Digital marketing isn't a set-and-forget strategy. New marketing trends, technology and evolving consumer and market demands keep digital marketing in a constant state of metamorphosis. If the last decade has shown us anything, the digital landscape is ever-changing, and to be on the ball, you need to be ahead of your competitors.
To help you align your brand marketing to future changes and stay ahead of the curve, we've researched the 2023 trends that'll most impact digital marketing.
1. Social media influencer marketing
According to research by Edelman, only one in three consumers say they can trust most of the brands they buy from. Furthermore, 67% of customers agree they may buy a company's product because of its good reputation, but they'll stop if they don't come to trust the company.
In response, many brands are partnering with influencers to help them cultivate strong brand awareness, recognition and trust. Influencers are people or entities with a receptive fan base (followers) that they can persuade (influence) towards a certain action. They may be content creators, celebrities, models, or marketers with a huge or rising social media following. Partnering with influencers builds brand credibility, as 37% of consumers trust social media influencers over mainstream brands.
To succeed in influencer marketing in 2023, design an influencer marketing strategy. With a solid strategy, you'll pick the right influencers to elevate your brand's credibility and awareness with your target market, boosting your sales in the long run.
2. Marketing automation
Every marketing campaign has many repetitive functions that can be automated with the right tools. These are everyday processes such as project assignments, social media posting, new project requests, messaging, email marketing, task reminders and workflow status updates.
These recurrent marketing tasks can eat into your productive time, preventing you from completing other, more productive functions like creating fresh marketing content or analysing key insights from your marketing data.
Automation tools are particularly crucial today, seeing the greater part of marketing is data-driven. Conventionally, automation tools have supported data collection and behavioural observation. But in 2023 and subsequent years, data will advance signal-based marketing, which will interpret signals from the customer and help you better understand what customers want, both now and in the future.
Next-gen automation tools learn from old customer data and predict their future actions. As such, you'll be empowered to automate messages addressing future customer needs. This is a welcome innovation, considering how much effort it takes to derive key insights from predictive analytics manually.
3. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in content creation
Generative AI is improving daily, making automated content generation the most disruptive trend in contemporary content marketing. Cutting-edge AI programs like Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) are already creating quality human-like text. GPT-4 will likely debut in 2023, offering more automation functions, better accuracy, and lower bias.
While content automation tools are unlikely to eliminate the need for human content creators, they make content curation, creativity and predictive marketing much easier. You may not have the resources to immediately roll out sophisticated automation tools like GPT-3 in 2023 because they're costly to acquire and train. Still, you can use more affordable tools like Marketmuse or Article Forge to assist you in meeting your content creation aims.
The upside of generative AI is that once you train your model, you can fine-tune it on the go to suit different content. This makes generative AI extremely convenient for digital marketers who need varied types of content.
4. Video marketing
Video marketing has been one of the top marketing strategies for years. However, video production and delivery advancements have steadily increased its importance, as well as transformed the best practices for video advertising.
Some of the video marketing trends you should cash in on in 2023 include:
- Search-optimised video
- Live video
- Virtual and augmented reality
- Vlogs and social media stories
- Silent videos
- Smartphone production
A great video pays dividends since you can release it through multiple channels without reproducing it from scratch.
5. Mobile-first marketing
Mobile devices made up 58.99% of global website traffic in the 2nd quarter of 2022. An even larger percentage of web traffic will likely come from mobile in 2023 and beyond. Pay more attention to mobile-first marketing in your digital marketing approach to take advantage of this trend.
A mobile-first marketing approach requires you to tailor your website and marketing content precisely for your mobile users so that they can consume and engage with your brand marketing message effortlessly. Mobile-delivered content is more appealing and personal to consumers. To execute mobile-first marketing effectively, consider the following 2023 best practices:
- Utilize target messaging
- Employ chatbots to advance personalization
- Create relevant and exclusive content that's mobile-friendly
- Leverage SMS and in-app messaging
- Use geo-targeting marketing, QR codes, and push notifications
To nail mobile-first marketing, you must embrace fresh ways of designing and disseminating marketing content via mobile and optimize your e-commerce storefront to support and advance mobile commerce.
Source: Entrepreneur
Image: Pexels
