New Year goals for your content marketing strategy
What should your food and drink brand focus on?
by Natalia Lopez
The New Year is here, and it's time to get your content marketing strategy set. You may have a few ideas about how you want to improve your content marketing this year, but where do you start?
In this post, we will look at six essential New Year goals for content marketing strategies for 2023 and discuss how they could benefit your food and drink brand.
1. Define your strategy
Content marketing is a powerful tool for reaching your audience and generating new business. But like any other strategy, it requires planning and forethought. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a goal in mind before you begin creating content.
Once you've created a content strategy, the next step is to make sure it aligns with the goals and objectives of your business.
Your overall goal should be to build trust, generate leads and create customers. The first step in this process is defining your audience, who they are and what they want from your brand. Next, determine your budget for content marketing efforts during 2023. Then, outline how much time can be dedicated within the company to creating new content. Finally, define which resources are available for creating new content, such as writers, editors, designers, photographers etc.
2. Drive customer loyalty and brand advocacy
Content marketing is a great way to build relationships with your customers. Your customers will be more engaged and loyal when you provide helpful information and help them make decisions. Brand transparency also builds trust; an estimated 94% of consumers stay loyal to brands they consider genuine.
The idea behind your overall digital strategy should be to leverage the strengths of each social media channel to get your message in front of the right people at the right time. Focus on topics relevant to your brand, like recipes, product demos or seasonal trends. That way, it’s easy for people who follow you on social media and stay up to date with the latest updates.
3. Use new formats, new platforms and new tools to enable creativity
As you know, content marketing is a mix of creativity and know-how. And if you want to make your content strategy even more effective, think about creating new types of content to take advantage of as many social media platforms as possible.
The way people consume information has changed dramatically in recent years: social media has become one of the most important channels for communicating with consumers. To reach your audience on these platforms, you will need to publish content in different formats: videos, photographs, or gifs are examples of what can be used today.
Experimenting with technology and tools and researching trends from other industries can also give your team and brand a valuable creative boost.
4. Harness the power of video marketing
If you’ve already got a video strategy, definitely keep it up. If not, add one to your content plan for this year.
Use videos for your social media and create short clips that share tips or behind-the-scenes footage of your employees at work. Then post these videos on Facebook or Instagram with relevant hashtags, so they get discovered by people searching those terms.
Aside from their use in social media posts and emails, videos are also great for advertising and SEO. You could also use them on influencer platforms like Instagram Stories or Snapchat to reach out to potential customers who may not be following you yet.
For email marketing, consider making an animated GIF or short video that explains the benefits of your product/service and add it as an attachment to emails sent out to customers who have recently purchased from you.
5. Think long term
Thinking long-term is vital to creating a successful content marketing strategy. Yes, it’s tempting to focus on the short-term goals right in front of you and try to get them done as quickly as possible. But if you plan on being successful over time, you have to keep your eye on the prize.
That means ensuring your content is consistent and relevant and measuring success. It also means thinking about the bigger picture: what do these campaigns help achieve? Is there a larger purpose? Do they bring value to customers or potential customers?
6. Measure success
Finally, measuring its success is another integral part of a successful content marketing strategy. Like with any other digital marketing campaign, you need to evaluate your efforts regularly and learn from them as you go.
To measure the success of your campaigns, make sure that you have set up clear KPIs before starting. Remember: it’s not enough just to create good content—you also need to track whether people are engaging with it effectively and improving their knowledge or interest in your products or services as a result. The best way to do this is by using metrics like traffic sources, audience age range, gender split and engagement indicators like comments and social shares.
If there's little engagement for content, this could mean that it wasn't interesting or informative enough. Consider posting another piece on a similar theme to see if that gets higher engagement numbers than the previous ones; if so, this gives you some ideas of how to adapt your content, so it is more effective for your target audience.
Wrapping up
Content marketing is all about creating interesting, engaging content that engages your audience. If you can do that consistently and effectively, then you’ll be well on your way to building a compelling brand story. We hope these six tips will help you on your journey!
