With the ever-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams must stay on their toes. 2023 is bringing a lot of changes with advertising, the introduction of ChatGPT, and changes on Twitter and Facebook.
For businesses, in particular, Apple’s recent update of iOS 15 has caused a stir, with increased ad costs and reduced conversions becoming prevalent aspects for many companies’ campaigns. To be successful over the next few years, it is important to keep an eye out on certain trends that are most likely to emerge by 2023 – such as leveraging AI insights into customer behavior – so you can maximize your potential returns without sacrificing user privacy or control over data distributions.
Stay ahead of the curve when it comes to optimizing your overall performance! Here are four trends that are most likely to occur in 2023:
Marketing and task automation
Marketing automation can improve the efficiency of your marketing team, sales productivity, and overall business performance. It’s no surprise that the marketing automation industry is expected to grow from $5.2 billion in 2022 to $9.5 billion by 2027.
But this automation is not limited to automating marketing tasks. You can also use these technologies to automate your digital assets and promote them on social media, deliver personalized content for each visitor, or monitor the competition’s strategies.
Marketing automation is a technique that employs software to aid in the automation of a variety of processes. The objective is threefold:
- Complete marketing or business tasks more quickly
- Increase consistency and easily recreate your marketing and business efforts
- Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks to focus on business objectives
Marketing and business automation benefits include increased team efficiency and better collaboration with existing and prospective customers. This means you can run more marketing campaigns, collect data more efficiently, improve customer onboarding, and do other things.
According to research, the top three reasons for businesses to begin automating are to streamline marketing and sales, increase customer engagement, and improve customer experience.
Automating those areas has long-term consequences:
- Cost savings — fewer errors occur, and fewer resources are required to cover manual, mundane administrative tasks, lowering marketing overhead.
- Increased revenue — the average ROI for digital marketing is $3 per $1 spent, while the average ROI for marketing automation is $5.44 per $1.
As you can see, automation can help you optimize your finances by lowering expenses and increasing your ROI.
Evolution of SEO
In the past year, Google has updated its algorithm over 10 times this year alone.
This creates a constantly changing landscape for SEO and marketing teams to keep up with. Keywords change, traffic shifts, and rankings fluctuate – making it difficult to track the success of campaigns through keywords alone. As these platforms update their algorithms more frequently than ever before, teams will need to evolve quickly.
Staying ahead of the curve in SEO is critical. You’ll also need a solid understanding of the current state of SEO, so you know what to do next:
- Google is cannibalizing organic traffic more via featured snippets, knowledge panels, Google Shopping, and other on-search page content that keeps you on Google
- Search traffic is increasing, and Google sees an increasing number of searches that no one has ever searched for before
- Mobile-first indexing is now the default, with page speed being an important ranking factor.
The future of SEO is rapidly changing, and the mindset that once dominated it is fading. The days of more links and more keywords on the page are over. Google’s AI is better at parsing the meaning of the text, comparing quality to other web pages, and inferencing meaning from the overall article.
The trends going into 2023 have been present in past years but becoming more important as they’ve taken ahold of more of the population.
- Quality and accurate content is a top priority for any website. Google is setting the bar for content, attempting to weed out low-quality and poorly written content. Leverage AI-generated content to fill in and update content.
- Video is an essential part of discovery. Optimizing content for video discovery, including transcriptions, will increase the search visibility. TikTok and other sharing platforms have accelerated the push for content in search engines.
- Voice search is becoming more common. Amazon is selling Alexa’s devices faster, and Google is adding more voice assistance features on Android phones and Google’s core search functionality.
- Location matters to Google. People are often starting more product or service searches at Google first. They’re looking for locksmiths nearby or a lawn care company. Optimization around your local area is critical.
Google is getting more advanced at interpreting content, determining who should rank first, and assigning value to web pages. No longer is search tied to the number of backlinks, referring pages, or keyword ratio on the page. It’s going deeper with more multi-media impacting ranking factors.
Google Analytics 4 is Changing the Data Processing
Google announced Universal Analytics, the popular web analytics tool for the better part of 20 years, is being turned off in favor of their new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking system.
Google introduced GA4 to address the growing importance of GDPR and online user privacy, reduce our reliance on cookie data, and fill potential data gaps using advanced machine learning (ML). All while making data analysis easier. When used correctly, it will assist you in capturing business-critical first-party data, becoming increasingly valuable as third-party data becomes increasingly scarce.
GA4 will focus on Users and the Events they complete rather than session data. It is more concerned with the entire guest lifecycle than just the pages they visit. The benefits include:
- Events will now be tracked automatically within GA4 (via ‘enhanced measurement’). Some examples are page views, scrolling, outbound link clicks, and file downloading.
- The event-based approach will enable more flexibility and assist in predictive analysis when evaluating a guest’s online behavior.
- Better cross-platform performance analysis. For example, better understanding when a guest researches your hotel on mobile but books on a desktop.
Unsurprisingly, GA4 integrates even more tightly with Google Ads, allowing you to create, manage, and share audiences that can help direct your paid search activity.
For example, suppose a user completes an Event to book a room. In that case, you can remove them from the Google Ads retargeting audience. Or perhaps a user visits your website’s family room type page – boom! – Add them to a family-related Google Ads audience and serve them a more personalized ad if they don’t convert the first time. You can even import micro conversions (such as phone clicks, email clicks, reaching the first stage of a booking engine, and so on) to help optimize your campaigns.
Practice Thought Leadership
Thought leadership content is one of the most important tools for developing a strong brand. However, it takes more than just expressing an opinion or providing new information.
Thought leadership delivers authentic and genuine content that draws on the author’s expertise, insight, and experience to share that wisdom with others.
Thought leadership is about adding value, expanding knowledge, and taking a stand.
Some argue that thought leadership entails expressing strong—and frequently divisive—opinions in a piece of content. This may entail taking a strong stance on a contentious industry issue. Others argue that thought leadership entails being a subject matter expert (SME) and using that position to wield influence in a specific niche.
In reality, it’s a hybrid of the two.
According to research from SEM, thought leadership is about sharing inspirational, research-backed content that inspires change and adds educational value.
People want to interact with people.
Deep research on your topic is one of the best ways to establish authority. You must demonstrate a breadth of knowledge that no one else possesses. This research ties back to SEO. Having high-quality and authoritative content will increase your chances of ranking highly on Google.
Thought leadership is essential for both consumer and business-to-business companies. However, the complexity of the B2B decision-making process, the time it takes to make decisions, and the number of people involved all point to thought leadership as an important component of B2B Content Marketing.
Thought leadership content can assist anyone involved in a business decision in gaining alignment among their peers, which is frequently difficult.
Thought Leadership also allows businesses to define our solution’s category or brand’s purpose in customer terms. As a result, even consumer companies can effectively use thought leadership to support their overall mission and establish authority in their space. After all, branding is all about being associated with a specific product or service.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is always changing, and that means businesses need to be prepared to change with it. These four trends are likely to have a big impact on digital marketing in 2023 and beyond, so if you want to stay ahead of the curve, make sure you’re keeping an eye on them. And if you need help staying up-to-date with the latest digital marketing trends or implementing them into your own business. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you grow your business in 2023 and beyond.
