Internet of Things (IoT) advertising, voice search engine optimization (VSEO), and metaverse marketing were formerly too optimistic ideas that bordered on the absurd. These are some of the most popular digital marketing trends right now.
Why else would they not be? After all,as companies embark on the digital transformation journey you must keep up with the most recent advancements if your company wants to survive in this congested internet market.
In this article, we’ll outline 16 crucial digital marketing trends for the upcoming year that you can’t ignore because they’ll help your company not just survive but also prosper in this era of constant changes in the marketing landscape.
1) AI Marketing
The use of artificial intelligence in many businesses, such as content generation, chatbots, and search engines, has increased significantly in recent years.
Artificial intelligence is being used more and more in digital marketing, and for good reason. Digital marketing tools powered by AI have a higher chance of success since they can deliver quicker and more precise insights on consumer behavior.
One trend that has been observed in recent years is the increasing adoption of server-side header bidding, which allows for faster ad serving and can improve the user experience. It is also possible that the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence will become more prevalent in optimizing header bidding campaigns.
Jasper is an example of artificial intelligence-powered content creation software. Marketers can use this (or a similar) AI writing tool to generate relevant content quickly – for ad campaigns, email campaigns, and blog post writing – without having to manually search for content ideas or create new content from scratch.
Jasper makes content marketing easier than ever before, with features such as automated keyword tracking, trending topics analysis, and personalization capabilities, as well as the ability to create headlines and outlines.
2) Metaverse Marketing
The concept of the Metaverse is gaining traction. It is a digital universe in which people can interact in three-dimensional computer-generated environments. Users can explore digital spaces, create digital objects, and purchase digital assets in the virtual world. All that will also boost the performance of your small business packaging.
The metaverse provides opportunities for businesses to reach consumers with more engaging experiences than traditional digital marketing methods can provide. This could include developing interactive video campaigns or opening digital stores within the metaverse for customers to visit.
Metaverse marketing is a novel marketing concept that combines digital and physical spaces through VR and AR to create an immersive digital experience in which brands sell their products or services.
3) Augmented Reality (AR) & Immersive Technologies
Although virtual reality (VR) piques everyone’s interest with grand sci-fi concepts, augmented reality (AR) has proven to be more practical for marketers.
Facebook recently unveiled its long-awaited smart glasses, and while the emphasis is on photography rather than augmented reality, it’s the start of what could be a game-changing venture.
With the advancement of AR technology, we will see a significant increase in the number of brands finding useful applications for the technology in the future.
4) Conversational Marketing
With all of the talk about chatbots, artificial intelligence, and personalization, the reality of modern marketing becomes clear: it’s more conversational than ever.
Conversational marketing is a marketing strategy that entails having real-time conversations to build relationships with prospects or customers, increase engagement, and even close sales. The goal of conversational SMS marketing is to provide a personalized experience for each user by utilizing chatbots, voice search, enhance customer engagement with two-way texting, and other digital channels, all while ensuring TCPA compliance.
Businesses can provide more engaging interactions while gathering valuable insights into their target audience by leveraging AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) to analyse customer intent and provide personalized responses. This enables them to deliver personalized experiences at scale, potentially leading to increased conversions.
Companies use the following methods to implement a conversational marketing strategy:
- Chatbots
- Personalized videos
- Personalized emails
- Virtual selling assistants
5) Chatbots
Chatbots softwares are one example of conversational marketing in action. Chatbots such as Stealth AI use AI technology to deliver human-like messages to website visitors in real time:
Many customers prefer interacting with chatbots because they are available 24 hours a day, provide prompt responses, and accurately recall their entire purchasing history. These virtual assistants provide excellent customer service by exceeding expectations and automating repetitive tasks, freeing up your resources for more important tasks.
Chatbots will become increasingly important for a positive customer experience as more consumers become accustomed to them.
6) Personalization
To stand out in 2023, you must personalize your marketing, which includes personalizing content, products, emails, and so on.
This short clip from the film Minority Report may be exaggerated (not to mention completely overwhelming), but it depicts a world of ongoing personalization:
Consumers, it turns out, value customization:
It has been discovered that 72% of shoppers only act on marketing messages that are tailored to their specific interests.
7) Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) as a digital marketing strategy is all about optimizing customers’ digital interactions with your company. Customers now expect a more personalized, seamless experience when interacting with brands, thanks to the rise of digital channels and increased competition.
CX aids in the creation of personalized experiences by determining what customers want and require when interacting with your website or digital platform. Businesses can ensure that they provide an exceptional digital experience to their customers by leveraging digital marketing tactics and tools such as personalization, automation, augmented reality, an gamification.
The most serious threat to any business is a negative customer experience:
However, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better digital customer experience.
Here are some ideas for improving your customers’ experiences:
- Create multiple, detailed buyer personas to better understand your customers.
- Improve the user experience of your website by simplifying usability and navigation.
- Provide an omnichannel experience (see the next section for more)
- Provide the highest level of personalization possible so that they feel valued.
Make everything as simple as possible for the customer (make a purchase, contact a human customer rep, return a product, or cancel a service)
8) Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing was one of the year’s buzzwords. While the phrase may have become a little tired, the strategy remains as fresh and relevant as ever.
Omnichannel marketing is the process of marketing across multiple platforms, such as social media, apps, email, and blog posts, to provide a better customer experience and a consistent brand message, brand storytelling, resulting in higher conversions and loyalty.
Don’t forget to include offline marketing strategies in your omnichannel strategy, such as promotional emails with digital coupons that customers can redeem in-store.
Direct mail campaigns, such as sending physical letters or postcards through post offices to promote digital marketing initiatives, are examples of direct mail retargeting campaigns. You can also add a QR Code to your direct mail campaigns and connect the offline media with the online media.
This is another area where AI and big data are assisting brands in better understanding consumer behavior and personalizing at an individual level at scale.
9) Account-based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing is a marketing strategy that targets specific accounts rather than a broad audience, allowing companies, such as Pro Business Plans, to tailor their messaging and build relationships with key decision makers.
This strategy also allows businesses to save time and resources by concentrating on accounts that are most likely to succeed. Furthermore, ABM fosters strong customer relationships, which can lead to increased conversion rates and customer loyalty and ABM marketing is very successful in improving the SAAS business with great SAAS marketing strategies..
10) Video Shorts & Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the most important marketing trends today and will be for the foreseeable future. In this section, we’ll discuss both short-form and longer, traditional videos.
You can use video shorts to create:
When we talk about traditional (i.e., non-short form) video marketing, we don’t just mean YouTube. There are numerous ways to increase video engagement.
Video is a useful channel for repurposing and republishing existing content or vice versa. On the one hand, this entails transforming a piece of content, such as a blog post, into a video. Although video production can be time-consuming, content creators can leverage a wide variety of tools, such as pre-designed video assets, to streamline the process.
11) Visual Search & Visual Content Marketing
Visual search is a new practice in which people can search by uploading an image. Although it is still in its early stages, two companies are making use of visual search:
Visuals are an extremely effective way to engage audiences. A great-looking visual – videos, images, charts, GIFs, infographics – can create a much stronger connection with potential customers than text alone.
12) Voice Search (VSEO) & Voice Commerce
The growing popularity of voice search has compelled businesses to reconsider their digital marketing strategies. Consider the following statistics on voice search:
- Voice searches account for 40% of all internet searches in the United States.
- Voice search was used by 58% of consumers to find local business information.
- 40% of adults use voice search on a daily basis.
Every month, 1 billion voice searches are conducted.
As the use of digital assistants grows and people become more comfortable with using their voices to search online, voice search engine optimization (VSEO) is becoming increasingly important.
VSEO entails optimizing your website content so that it can be easily understood by digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, allowing them to provide faster and more accurate search results. Businesses must ensure that their content is easily found via voice search by 2023.
Voice search is already important in providing relevant information to search engine users. Google Assistant has 1 million actions and Alexa has over 100,000 skills, which are functions that allow their voice assistants to respond to user commands and queries very specifically.
13) Prevent Cybersecurity Threats with an SSL Certificates
As SSL certificates encrypt online communications and ensure no third-party can access confidential information that users share online. Most SSL certificates offer 256-bit encryption, which is unbreakable and is sure to offer secure communications. Users’ personal information like contact details, banking details, etc. will be kept secure.
Install an SSL certificate and make sure all web pages are served over HTTPS. However, an SSL certificate may not be just enough for overall security and you will need to consider other security measures like enforcing strong password policies, keeping your software up-to date, etc.
14) Push Notifications
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter privacy laws have harmed the effectiveness of email marketing. Furthermore, younger audiences prefer alternative modes of communication and prefer to interact with brands through fewer touchpoints.
Browser or web push notifications will be used by more brands in 2023 as part of their effort to engage users across multiple channels — and they are becoming more sophisticated and personalized.
Using personalized push notifications actually increases conversions:
- The open rate for segmented push messaging is 7%, compared to 3% for generic, broadcast messages (a 2x improvement)
- A segmented push notification converts 54% of users, compared to only 15% for broadcast messages (a 3x improvement)
- Notifications triggered by behaviour are used to re-engage people who have expressed interest but have not converted, as well as to recover revenue from abandoned shopping carts:
To maximize conversion rates from such efforts, notifications can even include images and CTAs:
15) Interactive Content & UGC
In 2023, we’ll see a shift away from traditional text-based content and toward dynamic interactive content that provides users with an immersive experience, such as:
- Quizzes and polls
- Embedded calculators
- Augmented reality ads
- 360-degree videos
Interactive content is more engaging, memorable, and likely to produce the results your company requires. People like it not only because it’s new and different, but also because it makes them feel more connected to brands and involved in the purchasing process.
And interactive content goes hand in hand with user-generated content.
User-generated content (UGC) is content created and shared by social media users. Images, videos, reviews, and blog posts about products or services can all be included.
Imagine an Instagram wall showcasing customer photos using your product or creative content inspired by your brand. This UGC can be incredibly powerful, fostering a sense of community and trust among potential customers.
16) Predictive & Augmented Analytics
Predictive analytics is the practice of identifying patterns in data and attempting to predict the future using data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning. It has become more sophisticated and widespread in many industries because of its potential.
We can expect to see an increase in the number of predictive analytics tools and applications, such as advanced lead scoring, customer segmentation, and personalization, in terms of digital marketing trends.
Augmented Analytics, on the other hand, uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate data preparation and enable data sharing.
17) Email Marketing Tactics
“Email marketing is advantageous for digital marketers because it can be used to promote other marketing channels such as social media platforms. When you use email marketing to promote these channels, you ensure that your audience receives all of your company’s information in one place. This allows them to make an informed decision about whether or not to purchase from you.”
They even go on to say that email marketing content will be around for a long time. Email list hygiene is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. If done correctly, email list hygiene can improve your deliverability rates and ensure that your marketing emails reach the inboxes of your subscribers.
Email marketing remains relevant and has a bright future. It’s likely to become even more important as time goes on, especially given how simple and inexpensive it is to use.
With email marketing, businesses can easily send targeted, personalized messages to their audience, leading to increased engagement, more referrals, and sales. In addition, email marketing software like NotifyVisitors, Klaviyo provides various features and tools that make it easy for businesses to create, send, and track the success of their email campaigns.
As more and more people use email as their primary form of communication, the importance of email marketing software will likely continue to grow in the coming years. However, if you’re interested in cost-effective tools to reach and communicate with their customers, you should check out Klaviyo alternatives.
18) First-Party Cookies
The GDPR of the European Union and the CCPA of California were both passed into law to limit how companies use their customers’ data.
Since then, dozens of the world’s largest corporations have been fined exorbitant sums of money for violations of user privacy, such as:
Amazon — €746 million ($877 million)
Google – €50 million ($56.6 million)
The implications of the new privacy laws go far beyond economics. Marketers are now facing what has always been their worst nightmare: the end of third-party cookies.Cookies enable marketers to collect a wide range of data in order to measure, personalize, and develop ad campaigns. With the gradual but steady disappearance of third-party cookies, such as those used by most marketing tools to power their technologies, businesses can only rely on data collected by themselves.
