Menu
It’s not classified information that marketing trends tend to come and go. After all, the market is constantly evolving to keep up with buyer preferences, which forces many brands to learn new technology in order to stay ahead.
2023 is shaping up to be an innovative and interesting year for marketers. Trends are shifting to accommodate new buyer behavior, customer expectations, and technology.
Here are 16 marketing trends that will impact your marketing strategy for the years to come.
Ask yourself this: when was the last time you watched a video, listened to a podcast, or scrolled through your social feed without seeing your favorite influencer partner with a brand?
If your mind seems to be drawing a blank, then you’re in good company. I can’t seem to recall a time when I didn’t come across an influencer marketing campaign.
In my experience, one of the most effective marketing strategies is word-of-mouth marketing. People are more likely to try a product, service, or solution if someone they trust recommends it. That’s why influencer marketing became increasingly popular in 2022 and why it will continue to grow in 2023.
Here are some interesting influencer marketing statistics:
If influencer marketing is too costly for your 2023 budget, that’s okay! Consider working with nano-influencers instead.
Nano-influencers are social media promoters that have a smaller following–ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of followers–but a higher level of engagement.
These nano-influencers are the industry leaders within their field, so they have a larger sphere of influence, which can help you convert leads, connect with your target audience, and increase your brand awareness.
Why am I recommending nano-influencers to businesses? Well, from a customer’s perspective, they are regarded as more trustworthy, since they are considered “everyday” people within their community.
When looking for the right influencers for your brand, remember to look past their follower count. While it’s easy to get attracted with big numbers, true influence lives in engagement rates (clicks, purchases, conversions, and etcetera).
Ever wondered why you can’t seem to stop falling deeper into the rabbit hole when it comes to Instagram Reels, TikToks, or YouTube Shorts? One video turns into another, and then bam! It’s 3am and you still can’t put your phone down.
Short-form videos have become a staple in our online interactions. It’s certainly taken the world by storm. In fact, 90% of marketers will increase or maintain their investment on short-form videos, while 1 in 5 marketers plan to leverage short-form video for the first time in 2023.
While long-form videos allow marketers to share in-depth information, short-form videos can be very powerful, if leveraged correctly.
Not only does it take less time to create a short-form video, but this format is also able to keep up with the fast-paced attention spans of online audiences. That’s why we predict that short-form video will continue to help many businesses gain quick growth and interest in 2023.
Agile marketing is an approach that’s inspired by the Agile methodology. Being Agile, in a marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously find promising opportunities or solutions in real-time, deploy tests quickly, evaluate the results, and rapidly iterate.
Ideally, a high-functioning agile marketing team can simultaneously run hundreds of campaigns and multiple new ideas every week.
In order to achieve agile marketing, there needs to be real-time collaboration between every single department within the organization. This, as a result, will help marketers easily respond to change.
We predict that many brands will need to implement an agile methodology into their organization for 2023. Some benefits of Agile marketing include:
It’s no trade secret that a seamless user experience is necessary for your business. Good UX design has proved to be an essential component to fulfilling your customers’ needs and keeping them loyal to your brand.
Therefore, your website (or app) is your most valuable digital marketing asset and should be easy to use. My advice? Ensure that your layout is simple, doesn’t overwhelm users upon first glance, and is optimized for mobile.
Here are some upcoming UX design trends to consider implementing:
People are becoming increasingly more autonomous when it comes to their online interactions. In the past, a marketer would simply set up a lead capture form as a point of contact. In today’s world, consumers are looking to receive the answers to their questions ASAP.
That’s why I’m advising marketers to consider integrating targeting messaging and AI automation into their 2023 marketing strategy.
By employing chatbots with machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) abilities, you’re opening up the possibility of allowing your customers to have a two-way conversation with your brand. This is a great way to keep your customers happy, engage with your top-of-the-funnel visitors, and build rapport with your target audience.
Conversational marketing will certainly grow in 2023, so it’s just a matter of getting ahead of the curve. Start by evaluating whether integrating AI technology into your marketing strategy works for your business.
I know that we’ve talked about implementing interactive content in a lot of our past blogs, but bear with me—it’s imperative that I mention it again.
77% of marketers reported that interactive content is highly reusable and leads to increased visitors, while 73% of marketers agree that content marketing with interactive content enhances their message retention.
Today’s audience wants content that captures their attention upon first glance. That’s why many marketers have begun developing dynamic experiences. These experiences, in turn, help foster active engagement from their target audience.
Not only is this form of content marketing low-cost and high-impact, but it is also great for enhancing audience engagement, improving conversion rates, streamlining your customer experience, and increasing brand loyalty.
Experiential marketing campaigns allow your target audience to engage with your brand through interactive experiences. These experiences range from physical events to AR, XR, or VR platforms.
According to Forbes, experiential marketing can create a lasting connection between a customer and a brand.
Experiential marketing is also ranked as one of the top five marketing strategies that companies currently leverage. 91% of consumers report that they are more inclined to purchase a brand’s product or service after participating in a brand activation or experience, while 40% felt they became more loyal to the brand.
A great example of experiential marketing is the Stranger Things Season 4 campaign. When it returned for its fourth season after a three-year hiatus, it stirred up audience’s interest by running multiple global campaigns. Installations of various Upside Down portals appeared in areas like Australia’s Bondi Beach, New York’s Empire State Building, and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur Twin Towers.
This experiential event turned out to be a big hit! Because these experiences varied in different countries, it allowed fans–both new and old–to immerse themselves into the world of Stranger Things.
As a result, this made Stranger Things Season 4 go viral as millions of people began sharing their experiences on their social media accounts.
While physical based experiential events are highly effective and fun, we’ve seen a steady rise of AR, VR, and MR (all categorized under the umbrella term, “XR”) experiences due to the pandemic.
As digitally immersive platforms continue to become more accessible for larger audiences, it is entirely possible that experiential marketing will become a big trend in 2023. And because we’re moving toward a post-COVID season, many heads are turning toward Web3 and regarding the Metaverse as the ‘next stage’ of the Internet. We’ll discuss this more in our next point.
The Metaverse has been one of the biggest buzzwords of 2022. Large organizations like Meta have made its Metaverse ambitions abundantly clear—along with other big names like Epic Games, Tencent, Decentraland, Roblox, and more. So, it’s no surprise that these brands are eager to move toward Web3, considering that they are the pioneers of social media platforms and video games.
Other brands like Gucci, Nike, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, Disney, Hyundai, Balenciaga, and Netflix have begun experimenting with the Metaverse. Here’s why it’s exciting–because the Metaverse is still largely untapped potential, many businesses will be able to set the bar in terms of ROI, engagement, and effectiveness.
While Web3 and the Metaverse will still need to overcome some challenges like privacy and trust, we predict that preparing for it will only benefit your brand.
Savvy marketers are now leveraging AI methods to gain a better understanding of their target audience. However, a report by Razorfish revealed that 3/4 of marketers fail to use behavioral data for online ad targeting.
In order to stay ahead in 2023, marketers need to implement the right kind of data models, algorithms, and machine learning to optimize their spending.
In 2023, more marketers will utilize AI technology to:
A recent report by Harvard Business School found that 90% of the consumers surveyed are more likely to trust and be loyal to socially responsible businesses, while 85% of consumers have a more positive image of a product or company when it supports a cause they care about.
The demand is evident: social responsibility, transparency, and ethics matter to consumers.
For example, 94% of Gen Z think brands should address pressing social and environmental issues like racial injustice, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, gender inequality, diversity, and more.
Consumers want to support brands that practice social responsibility by balancing their business initiatives with socially beneficial practices. That’s why many companies have begun to pivot their social media strategies to focus more on inclusivity and the causes they advocate for.
Here are a few ways you can highlight your brands social responsibility efforts:
Recently, there’s been many controversies regarding privacy and security. As a result, many reputable companies are developing new systems to ensure their customers feel secure when they provide their personal information.
While this isn’t breaking news, I suggest increasing your data security in order to generate more qualified leads for 2023.
2023 is a prelude into what’s to come. As the market continues to grow, the demand for rapid results will increase. With these growing expectations, marketers need to ensure that their brand is ready for successful acceleration.
However, it’s not possible to complete a plethora of work without having a mile-long backlog haunting your every step. Therefore, outsourcing is the best way to get things done.
We predict that as expectations and needs continue to grow, more businesses will come to rely on the ingenuity, experience, and manpower of digital marketing agencies for services like web design, social media marketing, SEO and graphic design.
It certainly makes sense—why take on the brunt of the work when you can outsource it to capable digital marketing agencies?
As marketers, it is imperative that our websites and content are easily found and accessed on search engines like Google. While SEO is not a new strategy, it is increasingly becoming staple within modern marketing strategies.
That’s why marketers will be investing a good portion of their budget into SEO. Furthermore, 88% of marketers who have an SEO strategy will either increase or maintain their investment in 2023.
Since Google algorithms are constantly evolving, marketers must be aware of any new rules, search insights, multimedia optimization, and more.
Some extra resources to help with your SEO needs:
As 2023 draws closer, sales and marketing teams must work closely together. When marketing and sales are aligned, marketers can better understand their customers, including their behavior, hobbies, interests, demographics, struggles, needs, and more.
They can also help streamline sales presentations, create relevant sales kit materials, and assist customer experience processes.
I’m highly advising marketers to shift their 2023 marketing goals toward aligning their marketing and sales teams.
As 2023 draws closer, sales and marketing teams must work closely together. When marketing and sales are aligned, marketers can better understand their customers, including their behavior, hobbies, interests, demographics, struggles, needs, and more.
They can also help streamline sales presentations, create relevant sales kit materials, and assist customer experience processes.
I’m highly advising marketers to shift their 2023 marketing goals toward aligning their marketing and sales teams.
The big question now is: why is there a growing interest in this strategy? Simply put, it’s effective.
Because native ads are seamless in experience and made to blend in, consumers are more likely to interact with them—over 50% more, to be exact.
While native advertising is not a new concept, it’s certainly something companies need to learn to implement when it comes to the digital space. By integrating this format into your omnichannel strategy, it will help circumvent any issues with ad blockers while simultaneously leaving behind a good impression on your target audiences.
Who doesn’t love a good win-win situation?
2022 saw a sharp and steady rise in audio advertising. With podcasters cropping up left and right, it’s not shocking that brands have a new way of target niche audiences.
In 2023, marketers will be focusing on how to effectively advertise on podcasts and how to measure results.
However, podcasting isn’t the only space that marketers can leverage. As gaming grows in popularity, brands can look into investing in audio ads. In fact, according to a study by AudioMob, 75% of mobile gamers prefer audio ads over video.
It certainly makes sense–it is arguably smoother and is less likely to interrupt gameplay. Since we believe that there will be many audio ad opportunities, we’d suggest looking into including audio ads into your 2023 strategy.
Remember that trends often evolve, so you’ll always need to keep your finger on the pulse. We hope that these 16 trends will help your brand execute marketing strategies that are highly effective, build customer loyalty, grow brand awareness, and bring in great results!
Want to get started on Metaverse Marketing?
If you’re looking for a partner to create awesome Metaverse content or to even create your own Metaverse sandbox, get in touch! Our team of experts are well-versed in this new technology and we would be delighted to see how we can work together.
Get your free 15 minute consultation by saying hello using our little chat bubble, emailing us at hello@medianetic.me, or getting in touch by calling +603 7960 3088.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned for other articles!
Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest updates on topics like Digital Marketing, the Metaverse, Extended Reality, Social Media Marketing, branding, and more.
Medianetic Sdn Bhd
200301016995 (619415-K)
No. 59, 2nd Floor, Block E, Zenith Corporate Park, Jalan SS7/26 Kelana Jaya, 47301 Petaling Jaya, Selangor
hello@medianetic.me
+603 7960 3088 (Office)
Medianetic Sdn Bhd © 2023
Made by Medianetic