The new year is officially here, and it’s time to take a look at the top marketing trends for 2023.
In 2022 saw a near return back to normal life, where we combined shopping and physical events with digital experiences. This change, and the expected increase in physical events again, will have big impacts on 2023 marketing trends.
At Cyberclick we have made a selection of the most interesting trends you should keep track of, so read on!
The marketing plan as we knew it is dead. In the past, most brands used to make a one-year marketing plan and very rarely modified it. They just executed it according to plan. In the digital environment that is not feasible.
Digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving and that means that if we make an annual plan we have to review it at least every 3 months to adapt it to the current situation and to not miss any prime sales or marketing opportunities.
We recommend creating a marketing plan focused on agile and dynamic methodologies, based on data and experimentation. Most importantly, the user must always be at the center of the plan, to meet their needs and concerns at all times.
You must keep in mind that in marketing and technology, there is no magic recipe that fits everyone. The good thing is that we have many options, such as the ones we will discuss in this article, and each company must find the one that will allow it to grow.
TikTok has become one of the trendiest social networks in recent years. Many brands have already implemented it in their marketing strategies due to its popularity, with the idea of reaching young audiences. Its more than 1 billion monthly active users (according to Statista) has caught the attention of many companies, and now it is expected that throughout 2023 the number of users will increase even more.
Moreover, the short video format is not only making it big on TikTok. Instagram’s Reels and YouTube’s Shorts are betting heavily on this format and will both offer more monetization and reach tools to compete with TikTok and attract content creators and brands in 2023.
Speaking of TikTok, do you prefer searching on TikTok or Google? Your answer could be an indicator of your age.
According to Google's senior vice president, younger users are increasingly searching directly on TikTok when they have a question or need. He revealed that according to internal Google studies, 40% of users between 18 and 24 years old when looking for a place to eat, for example, do not search on Google Maps or Search, but on networks such as Instagram or TikTok. The reason is that they prefer more visual formats, such as video and photos.
This means that, depednign on your audience, it may be worth investing time into expanding your SEO reach to TikTok and start creating valuable content based on the platform’s SEO. Not only will you appear in TikTok, but also in Google itself, as it has recently started to insert TikTok in some searches.
And if you're a B2B company, don't rule out TikTok. According to a HubSpot report, B2B companies have higher engagement and ROI on TikTok than other B2C brands. In fact, 58% of B2B marketers decided to increase investment in TikTok in 2022, a significantly higher percentage than B2C.
If you're a B2B company, 2023 may be the last big year to sign up for the TikTok wave and enjoy the huge organic reach the platform offers. Its algorithm is part of the success, as it will help recommend your content to the audience that's interested in it, even if it's more niche than a B2C company.
In 2023, Brand equity will be essential for driving company growth, since it is what makes the company influential and respectable and, consequently, increases the value of what it offers. All this leads to the customer having greater confidence in the purchase decision, in addition to the brand being better known among the target audience.
In addition, higher brand value makes it easier to attract investors and generate confidence in them, as well as to be more reliable among suppliers.
Brand equity is very important in marketing strategies, but its importance will continue to grow. This is because it not only comprises the image that the consumer has of it, but it is what manages to create an advantage over competitors.
If a few years ago having an extremely well-designed and curated Instagram profile was all the rage, nowadays the trend is to be authentic and approachable.
We have seen this trend in social networks such as TikTok, which encourages the creation of videos recorded with the cell phone itself, with simple editing that is often limited to text and quick cuts. But now there is another newer example with BeReal.
This photo-based social network sends you a single notification during the day, at a random time. Then you have 2 minutes to post your daily photo, and it has to be a photo you take at that moment, not an image from your gallery. Although there are currently few brands creating content on BeReal, it is a social network to watch in 2023.
BeReal also shows that users increasingly value authenticity as a value and as a way of communicating. Apply this idea in other social networks and when sending messages to your potential customers.
Aligning sales, marketing and customer service results in optimized operations and increased revenue.
Companies have two objectives: to serve their customers and to generate revenue. The two objectives are intertwined: one cannot be achieved without the other. Hence the importance of the RevOps movement.
Revenue Operations (or RevOps) refers to the integration of marketing, sales and customer service into a single, appropriate strategy. It is gaining ground in B2B organizations as a method to improve productivity and growth.
Technology will be essential to unify the work of these teams. Having a good CRM, for example, will be essential.
Surely you've heard of the Metaverse and it's no surprise that it's one of the trends of we’re tracking in 2023. However, do you really know what it is?
The Metaverse is a virtual world in which users can carry out activities of their daily lives while in contact with other users. Working, studying, playing games or holding meetings are some of the activities that can be done in this new reality. To achieve this, users need virtual or augmented reality devices, such as the Meta Quests from the company formerly known as Facebook.
And, as a brand, the Metaverse offers you a new universe in which to expand and communicate.
However, keep in mind that the Metaverse is currently more of a concept than a reality. There are several players developing technology, both software and hardware, with the idea of having a final product in 2024, 2025 and beyond.
Customer loyalty consists of carrying out marketing and sales strategies, with the aim that customers continue to trust the brand after purchasing a product or service.
In other words, the aim is to make them become regular customers and buy again.
If one of the marketing trends for 2023 is to improve customer loyalty, it is because brands have detected that it reduces marketing expenses. Building customer loyalty has a much lower cost than acquiring customers from scratch. It also improves the lifetime value of the customer, which increases the average value of each purchase and the frequency of these; achieving that companies have more stable income.
It has also been found that loyal customers are so satisfied with the brand that they do not need to go to the competition, which improves the positioning of the company within the market and within the sector to which it belongs.
In addition to all this, when stable relationships are established with customers, more and more information about them becomes available. This allows us to know what they need in a much simpler way and to launch more personalized campaigns, which are more effective.
For all these reasons, brands will focus much of their efforts on customer loyalty.
One of the things to expect from brands in 2023 is that they will be much more proactive in the task of data collection. This can be achieved through forms, website registrations, social media sweepstakes, etc. Since even the most basic data can provide information about target customers and clients.
However, the aim is to make use of big data. This is because the more information you have about the target customer or even about the customer themselves, the more data the sales and marketing teams will have to capture their attention and offer them what they want and need at the right time and in the most appropriate way.
If you consume videos on YouTube, you will surely have seen Shorts. These shorter vertical videos are YouTube's answer to TikTok, and in recent months they have been gaining presence on the platform.
You may not be sold on the format but it's here to stay.
At the end of 2022, YouTube announced two big new features for Shorts that we believe will be trendsetting in 2023.
For one, they will be monetizable. Until now, the Shorts feed had no advertising, but in the first quarter of 2023, YouTube will begin to implement ads between videos, similar to what Instagram does with Stories.
This will encourage companies to invest advertising efforts in this format and Shorts content creators will have a more stable source of income and hopefully grow.
The other novelty is that the requirements to join the YouTube partner program and monetize content have changed. Until now, the only way was to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours viewed, something impossible to achieve only with Shorts of less than 1 minute in length. Now you can also become a partner if you accumulate 10 million Shorts views in 90 days. Still a very demanding requirement, but more feasible for viral creators.
Consumers are increasingly concerned about the use that a company can make of their personal data. In fact, many users are demanding greater transparency and confidence in the brand before deciding to buy a product or service or take any action that involves providing personal data.
All this means that brands are more committed to guaranteeing the security of personal data by complying with privacy regulations, avoiding leaks and providing users with detailed information on the use that will be made of the data provided. The configuration of options is also important and positively valued.
Brands are aware of this concern for the privacy of users and their personal data, which is why they should be committed to offering transparency in order to gain their trust.
Another digital marketing trend for 2023 is to give greater importance to account-based marketing. This is because what is sought is to design strategies focused on a specific type of customer and where content marketing, technology and commercial action are combined.
This type of strategy is very common to see in companies that have few potential customers and where the objective is not to reach a large number of people, but only those who could become customers.
It is also a very useful strategy for companies with high-value customers, as it keeps customer management costs low compared to the value of the customers. In addition, the results are greater in the short term, as it makes it possible to identify and reach the potential customer in a much more effective way.
Marketing automation consists of using technology or tools to automate actions and processes in order to reduce manual work, which, in addition to taking up more time and resources, is more sensitive to error. This leads to savings in time and resources within marketing teams, allowing them to focus on other actions to improve both their performance and results with customers.
There are now resources that allow virtually any type of campaign to be automated. In fact, there are already many companies that have implemented this automation in email marketing, although during 2023 it is intended to go further.
Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is a new and improved version of the well-known Universal Analytics or UA. Google announced that everyone will have to migrate to this version in 2023 (the previous one will stop working) and that it allows to collect data from websites and applications to better understand the customer journey. In addition, and to be much more efficient, it stores information based on events rather than sessions.
GA4 can be linked to Google Merchant Center, Google Optimize and BigQuery, as well as store custom reports. It is certainly a very good tool to detect anomalies, have predictive analytics and attribution models, among other things.
It is expected that companies already using Universal Analytics will move to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible, since it is also possible to migrate information from one tool to another without the risk of losing data along the way.
Many analysis actions and adjustments in digital advertising are done manually, something that is going to change in 2023, when the aim is to automate and create intelligent bids based on the results obtained. This tedious work, which can even be exhausting, can be much easier if Google or the specific advertising platform is allowed to use machine learning to analyze the data obtained and adjust, based on that, the bids in real time. In this way, digital advertising will be adjusted to the results obtained, although the specialists will be the ones who have total control over it and the last word, being able to make any changes or adjustments they deem necessary.
In other words, the aim is to achieve more intelligent and automated bids to make the task easier for marketing teams, since data analysis will be much faster and simpler.
If there is one thing that gives a lot of headaches to companies and, in particular, to the marketing team, it is Google's ever-changing algorithm. Google's updates are changes to the way its algorithm works, which can either benefit or hurt the SEO practices you've been following as a brand.
By 2023 these Google updates will be constant, but may no longer be a problem if more artificial intelligence is used in SEO, able to learn automatically based on the results obtained. This means that positioning could be improved, plus it will be much easier to understand and apply.
Marketing based on third-party data is going to come to an end, so advertising will have to find alternatives. The reason for the end of third-party cookies lies in the emergence of new regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. According to this legislation, the old techniques for tracking user behavior on the Internet are prohibited, which means that brands will have to obtain the consent of users to know their data.
Although it seems that we will have to wait until 2024 for Google to eliminate them completely, browsers such as Firefox and Safari have already stopped supporting them. Google has already started working on solutions to replace third-party cookies. One of them is the Themes API it brought out in 2022, according to which users' interests are identified through the Chrome browser to then classify the public into anonymous groups for commercial purposes.
A clear trend in advertising will be these new solutions to collect data that respect users' privacy, in addition to starting to develop proprietary solutions that collect first-hand information from company-owned channels such as surveys or email marketing campaigns.
During the Inbound 2022 event, Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, said that we are currently in a "disconnect crisis." Between a global pandemic that has changed the way we live and work, changes in the way we track user engagement, data privacy, our increasing use of technology tools and solutions, and an uncertain economy, Rangan believes we have never been more disconnected from each other, our customers, and our own data. HubSpot's solutions aim to bridge that gap and gain a deeper connection with our customers. And this is the big role of CRM in 2023.
CRM is software that records and integrates into a database all interactions between company and customers in order to make business management, the creation of effective marketing strategies and customer service much simpler. Considering the importance that the customer has and will be given, CRM is a key tool to improve sales techniques.
It is a very useful tool to have much more accurate and detailed information about customers. In addition, it allows you to build much stronger relationships with them. It also improves team communication, since all the information is in the same database, allowing the different teams to be connected.