of pillar pages, which are the core parts of the page and cover topic clusters associated with the main topic.
4. Create content with the chosen keywords and topics 
5. Become consistent with the flow of content by using a content calendar
6. Track the progress of the pages using KPIs like page traffic, organic search results, viewer impressions, and viewer count.
7. Adjust your methods, content, and research according to the latest review results.

Creating visually appealing content 

Creating visually appealing content requires skilled content creators, advertisers, and marketing specialists to work together. All these departments need to collaborate because marketers will know what image the brand would like to have, while content creators and advertisers can help produce this and ensure its quality. 

Content creators like graphic designers, photographers, and video editors are some of the most common specialists you’ll find using multimedia elements like images, audio, and videos to make visual content for brands.

Another way to make visually appealing content is through researching user-generated content (USG), which refers to product reviews, hobby blogs, and social media posts from people outside the brand. 

Social media influencers on visual-based platforms like Instagram are a particularly good way to create USG, as they create posts that balance product placement, aesthetics and audience engagement. 

Writing high-quality copy 

Producing high-quality content is one of the best content marketing strategies you can do. It’s important to distinguish that the tone and style of writing online can differ from offline writing because of the differences in target markets. Despite this, writing good content has rules like avoiding controversial language, ensuring high readability and accessibility and presenting information with quality research relevant to the brand and user’s interest.

Knowing that various articles will help keep readers interested is also significant. Individual articles are excellent as stand-alone pieces and can be used to open new topics or gauge interest from readers. Meanwhile, a series of articles, like how-to’s and guides, can go in-depth and help add more context for readers and keep them on the page.

Choose QWERTYLABS for all your content marketing solutions

With an ever-shifting industry, staying updated with the latest marketing trends is critical. Making high-quality content like articles, blogs, and videos takes multiple departments, specialists, tools, and time. In addition, solid insight, research, and attention to trends are crucial to keeping up with industry standards and business competitors. 

Suppose you’re looking for unique concepts and actionable recommendations for your business. In that case, it’s best to have a team of professionals like QWERTYLABS ready to undertake this challenging but rewarding task. Get in touch with us today and talk about how your brand can become more than a trend follower but a trendsetter.

Content marketing trends FAQs

Why is content marketing essential for businesses?

Content marketing is significant for many reasons, mainly because it builds trust and engagement with buyers, informs them about your products and services, and builds authority within the industry.

How can I stay up-to-date with content marketing trends?

Thorough insight and analysis from teams like research and development, marketing, advertising, and content help businesses stay ready, adaptable, and knowledgeable about content marketing trends.

What are the best practices for creating high-quality content?

The best practices for creating high-quality content include knowing your audience, conducting thorough research, and applying good writing techniques.

How do I measure the effectiveness of my content marketing efforts?

Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) before making a content marketing plan can help bring direction and metrics to the type of strategy you want to implement.