If anything, the last couple of years has taught us that the world is very unpredictable and hyper-sensitive to the volatility of our ever-changing environments.
This is even more prevalent in marketing, but ever more so in digital marketing. The digital marketing landscape has changed time and time again within the last two years from going solely web-based to mobile and application focused. A great example of this is the rise of delivery services such as Uber Eats and Checkers Sixty60. This is a great example of taking what had already previously been working, Uber Eats, and improving on your competitors’ strengths, Checkers Sixty60. Why do I touch on this? Well simply because this is exactly what will be happening in 2023 – we will simply be impersonating what we see in the world around us, and by us I mean creatives, visionaries and digital marketers.
This leads me to the reason you are all here. Here are my top predictions pertaining to marketing and digital marketing for 2023:
1. Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Said to launch in October 2023, GA4 seeks to capture the entire user journey instead of giving marketers a snapshot or just a piece of the puzzle. If you don’t know by now but this is HUGE! One of the biggest benefits of GA4 is that you can use it for your website or mobile app, or both. Prior to GA4, we had to turn to external or 3rd-party applications to gather our customer insights. We can now utilise GA4 to consolidate our website and mobile application statistics in a single property. Enough about what GA4 is, more about my prediction. I predict that we will have more customer-centric journeys and multiple touch points with brands. This will result in unique customer journeys and not generic, ‘automated’ mailers but more insightful customer-first journeys.
2. Influencer marketing/User Generated Content
Brands don’t have to overextend themselves and produce all of their marketing collateral and content on their own. A great way to lighten the workload on marketing teams while highlighting customers is to leverage user-generated content (UGC). UGC is more authentic and trustworthy because it comes from a brand’s customers and advocates.
By tapping into UGC, brands can effectively start to shape brand perception and sentiment by highlighting content from invested, loyal customers. This sort of content is also highly effective at boosting user engagement and interaction, especially on social media, while driving increased conversions and revenue—ads with UGC reap click-through rates five times greater than average. What was once only used by a handful of marketers is now being used by pretty much every business that exists digitally. The influence that some influencers have, whether that’s through Tiktok to Instagram and YouTube, companies collaborating with these users can generate a great ROI.
3. Application-based marketing / Chatbots
The greatest sales tool and marketing person for your brand is your website. Teams who only market to their audience when they are ‘online’ will fall behind in 2023. Brands need to be ‘switched-on’ all of the time in 2023. Big brands are going to make leaps and bounds in terms of retaining market share and acquiring new business by utilising this approach. The use of chatbots for example has fundamentally changed the customer experience and the digital marketing landscape forever. Chatbots have become more useful for marketers and as such, have become another source of investment. They help small businesses and those not operating all hours of the day, to answer queries and engage with customers who might need assistance outside of working hours. Be on the lookout for more brands utilising chatbots and building their own applications.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing is by far, one of the best marketing methods currently being used. With 89% of marketers using email marketing primarily for generating leads, it’s a trend that will continue thriving into 2023. Almost everyone in the world has an email account, making it extremely accessible for brands and businesses to connect with their customers.
When it comes to product launches, it’s beneficial to use email subscriber lists to reach existing customers and those that have perhaps signed up but not bought anything yet. With product launch emails for small businesses, they can help significantly widen the profit margins you make as a business during what is often a critical time for a new company.
5. Unique customer experience
Consumers want everything and they want it all as quickly as possible. With a lot of marketing teams, real-time messaging platforms have become a great opportunity to not only reach the customer quickly and directly but for data collection also.
As a digital marketer, the more these real-time messaging platforms mature, the more they can make from it when it comes to customer data. They can almost become a data hub that can store everything you’ll need to understand more about your customer than ever before.
6. Conversational marketing
In general, the dominating marketing trends today are those that are highly focused on brands adopting a more conversational and personal tone. This is what’s better known as conversational marketing, which strives to establish a one-on-one, real-time connection between customers and those marketing to them. The goal of conversational marketing is to enhance customer interaction and experience by providing instant solutions, resulting in higher levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
7. Omnichannel marketing
In the past, Marketers have focused on single or complimentary channels when deciding on approaches to gain new customers. Omnichannel Marketing is a somewhat new shift that will continue to gain traction in 2023.
Omnichannel marketing is keeping a consistent brand experience across any channel a customer could interact with your brand. This means not just tracking what sort of feedback customers give in specific channels, but also bringing unified campaigns and messaging to potential prospects. These strategies help to give the power back to the customer and could be things like purchasing via Facebook messenger and picking up in-store, or identifying opinions of software posted on a message board and making changes in the product.
The marketing teams that allow customers and prospects more freedom on where they interact with the brand will be winners in 2023.
8. Answer-based marketing
Brands should consider developing an answers-based content marketing strategy in 2023, rather than a traditional knowledge and promotional-based content strategy. The impetus for this is that last year, zero-click searches accounted for more than half of all Google search queries. This means that when users search for something in Google, a majority didn’t click on anything after executing their search to get what they were looking for.
Brands need to develop content that directly answers a query without searchers necessarily having to click on a link to find it. This is due to the rise of more platforms incentivizing native content. Google no longer requires clicks via features snippets, and social media networks are showcasing more content that keeps eyes on their social networks. Brands who are focused on creating amazing, and memorable content in the channels where customers live will see better returns in the long term.
9. Zero-party data
Big data has become significantly more important to businesses than ever before. The way we gather data though has had to change due to privacy laws in place across the globe.
When it comes to digital marketing, a hot trend in 2023 is likely going to involve businesses being more proactive in gathering intel through a variety of practices. For example, form building can be helpful in finding out information from your customers that could influence your next product launch or service.
10. Digital marketing agencies
As a small business or a big one for that matter, outsourcing remains a great way to get more done. No company wants to be held back by opportunities because they’ve simply not got enough resources in-house.
If you’re needing more help with marketing, why not outsource the help of digital marketing agencies? For small businesses and start-ups, this could be the difference between making a little progress over the first year to making big moves in the industry.
A lot of these digital marketing agencies also have a lot more knowledge to share and implement into growing trends within the digital environment.
Looking for someone to bounce ideas off and to chat more about what marketing may look like in 2023? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or message us on either Whatsapp or Email. 👋
