What are the main digital marketing trends for 2023?

As customers become more demanding about the products and services they buy, there is also a global cost of living crisis that brands will need to plan for by 2023.

That means it's more important for brands to be transparent and think about their messaging and investigate or change their strategy in the coming year. It also means marketers need to be aware of upcoming trends so they can plan for and take advantage of any new developments.

To help you start 2023 off strong, we've spoken to industry experts on our podcast to identify the biggest trends. You would also like to see our Trends webinar on more key things to watch in 2023.

• Within social media and influencer marketing, we look at TikTok and business, the rise of creators, and also SuperApps.
• In B2B marketing, we hear about the value of video content, how to conquer social selling, and curated content.  
• Content marketing seems poised to see more connections, creator-brand partnerships, and the perennial need to create valuable content.
• You'll be hearing a lot about marketing automation in 2023, especially the tools available and the highly anticipated GPT-4.
• Martech is also set to continue to grow, CRO will take an additional lead. And the metaverse will not disappear.

1. TRENDS IN SOCIAL MEDIA AND INFLUENCER MARKETING
There are some really interesting trends in 2023 for social media. In fact, it is an area of ​​marketing that will see significant change and brands need to keep up to date in order to have a presence and use the platforms effectively.

TikTok continues to evolve and dominate
TikTok has become a big player in the field of social media marketing. And that won't change in 2023. TikTok generated $4.6 billion in 2021, up 142% year-over-year with 1.8 billion monthly active users expected by the end of 2022, reported The Business of Apps.

It's not just for consumers or creators that TikTok is making inroads. The platform focuses on usability for businesses and improves targeting options for advertising, making it a bigger and better platform for brands in 2023.

“One of the things we will see on TikTok in the next year is the simplicity around the business tools. They have already been making waves in improving usability for businesses around their bulletin board. I've been looking at some of the new targeting options they've launched for their ads, which are great,” says Alison Battisby, social media consultant at Avocado Social.

Decentralize social media to create a 'super app'
The changes at Twitter have shed light on the vulnerability of social media platforms. Customers are no longer wanting to interact with platforms run by billionaires and instead have control over their content and data.

Battisby believes that “we are moving towards a need for decentralization of social networks. Some of the exciting new platforms we're seeing include Mastodon, which is experiencing a huge amount of downloads in recent weeks. And it is an interesting tool because it is built by the masses.”

Other apps are in the works, like BlueSky, which is being developed by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. More of an infrastructure than a platform, the company describes it as "a new foundation for social media that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience."

The 'creator economy' will grow and change
As brand awareness becomes more of a social media focus (as opposed to pure lead generation), marketers must find creators who have a voice base and followers (small or not).

It can be challenging for brands to create content that engages customers in a time-starved world. That's where content creators come in and that doesn't mean high profile influencers. It can mean employees, customers, or even subject matter experts in a niche area.

“Since COVID, we have seen a new social media culture that is not focused on the number of followers, but on the content itself, in this era of what they call 'recommended media.' I think this further pushes brands to work with influencers and content creators,” says Neal Schaffer, social media lead and author.

The emergence of creator funds on TikTok, YouTube and Twitch means there's an incentive for creators to spend time creating content that a brand could leverage. 

2. B2B MARKETING TRENDS
B2B marketing can be seen as boring or at least less exciting than its B2C counterparts. But that doesn't have to be the case. As a B2B company, it's important to be creative in your marketing and use the channels and tools available to you to be memorable.

Video, video and more video
As marketers, we all know the power of a great video campaign as a way to inform and connect. After all, 86% of companies use video as a marketing tool and 92% value it as an important part of their strategy (according to Wyzowl research).

The same research showed the variety of reasons companies use video, with explanations being the main one, followed by videos and social media presentations. The top three channels that businesses use are YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 

For B2B companies, video can play an important role in the sales and marketing cycle. This is particularly true on LinkedIn, as video has become more popular on the platform and offers a way to connect with and influence customers.

“LinkedIn has become a place where people can quickly create user-generated content. People do it with varying degrees of skill. Your mileage will vary based on your style and budget. But I think it's added a lot of personality to that platform and made the content more shareable. (Video) is a great way to act like an expert, like a connector,” says Stephen Walsh, co-founder of Kineo and Anders Pink.

Read our '9 Social Media Video Ideas' blog for some inspiration for your video campaigns!

Empower teams to use social selling
Social media is an effective way for brands and their sales team to connect with customers. This is particularly true for B2B companies that have longer sales cycles and rely on digital channels to deliver useful and relevant information.

But there's a difference between posting content that drives a sales message and using content to engage and build connections. Author and social transformation expert Julie Atherton believes that's what will drive business success in 2023.

“I think there will be a clear demarcation between companies that empower and support their teams to use social effectively for relationship building and those that see social as another channel to drive sales messaging,” Atherton says. . “Some organizations are afraid to give up control or allow people to show their personality.”

An Appetite for Curated Content
While businesses place a heavy emphasis on creating original content, sharing curated content can also be effective.

If the content is relevant, it can spark conversation and show that your business is interested in solving a problem or sharing information rather than just selling.  

“If you're looking for something informative and insightful, it doesn't matter too much if you've created that content. I think (curated content) can be an efficient way to provide some learning and knowledge, and show that you are a trustworthy person who can add value. As a B2B strategy, it can be very powerful,” says Walsh.

The types of useful content you can share include:

Industry news
Third-party research
Press releases or announcements
Interviews (video and blogs)
In-depth features
podcasts
3. CONTENT MARKETING TRENDS
The Content Marketing Institute found that while 78 percent of marketers have a strategic focus to manage content, only more than half have a documented content strategy for reference. That's a mistake in today's content-hungry society.

Use content to build connections
As marketers, we know that content can be used at all stages of the marketing and sales funnel to deliver information and solutions. But content can do more than that.

In 2023, you need to use content to make connections and build communities. As customers become more interested in the value and spirit of brands, it will be the companies that nurture and seek connections that will succeed.

“While social media and email marketing still have their place, for me, it's communities that drive the majority of my sales. People are looking for community. They want to communicate and get support from other humans,” says Kate Toon, founder of Stay Tooned.

“And it is very important that the leader of those communities has to be in tune. People want to feel like he's buying from (companies with) similar values ​​that align with his.”

Refine and Define Creator/Brand Partnerships
There's a lot of noise online, which equals a lot of content. Some of the content is great, but a lot of it is aligned with the wrong influencer or isn't aimed at the right audience. That's where a good partnership between content creator and brand can come into play.

Many creators want to grow and expand in 2023. This means they're looking for brand partnerships (rather than just sponsorships) that align with their content so posts feel natural and companies offer guidance and support, not just leave them!

For many creators, it's not primarily about money, other aspects are important as well, as Deloitte research shows.

“Brands should look more at influencers and user-generated content to help them appear and be seen through the noise. Not from his own voice, but from the voices of others,” says Neal Schaffer.

Balance your content to deliver value, not just sell
More than half of marketers cite a huge increase in demand for content according to marq's "Content Effectiveness" report in recent years. But it's not just about having more content, it's about having content that provides value to leads and customers.

“I think you have to create your own content and have your own voice. But you can balance your content marketing budget with more curated content than people realize,” says Stephen Walsh.

“It shows that you are connected to the world and that 'our ideas are the only ones' or 'it always has to be something that comes from us', that you are connected and that you pay attention to trends. That sends a good signal to buyers that you're part of a community, and it's not always me, me, me,” Walsh concludes. 

4. MARKETING AUTOMATION TRENDS
As businesses collect more data and need to execute more tasks to implement effective marketing campaigns, automation tools offer a way to automate routine and repetitive tasks at scale.

A shift to signal-based marketing
In 2023, there will be a shift in mindset from technical marketing to anticipation marketing. This will allow marketers to anticipate what customers want and then feed it into automation processes.

This new mindset will now only make things more efficient but will allow for customization. This applies to platforms like Google Ads and also seems to be where Facebook and other social channels are heading.

“In digital marketing we have been collecting data, observing behavior and now what we are looking for are signals. They may sound like the same thing, but they are slightly different. Behaviors reflect interests, while signals are where the audience tells you what they want,” says Cathal Melinn, a PPC and eCommerce specialist.

Importance of automation tools.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations with IT teams that understand customer needs will outperform other organizations' customer experience metrics by 20 percent.

This understanding will be based on automation tools for internal processes and to improve the customer experience. These include marketing tools for CRM, social media, advertising, lead management, or email.  

“(A trend for 2023) is the increasing use of tools for automation and personalization at scale. Doing that is difficult unless you understand the data you have, put that data into a tool, and use it to automate your communications with consumers. This could be automating things like 'next best action' based on what customers have done in the past and what they might do next,” says Ken Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Digital Marketing Institute.

Artificial Intelligence and the release of GPT-4 You
may not have heard of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4), but it is a cutting-edge tool that can help marketers automate many tasks.

Powered by OpenAI, it is a deep learning model of text generation that is trained through content available online. It is used for Q&A, text summaries, machine translation, classification, code generation, and conversational AI.

According to Clark Boyd, a digital strategy consultant, it could open up new opportunities for marketers. “We're going to start seeing specific business applications (with GPT-4). There's a lot of funding going to startups right now that are trying to build, for example, social media content generation tools. So you could just put in a little bit of information about your brand, and these tools would generate 50 ideas for your content, and you'd just drag and drop the ones that interest you the most.”

You can listen to our podcast on 'The Art of Copywriting' to learn more about the impact of AI on content marketing.

5. MARTECH TRENDS 2023
Marketing Technology - Martech - software is used to create, run, manage and measure the performance of content (online and offline), campaigns and experiences. It's an effective way to optimize customer journeys and implement omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Martech Spending Will Keep Growing
Martech spending in the US will exceed $20 billion in 2022 for the first time, up 15 percent year-over-year according to eMarketer. This spending comes as companies invest in technology that will allow them to collect and store data, use this data to make decisions, and implement those decisions.

Interestingly, B2B companies account for more than 30 percent of that spending, and this share is expected to grow moderately over the next two years to $8.5 billion by 2024.

“It is very difficult to keep up with the Martech industry. What we keep seeing is that we work with a platform, we learn something, we find that there's a gap, and then the next year, or six months from now, there's a new technology platform that fills that gap. . We know it's huge,” says Neil Patel Accel's Chris Coomer.

CRO will no longer be about experimenting
Every business wants to improve their online conversion rates. This means more traffic, more sales, and more income, right?

Until now, many marketers have experimented with conversion rate optimization (CRO) and have used many testing methods. However, Chris Coomer believes that this era of just seeing what happens is coming to an end, as it's not just about chasing the result.

“I think CRO has been seen in a silo. This is how we get from A to B. I think everyone is starting to look more holistically and customers are getting smarter with what they want to see,” she says.

“(As an agency) we'll do something, we'll get a better conversion rate, but how does that impact the bottom line for the client? How does that impact the user experience? The questions being asked force us to migrate to that broader point of view.”

Metaverse growth slow, but brands will keep playing
The metaverse caused a stir in 2022 and will continue for years to come, but growth has been slower than expected as profits plummet and costs rise.

Despite this, Alison Battisby believes that brands will start thinking about their strategy for this new era in the world of immersive virtual communication in 2023.

“One of the biggest tell-tale signs (of a new chapter in social technology) is Meta's commitment to the metaverse, and how they're firing on all cylinders to build these domains and virtual existences. It will take years to change people's behavior and get used to this new offering, but that doesn't mean we won't see some exciting innovation in the space."

Nike recently announced that it will allow people to design their own trainers and sell or wear them in the metaverse. I think the next year will see a lot of big brands commit to the metaverse,” concludes Battisby.

Read 'What digital marketing skills do you need for Web 3.0 and the metaverse?' To discover more.

2023 Marketing Trends Overview
2023 is going to be an exciting and challenging year for marketers! External circumstances mean brands need to think carefully about their messaging to engage their audiences and align with creators and influencers who hold the same values.

These developments show the constant evolution of marketing both in terms of technology and strategies. Check out the 'The Next Big Digital Marketing Trends in 2022' blog to see what we predicted for this year.