The dynamic and versatile nature of digital marketing keeps us all on our toes pushing us to adapt to the new reality. With the help of modern new tech – digital marketing has become transformative for businesses offering them to reach new markets and sectors.
Based on what has worked in 2022 and keeping in mind the latest in technology, sustainability and consumer-behaviour, here are some 2023 digital marketing trends to keep in mind:
-AR Experiences
AR and immersive experiences have become key towards building sales during pandemic. The rise in use of AR technology directly means there are more consumers who are demanding these experiences – especially the Gen Z, who are predicted to be shopping via AR itself by 2025 – as per a report by leading brand Snap in 2021.
Pandemic’s push to online shopping has built more innovative brands who are offering these immersive experiences – now even via their stores/ offline marketing to bring in a unique value encouraging physical footfall alongside shopping.
-A great example is how Miss Dior AR campaign was seen to encourage shoppers to use Google Lens in the stores to create an AR garden of blossoming flowers.
-Burberry made use of AR immersive experiences to celebrate their Olympia collection via a pop up at Harrods where people could make use of their smartphones to bring a statue of Greek goddess Elpis to life.
And these experiences are no longer limited to one location or stores, many AR brands and start-ups are working to allow brands to make the world their canvas and bring creative content to real locations. Snapchat is one such example using Geo-filters on iconic world locations.
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-Byte size video content, snackable short form videos
Digital marketing will stay big and get bigger in the social media scene. Tik Tok Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook – all these platforms have their unique audiences and influencers. The consumer viewing habits are all different for each style of channel. With so many different needs and expectations – one thing that has stood out is short form/ byte size video content. Be it in the form of stories, reels on Instagram, shorts on YouTube – it’s all about quick, easy and strong recall value content.
YouTube Shorts alone has 1.5 billion monthly active users and sees more than 30 billion daily views – making it a huge opportunity area for brands to advertise on. Brands here will surely need the creator economy tactics and influence to bring the right content out in the right format.
With just 10-60 seconds of advertising space for videos – there is no need to build extensive storylines, rather it’s the time to learn from creators and let them lead the way.
-Privacy in experiences
We are living in the digital world – and privacy is a huge concern for all of us. Especially with the lack of laws protecting our data digitally. Businesses need to be able to differentiate themselves – show how they value their customers and manage their day-to-day lives online – especially in terms of privacy.
Privacy experiences are becoming a consumer need more than want where consumers are eager to share brands with their close ones that offer privacy in the experiences. They are directly known to impact the user’s trust in the brand and in the same way a bad privacy experience can damage the reputation of a brand.
How can a brand offer more privacy?
Make sure you are offering your customers a sense of control on their own data. When there is more control there is less criticism and less skepticism of digital marketing. Brands can build this trust by offering easy to access and understandable tools for customers to use and manage their privacy.
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-Content segmentation
Content segmentation is an essential practice in the digital marketing landscape that helps marketers to divide the content into smaller and more targeted segments that helps to maximize reach and engagement for brands.
One will need to go into deep analysis of customer data to segment it from demographics, interests, behaviours, buying patterns, and likes to build exclusive content that resonates more with those particular audiences.
Content segmentation is crucial when it comes to social media marketing. Let’s look at Instagram’s subscription feature – what it does is simple yet so unique – an influencer now has a set of unique audiences that are interested in a type of content and willing to pay more for the same. Giving influencers the power over a small community and brands thus can partner with such creators and influencers to reach various audience segments.
Also read: Achieving UN Sustainable development goals with digitization
-Wider adoption of marketing automation tools (AI driven tools)
AI has taken over our lives and how – and we are not complaining. It is no secret now that AI automation in digital marketing is one thing you cannot live without. AI has saved marketers time, money, and energy by automating mundane tasks such as email campaigns and paid ads.
AI tools today are also able to offer crucial and game-changing insights into customer behavior and patterns that can be used to analyze and build the marketing strategies to capture the audiences with the right message. If you are a business seeking to maximize your digital output (spending’s) – AI automation tools and AI data-based tools are not to be taken lightly. While AI continues to evolve and bring in new advances to help reach the right people, what we have today is already gold if one can apply it tactfully to know more and engage their audience
-Voice Optimization
Voice search is increasingly gaining popularity and with Gen-z – it is surely going to be the most used way to search on any search engine or shopping sites. Voice Search optimization is now a must for digital marketing in 2023 and involves marketers working on optimizing content for voice search on smart devices today like Google Home, Alexa (Amazon), Apple’s Siri amongst others. This surely is one of the biggest digital marketing trends one must watch out for 2023.
Not only is the voice optimization necessary but also making sure that the vernacular content – in voice and written is also taken care of. Adapting the existing and new content to natural language format using these devices and then curating the language such that it is exciting, conversational, and engaging.
With the future looking at an increase in smart devices, optimization is of utmost importance for voice commands.
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Other trends for 2023 will be customer focused marketing trends, hyper personalization, growth of creator economy, social consumerism amongst a few others. It sure will be a challenge for brands to create content that engages customers where they – the consumers are already time-starved, and content is widely available at almost every other device, channel, and application. What does seem like a common theme for the year is that the companies and brands will continue to work with customer data to tailor make content to enhance customer experiences, build immersive content for continued engagement and work to be more human centric.
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