10 Marketing Trends to Look for in 2023

Increasing your brand’s visibility for your target demographic is essential for growing a business. Understanding how to approach potential leads and the best ways to market your company make a big difference in your advertising ROI. Incorporating these into your current strategy can help develop more leads and reach customers the way they prefer.

Hybrid Events

The cancellation of in-person events due to the Covid-19 pandemic shifted traditional events to virtual ones, from a grand opening retail store to concerts and happy hours. Promoting these events on social media made them successful and, in fact, able to happen at all. Although the urge to gather in person is strong, some consumers have developed a preference for the virtual. Adding AR and VR to digital events can help those at home have a more immersive experience.

Shorter Video Content

Short-form content is a very effective trend; nearly a third of global marketers use short-form video content. Although longer-form videos can provide more in-depth education and information, getting to the point quickly via short-form videos is quite effective for B2B and B2C businesses. The emergence and popularity of sites like TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated how engaging short-form videos can be. Short-form videos align well with the attention spans of online audiences.

Interactive Marketing

Interactive marketing involves one-on-one engagement with brands and customers, including contests, quizzes, polls, or calculators. Customers directly respond to personalized initiatives and allow brands to distinguish themselves from their competitors. For example, Keto’s Ketogenic calculator enables users to enter their information and needs to customize plans and push them further down the sales funnel.

The Importance of Content Alignment

Aligning content to give a consistent brand message across all channels, from thought leadership pieces to PR and on and offsite SEO. When brands can overlap credibility, authority, and visibility, they’re better able to stand out in their industry. This means including source content on your website, sister sites, and company social media. Establish a base of authority in your niche first, then gain added credibility through a PR element, allowing others to comment on your posts or mention your content through links.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is similar to content but is specifically designed to promote a product, service, or brand. Customers understand that advertising is simply a fact of modern life, but many prefer more native advertising instead of intrusive banner ads and interstitials. However, it’s important to note that about 20% of customers cannot determine the difference between ads and organic content. Therefore, they may be upset to know that they were actually reading an ad.

Greater Ownership From Marketing Companies

Marketing agencies are changing their investments in the brands they represent, increasing their level of ownership. This shift to more of a partnership versus strictly transactional makes sense since being able to sell a product and increase a client’s market share means that the company’s value increases. Adding an ownership stake to the process gives marketers even more motivation to boost the company’s performance.

Marketing and sales professionals can start by looking at specific products or services that will benefit from their efforts. They can then identify which companies will allow them to put performance metrics in place for each marketing strategy that would enable some ownership if each goal is met. For example, TechCrunch reported about an outsourced CMO firm that created its own venture firm to invest in companies that benefit from the firm’s resources.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored posts can enhance the social media experience for your customers. These high-quality, exclusive, brand-sponsored content pieces are typically created by third parties and sponsored by the brand. For example, a brand may promote an organic post, such as an Instagram story or blog post, and promote it to a large audience through paid content.

Sponsored content should seamlessly integrate with the social media platform, meaning marketers and business owners must be discerning when developing content or selecting existing content to sponsor.

Using AI To Make Influence Marketing More Results-Driven

Most marketers budget about 20% for influencer marketing, valued at $9.7 billion in 2020 and predicted to peak at $15 billion by the end of this year. The most recent change in influencer marketing is the shift from generic major influencer marketing to focusing on micro-influencers, with their more engaged audiences.

Widespread adoption of artificial intelligence is the next trend on the horizon. AI can be utilized to watch and assess millions of influencer-curated videos in ways humans can’t, identifying the most appropriate ones for a brand. With predictive AI, marketers only pay for conversions and sales that influencers produce, which means a high ROI is almost guaranteed.

Alternatives to Third-Party Cookies

The death of the third-party cookie is postponed until 2023. Marketers should be proactive in finding other means to gather data about customer behavior online before this. Consumers are demanding more privacy on the internet and control over their data. First-party cookies, however, aren’t going anywhere, which marketers can still use to gather and exploit data. Or tools like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLOC) or Google’s Privacy Sandbox can help brands personalize content and target consumers without intruding on their privacy.

Marketers as Agents of Change

More and more businesses may use SEO to concur search traffic, and as marketers, it’s our responsibility to ensure our content and websites are as visible as possible, especially on Google. SEO isn’t a new online marketing strategy, but current tactics are more ingrained with newer marketing strategies. About 28% of marketers currently use SEO, although the interest and need for strategic SEO is growing. 

Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, so SEO needs to be more than just generic blog posts to answer simple search queries. Marketers, therefore, must ensure that their websites mesh with the newer requirements of Google algorithms.

Takeaway

Embracing the hottest trends in marketing can help marketers and businesses increase their market share and improve visibility. Want to learn more about how MarketBurst can help you leverage these strategies for your business? Contact us today!