Online marketing trends for 2023
Brands will need to pay even closer attention to online marketing trends in 2023, as the current year is fully impacted by the livelihood crisis that is hitting the vast majority of the world.
This means it’s even more important for brands to rethink their messaging and research and refine their 2023 strategy. To do this, marketers need to be aware of upcoming trends so they can plan and capitalise on new trends.
What digital marketing trends will emerge in 2023?
How can we use these trends to our advantage?
Digital marketing is constantly evolving. What is popular one minute may be irrelevant the next. The WebMa team helps you stay up to date with this article.
Digital marketing trends for 2023
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics
You’ve probably seen ads for products you didn’t search for, but when you saw them, you clicked on them and ended up buying them?
This is all thanks to so-called virtual assistants, which are completely changing the way consumers buy products: limiting or even expanding the range of products with specific recommendations, thus enabling people to buy products they have never seen before.
With the right amount of shopper data and predictive analytics, we can know what shoppers are going to buy before they even get near the checkout. Data analytics and artificial intelligence allow us to combine data to optimise the speed and quality of logistics, for example.
Blueshift reports that 28% of marketers use AI for product recommendations, while 26% already use it to optimise their campaigns. AI can also help with data collection, analysis, reporting and strategic marketing planning. It can help us make decisions based on the marketing statistics we have, rather than intuition.
AI and analytics are also being used by search engines and digital marketplaces such as Amazon to understand customer preferences to increase efficiency and profits.
If all this is not convincing enough, here is a striking example of the success of artificial intelligence:
World chess champion Gary Kasparov says he was the first person to lose his job to AI when IBM’s Deep Blue beat him at chess. Deep Blue wasn’t really artificial intelligence yet, just a supercomputer that could predict 200 million moves per second, apparently far more than the human brain is capable of.
2. Account based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing leverages the combined expertise of classic marketing and sales teams to find, target and engage selected customer groups that require personalised advertising, and ultimately, to buy. The goal is to personalise the entire shopping experience, using content, direct messages, email, video and other tools that are useful to the customer.
In today’s digital world, capturing the attention of potential customers is harder than ever. With ABM, we can find and target the customers that sales wants to reach directly and with personalised content. In the past, for B2B companies, the goal was to generate as many leads as possible, but that’s not going to result in the best ROI.
How does this happen?
The benefits of ABM:
- It can help you achieve a higher ROI by targeting qualified leads instead of mass lead generation.
- Because account-based marketing focuses on promising and high-value customers, we can spend their resources more efficiently, so we advertise specifically to those who are sure to be valuable to us.
- The customer lifetime value of customers reached through account-based marketing is higher than average, because we can display personal messages and appeals on our website or in our ads that the user is interested in.
- With Account Based Marketing, our customers are more likely to interact with us, so real activity between brand and customer remains constant.
- The data collected through Account Based Marketing is more detailed and can provide insights into our customers’ habits that we would not otherwise be able to gather.
- It aligns the work of sales and marketing.
3. Conversational marketing
Conversational marketing allows you to have real-time conversations with your potential customers, build relationships and answer their questions quickly and efficiently, increasing their engagement with your brand. Conversational marketing aims to create a unique experience for each user by providing an interactive experience through chatbots, voice search, SMS and other digital channels. While the chatbot “talks” to the user using artificial intelligence, we ourselves can gain valuable insights about our customers that can be used to personalise the content of the ads we target to them, increasing our conversion rates and revenue, while the conversation does not require extra human resources and the presence of, for example, a customer service representative.
4. Voice search
The growing use of voice search has led companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies.In the US, 40% of all internet searches are voice-based. Voice Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) is becoming increasingly important as the use of digital assistants continues to grow and people become more comfortable using their voice to search online.
How is voice search different from traditional search?
- It’s quicker to say than to type the phrase or sentence you’re looking for.
- People using voice search talk as if they were talking to a friend, so they use longtail keywords in their searches.
- A simple example:
– In case of typing: dog grooming Budapest
– In case of voice search, where is the dog groomer nearest to me in Budapest?
According to official Google data, 27% of the world’s online population uses voice search on mobile. Most voice searches are for the weather, playing music, shopping and answering short questions. For example: where is the nearest pharmacy? What’s the fastest way to lose weight?
5. User-generated content
In the current competitive environment, it is even more important to convince our prospective customers that our products and services will be the best for them, that our value proposition is the best choice.
Of course, we can put better and better photos and informative text, facts and figures on our website and social media platforms. But with this “self-promotion”, we only achieve success up to a certain limit. If we really want to win potential customers, we need to convince our existing customers that they are in the right place. Just think of the customer reviews.
Worldwide, nearly nine in ten consumers (88%) check reviews before making a purchase or choosing a service provider (Podium, 2021).
What is user-generated content?
All written or visual content that people create: posting about it on social media, making video testimonials and talking about their experiences with the product they bought and the company. Live videos of people unboxing products.
How to get one?
- Create a review page and send an email after the purchase inviting the consumer to give their opinion.
- If they shop with us in person, ask some customers to tell us why they chose us in a short video.
- Offer special discounts to those who rate us or post about us on their social media pages.
6. Video, video and more video
It’s important for customers to make sure that whoever they spend their money with is the best product or service for them, because they are experts in the field. To prove this, it’s worth posting short educational videos and product tutorials on your website or social media platforms. As we’ve already discussed in a previous article, 96% of people also watch videos to learn more about a product or service before making a purchase. As marketers, we all know how informative and effective a good video campaign can be. Such is its power as a tool for information and engagement. In a previous article, we wrote that 69% of consumers choose video as a format to learn about what a brand has to offer. (Wyzowl, 2021) The three most commonly used channels that businesses use are YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram.
7. Livestreaming
It’s no surprise that brands are spending big on YouTube, Instagram and even TikTok, and 2023 will be no different. But what’s worth paying one more attention to is Livestreaming. With live, video check-ins, we can show prospective customers our products, give them a behind-the-scenes look at them and even answer their questions live.
8. TikTok
The videos mentioned in the previous point are becoming more and more popular thanks to platforms such as TikTok, which is also becoming increasingly popular in our country. TikTok has become a huge player in social media marketing. TikTok’s advertising revenue is expected to grow from $13 billion in 2022 to $44 billion in 2027, according to the company’s own estimates. From an advertiser’s perspective, the platform is focused on usability and improving ad targeting capabilities, so if you haven’t already and are targeting your business on this platform, you should definitely look into TikTok advertising in 2023.
Source: Flickr.com
9. Influencers
Influencer marketing was a $16.4 billion industry in 2022 and some analyses estimate that the size of the influencer market will reach $84.89 billion by 2028. Influencers recommend products to their followers – but typically only those they use or trust, as they need to remain credible. They often provide personal recommendations and short video tutorials, helping and encouraging their followers through the entire sales funnel, from awareness to consideration to purchase. Influencer marketing ranks second among the trends marketers plan to invest more in in 2023.
Add to this the fact that more than 50% of Gen Z have purchased products based on influencer recommendations.
10. Interactive website features
Features such as an interactive online chat or a calculator help us to quickly answer questions from prospective customers. All this also helps to ensure that our customers don’t abandon our shopping cart. More about this in this article. If, for example, we sell solar panels, which are currently very popular, we can help the user decide exactly what power rating they need with a simple calculator. For example, you can also try out the free ROI calculator on WebMa to see what kind of return on investment you can get from your advertising.
11. Disappearance of the third half-cookie
We’ve covered this phenomenon in some detail before, but for those of you who didn’t come across it then, here’s a brief summary:
With the tightening of GDPR rules in recent years, there has been an increasing focus on customer privacy. With the increased focus on data protection since the GDPR’s recent GDPR rules, the more the GDPR has been enforced, customers will only give their personal data to websites they trust, which will be transparent about their data and where they can change their preferences for how it is handled at any time. According to the GDPR regulation, cookies and IP addresses are also declared to be personal data, so they must comply with a number of data protection provisions when used.
In order to guarantee this data security, Google will soon stop using 3rd-party cookies to track website visitors, limiting the ability of companies to send and display personalised advertising. As a result, it will be crucial for all website owners to start using first-party cookies. Another consequence of the change is that Google is moving from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. So if your website is still using GA3, you need to start migrating to the new version now. If you need any help with the migration, feel free to contact us.
12. Marketing automation – signal-based marketing
We are collecting more and more data about our users and customers, which we need to store and analyse systematically to help us develop an effective marketing strategy. Automation tools help us to do these tasks quickly and cost-effectively. In 2023, our key challenge is to anticipate what our audiences want and build our automation processes to support this. CRM systems can help us analyse our customers’ behaviour to date and use the data to predict what our customers will do next. The definition of this next step will rely on automated internal processes and automation tools to improve the customer experience. These include CRM, social media, advertising, lead management or email marketing tools.
13. Martech trends
If you are new to the concept of Martech, now is the time to discover it for yourself. Martech as a term originated from the words marketing and technology. It is a catch-all term for software used by marketers to create, execute, manage and measure the performance of online and offline content and campaigns. Software, as described above, helps us to work more efficiently and quickly, to know our customers better, to streamline our processes and to plan our multi-channel online marketing campaigns.
14. Generation Z
It’s Generation Z’s world – the older ones are just living in it. They are the first generation to have grown up entirely on the internet, and for them, the platforms that are best suited are those that are dynamic, highly visual and meet their ever-changing needs in new and innovative ways. Generation Z is a huge consumer force whose needs and buying habits we need to understand and reach in their world and reflect in our messages on issues that are important to them. They are now looking almost exclusively for visual content before they buy and about half of their purchases are now made online.
More than half of Generation Z members believe that companies should take a stand on social issues (such as climate change or racial discrimination).
They are also over 50% more likely to buy from a company that treats its employees well and cares about sustainability.
55% of Generation Z say recommendations from influencers are the most influential in their purchasing decisions. BUT. When they shop, influencer recommendations are more important than the opinions of their friends and family.
So, brands that want to connect with Generation Z need to use influencers, pay attention to social responsibility and environmental protection and sustainability.
The 3 most important online marketing channels in 2023
1. Social media
On average, marketers use four different marketing channels in their activities. Of these, social media is the one most used (over 42%). If this figure is still not convincing enough, we should also know that this is the channel with the highest ROI and is only expected to increase, so it is quite obvious that all marketers should be using this tool.
2. My blog and website
3. E-mail marketing
Which media are the most popular?
More than half of marketers use videos, 47% use images, 33% use blog articles and/or infographics, and 28% use podcasts or other audio.
Of these tools, video has the highest ROI, followed by images and blog posts.
How often should you publish content?
This question has been asked many, many times by our customers. The short answer is “as often as we can consistently post quality content.” There are, of course, optimal posting frequencies for different social media platforms, which are worth looking at when planning, so that if you choose a medium, you have the capacity to post the quality and quantity of content you want.
Summary of 2023 trends
2023 will be an exciting and challenging year for marketers. Brands will need to think carefully about the messages they want to use to engage their customers. The use of artificial intelligence and account-based marketing is inevitable for those who want to stay competitive. Short-form video and privacy are areas that everyone needs to address. Technical and software solutions will be an indispensable part of the day-to-day work, as it is no longer enough to meet current needs, but also to assess the likely actions of customers. We need to select the right platforms for campaigns and produce customised ads, typically videos, that fit into the overall communication of the company and exploit synergies between platforms.
Do you need help to do all this? WebMa digital marketing agency can help you understand and implement these new trends. Our team takes the time to get to know and understand your business so we know exactly what you need.