What digital marketing trends will we likely see in 2023? 

Keeping an eye on your long-term goals will help you make a solid plan for the short term. Marketing’s future cannot be predicted with 100% certainty, but we can offer some useful insights and predictions.

It was impossible to predict how marketing would change in 2020 with the onset of Covid. A marketing plan based on what was known at the beginning of the year had to be scrapped and rewritten.

In the future, marketing and business will be more diverse, inclusive and customer-focused. Ensuring your business is in the local pack ranking, for example will serve to set you apart from the competition.

Some of these trends are centered around technology as it continues to advance at a rapid rate. Brands and consumers are also pushing back against increased digitization and automation of interactions. 

Marketers today want to bring marketing back to its human roots. 

Creating content that appeals to your target audience and is structured in a way that makes search engines happy is the essence of humanizing your SEO strategy. 

Search engines rank your site based on its quality. As it is with search engine optimization in California, visitors determine the quality of your site. Your SEO ranking is influenced by how often they come back, how much they engage, and what they do on your site. 

The key to creating an SEO-friendly site is to prioritize human behavior.

Despite the growth of technologies like artificial intelligence and data-driven marketing, people will remain the primary focus. 

Marketing in 2023 will be a fascinating year as new technologies and consumer behaviors emerge. 

The following 7 marketing trends and strategies will give you a competitive edge.

1 – An Exceptional Customer Experience

Customer loyalty is a year-round phenomenon. We’re witnessing a massive shift in attitudes toward marketing. People don’t need to be convinced to buy from or work with your company anymore. 

Rather, the focus is on providing a fantastic customer experience that will keep people returning. Providing great service and building a positive business culture almost takes care of the marketing.

The consumer expects a seamless shopping experience from the moment they are interested to the time they are satisfied with the purchase. An experience that delivers quality across all channels is more likely to earn customers’ business, from delivering personalized messaging that helps them solve problems to a customer-centric culture throughout their customer journey.

Consider ways to listen and respond to their questions in addition to personalized marketing messages. To ensure quality throughout the customer experience, coordinate your digital marketing team with your sales and customer service teams.

Online content has given consumers more power. Consumers are no longer passive when it comes to learning about products. You don’t have to tell them how great your products are. They’re doing their research instead.

Therefore, you need to provide them with more than just information. Currently, only 49% of US consumers say that today’s companies provide a good customer experience, despite 73% saying it is an important factor in their buying decisions.

2 – Voice Search

Google Home, Amazon Echo, and other smart speakers now have a place in around a quarter of US households. There is no sign that voice search will slow down and will continue to influence how brands create content and market themselves online.

According to Google, voice searches are currently driving about 20% of searches (we aren’t quite at the 50% prediction for 2021), but it’s probably not too far out. Despite new challenges, voice search offers exciting opportunities as well. 

You should optimize your content for voice search even if your brand is not ready for smart speaker advertising. The way voice searchers use search is different. Understanding professional search engine marketing is critical to growing your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Using longer, more conversational queries can help you make your content more visible to voice searches, as well as answering questions directly. Additionally, this makes your content more likely to appear as a featured snippet or on Google’s position zero.

3 – Video Marketing

According to research, video accounts for 82% of all online traffic. The likelihood of videos ranking on the first page of the SERP is 53x higher than that of other SEO tactics. Consumers today are 84% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.

Additionally, 93% of digital marketers say video is a key component of their content strategy. What is the main takeaway? Video is the future of content marketing trends. To keep their content relevant and aligned with what consumers want, brands need to incorporate video content like product demos, webinars, and live video events.

The trend of live streaming is also proving to be an effective marketing tool. In 2021, consumers spent around 548 billion hours streaming through mobile devices. 

Combined with influencer marketing (which we will cover next), live streaming allows potential customers to interact with influencers familiar with the product, talk about the product, and make a purchase.

4 – Developing Long-term Relationships With Influencers

Influencer marketing is expected to continue to flourish throughout 2023. For every $1 spent on this type of marketing, it generates, on average, $5.20.

Nowadays, almost every digitally-based business uses what was once used only by a few marketers. Companies that collaborate with influencers or Tiktok users can generate a great ROI from their influence.

The following are some of the reasons why 93% of marketing professionals use influencer marketing: 

• Raising brand awareness
• Establishing trust and authority
• Targeting the right audience
• Conversion optimization
• Lead generation
• Setting a new standard
• Reaching a broader audience

By appointing long-term “brand ambassadors,” brands are taking advantage of social media marketing that’s not new to 2023 as a way to build more authentic connections with their target audience. By promoting the same brand over time, influencers can maintain trust with their audience, while brands can build lasting relationships with their influencer partners.

The type of influencers a brand needs should be carefully considered. Marketers can fall short with this type of marketing when they choose the wrong individuals who don’t have the right audience or reach. Given the large use of mobile device users, the use of influencers can also help companies greatly increase mobile conversion rates.

5 – An AI-based Automation System

Over the past few years, AI has made huge advances, and there has been an increase in the number of businesses using AI-powered technology and automation to help them market.

Smart assistants and voice search are both powered by artificial intelligence. It has also made chatbots possible, which are now appearing on more websites than ever before. With artificial intelligence and automation, brands can focus on strategy and creating fantastic customer experiences rather than doing the grunt work of marketing.

The human element is still important in marketing (perhaps more so now than ever before), so use technology to enhance your marketing efforts, not replace them. AI and predictive analytics are also helping brands better understand their audiences and customers through big data. Through it, customers can receive hyper-personalized marketing messages.

6 – Chatbots

In digital marketing, chatbots have become increasingly popular. Despite this, 38% of people are unwilling to deal with chatbots when it comes to customer service issues (GetVOIP, 2019). All of us understand why. 

The first reason is that they are not as conversational as they should be. Two, it would be nice to talk to someone in person. Three, they might be wrong about certain things, which exacerbates our problems. These are sentiments, of course. They may not reflect reality. However, sentiments matter in marketing.

Chatbots are still widely used by many companies today, despite all these disadvantages. Additionally, experts predict waves of adoption soon. What’s the reason? Most questions are answered almost immediately by chatbots.

By using live agents, you can reduce wait times. Despite this, they are not as “intelligent” as they should be. There is no doubt that AI can be trained, and machine learning has come a long way. We can certainly expect better chatbots in the future, but you can use them right now with a good workaround.

7 – Conversational Marketing

Once upon a time, customer service and sales were formal processes. There were no online or email forms to inquire, and representatives used the words “sir” and “ma’am.”

How about today? Through instant messaging, sales reps and customer service agents communicate with customers. It’s like interacting with a friend. 

Personalization and more human-centered interactions are other trends that we’ve already discussed. A scripted conversation isn’t appealing to customers. 

Help that is tailored to their needs and circumstances is what they want. A quick response time is also important to them. As a result, there will be more informal channels of communication.

The goal of conversational marketing is to engage people when they are on your website, rather than sending them to lead capture forms and waiting for a response. 

This digital marketing trend employs intelligent chatbots with machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), allowing customers to have a two-way conversation with a brand. 

Shifting from an asynchronous way of marketing to real-time conversations presents a major learning curve as conversational marketing grows in 2023. 

Instead of sending people to lead capture forms and waiting for a response, conversational marketing engages people while they are on your website, thus stimulating conversion rate optimization. This will continue to be a big priority going into the new year, making web conversion experts a critical partner to your success.

Conclusion

It’s time to start planning your 2023 marketing strategy. 

Set clear goals for the New Year and plan how to accomplish them. Although marketing trends come and go, the basics of success remain the same: understand your audience’s needs and communicate clearly and consistently with them. 

The best way to establish solid relationships with your audience is to provide them with customer-centric content. As long as digital marketing continues to dominate, content marketing will remain relevant. 

There is a strong connection between most of these trends and content in some way. A solid base of quality content across all your marketing channels is essential for success.

ABOUT AVITA GROUP

Avita Group is a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles. We specialize in organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management, Online Reputation Management (ORM), website creation and conversion optimization. 

The Avita Group team boasts a collective experience of over 25 years in the industry and has worked with a variety of multi-million dollar companies to help them improve their ROI, build better brand awareness, and mitigate negative online reviews and results.

Contact us today for a free consultation.