Which Google algorithms are changing? What do consumers care about in 2023? How can we help them find what they’re looking for? Your “2023 Vision” you’ve been excited about all year might be replaced with an “oh crap” attitude as more new trends emerge.
Luckily, there’s a very simple list that breaks those confusing “35 Trends to Look Out For” articles into a simple five items. They are:
- Visual Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Virtual Product Placement
With a head-start on these five marketing tactics, which are an absolute necessity for success in 2023, you will have an unstoppable force of lead generation and sales push behind your brand. Let’s look at them individually and see what’s right for your company.
Visual Marketing
Visual Marketing is an advanced way of reaching an audience. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and you’re going to need to implement a thousand pictures this year.
Visual Marketing encompasses a few different concepts. First, we want to make sure we have high-quality images or videos attached to our promotions. Even our website can benefit from quality images, since your Google Ads Manager is probably turning those into high-quality Responsive Display Ads anyway.
Social Media is another huge beneficiary of quality images and, especially, video. Video is exploding on Social Media with around 100 million hours of video watched on Facebook daily. 84% of marketers publish video content on social media, and 85% of those people find it effective. My own campaigns see a 41% decrease in cost per click for videos ads on Facebook next to image ads, and 300% increase in click-through rate.
Second, we want to leverage emerging visual search technologies. Google Lens has developed technologies to explore, translate, and identify from pictures taken, and you can search products/boards by picture on Pinterest.
Think of the Tony Stark glasses, where he looks at things and immediately gets information about what he’s seeing. How cool is that!?
So what can we do to prepare for this? Well, we need to start curating large, quality images and video across our website of course, with appropriate meta-tags. We need to ensure that they’re attached to messaging that’s useful to a consumer (think of your Google Shopping or Amazon listing details). If you’re wondering what an awesome gallery of pictures & videos looks like, ask an influencer.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing started to take off toward the beginning of 2018 and has been on the rise ever since. The basis of this concept is that word-of-mouth advertising plays a huge role in successful businesses.
These influencers, with followings in the tens or hundreds of thousands, are hired to advertise your product to their followers and generate sales. You would search for these influencers like you would ad placements. Fitness influencers would advertise for exercise outfits, video game influencers to new game systems, etc.
I would caution others about the problems plaguing influencer marketing, however. Some influencers can be hard to work with from an agency perspective, are subject to human emotions and outbursts, and are at times very transparent about flaws in your brand. Be sure that the product you give them to advertise is of impeccable quality.
Furthermore, as we get away from the micro-influencers of the early industry, we see a less loyal following when their followers get into the 50,000+ range. The transition into “celebrity” in the eyes of the consumer generates less influence than the “friend” as which they previously saw them and, as that transition occurs, could lead to a decrease in engagement rate and overall ROI for your influencer strategy.
Email Marketing
Yes, your tried and true email campaigns are here to stay. What’s even more interesting, however, is what goes in the emails!
We’ve learned time and again that creating links to our website leads to better and better results, but the original design of email marketing was to send great content directly to your inbox.
Marketers are finding more and more that this traditional version of email marketing is WORKING! Give, give and give (Gary Vaynerchuk would be proud) and the valuable members of your audience will visit your website!
Artificial Intelligence In Google & Facebook
While certain automated systems like chatbots can be good or bad, the consensus for artificial intelligence and its place in marketing is very positive. AI influence in platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager helps marketers free up time to get creative with messaging and is expected to grow exponentially as time goes on.
Search Engine Journal’s PPC trends in 2023 suggest that if you’re not using rules or scripts in your Google Ads, you’re way behind. Rules and scripts are Google Ads Managers’ self-directed AI systems for menial account tasks.
Content personalization and time-of-day messaging for individuals are both key aspects of AI and are expected to become necessary for advertisers in the New Year. Imagine being able to craft quality ad copy, pair it with stimulating creative and get maximum results from sending it straight to your AI tool. This is the future, and it may come as soon as this year.
Content Marketing
The biggest trend in 2023 is Content marketing, prevalent for years and still growing in the digital space. While we’ve already mentioned high-quality videos and images, marketers are finding huge success with high-quality content in podcasts, blog posts and interactive content (quizzes, lists, etc.).
As a consumer, you only want to be shown ads relative to your situation. Not only that, but as of 2023 the expectation will be that you don’t even know you’re being shown an ad.
On my personal Facebook page, I can avoid the “get a new car!” content like the plague, even though it populates my feed every hour. But you bet I’ll be clicking on Marvel’s “what could have happened” content all the livelong day, because I’m so intrigued by the articles that pop up. Last week, they got me with a short paragraph at the end of article about their political views… and I read it!
Now that is content marketing at its finest. I wasn’t expecting to be advertised to, but they got me because they had solid content.
Content marketing does work, and those who aren’t working to develop exciting, stimulating content are going to find themselves without ammo in the fight for decent impression share across the whole digital space. Start developing videos, pictures and other fun content on your website now so you have something high-quality to share when it comes to promoting your business.
The future is bright with marketers in 2023. Fighting advancing concepts will not only cause your progression as a marketing department to halt but will stunt your growth against others who have embraced it. Find a way to get excited about the opportunities and you’ll find success in these emerging technologies.
Resources:
- https://www.wyzowl.com/video-social-media-2019/
- https://www.revechat.com/blog/chatbots-trends-stats/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ppc-trends-in-2020/333465/
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ar.lens&hl=en_US
- https://instapage.com/blog/content-personalization
- https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/07/content-marketing-focus/
