It’s that time of year again! Time to look back at 2022 and see what happened, and then look forward and try to guess what 2023 will hold. Like most industries, we have no guarantees about what will happen in the world of marketing over the coming months, but there are some pretty clear signals showing us what we should be looking out for – and you should be too. So, what digital marketing trends does 2023 have in store?
Metaverse
It wouldn’t be a 2023 prediction without some mention of the metaverse. It’s one of the most talked about trends in digital marketing right now, and just like Facebook it’s not going anywhere soon. The idea is to create a variety of immersive virtual experiences online alongside other users. The concept hangs on VR, but already we’ve seen big name businesses like Starbucks and Nike announcing metaverse experiences.
That being said, a lot of businesses, particularly smaller ones, don’t have a practical use case for the metaverse yet, which means it’s likely to stay with big brand experiences this year while the concept settles into the consumer consciousness. So this year might be the year of snooping and planning what you would do with the metaverse concept, rather than going all in on it yourself.
Automated Content Generation
In the last 2 months of 2022 automated content was a huge hot topic, and it hasn’t cooled off just because Christmas happened. The first wave of discussion was around AI image generation, and the second is now around AI-generated written content, and what that might mean for other parts of the marketing mix.
This is a tricky one for us, because while the idea of AI-generated blogs and web copy sounds good, it likely won’t take hold in the way many think. This is mainly because Google has outright condemned AI-generated content, labelling it as spam as far as search engines are concerned. In an interview, Google webmaster John Mueller stated:
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning. And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways.
And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kinds of things.
My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old-school tools, but for us, it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
However, there are other areas we think AI could be incredibly useful in. For example, some marketing companies are experimenting with integrating AI into various digital marketing channels, using algorithms and machine learning to help you understand the social media posts your audience engages with most, which search results they see and even which ads are displayed. In short – using AI to help connect buyers with the right products. This is where we think AI will end up going in the next year.
TikTok Will Continue To Dominate
Since its launch TikTok has become one of the most popular social media sites on the scene. But just like other social networks it’s done some growing up in the last few years, and it’s gone from kids lip-syncing to audio clips to being one of the biggest players in the social media marketing realm. TikTok generated $4.6 billion in 2021 – a figure that estimates say will be 142% higher by the end of 2022.
With roughly 1.8 billion active users, the audience is there and ready to hear your message. TikTok have seen the potential in this, and so have been investing heavily in useability for businesses, improving targeting options for advertising and making it an all-round goldmine for businesses looking to target anyone from ages 10 to 50. And since the average TikTok user opens the app 19 times a day and spends around 75 minutes a day browsing, there are more opportunities than ever to connect with them.
In summary – TikTok will get bigger and better than ever.
The Great Marketing Automation Shift
Marketing automation tools have been around for a long time now, so that itself isn’t a trend you need to watch out for. The interesting thing that we think will happen in 2023 is an attitude shift. A change in how marketing automation are used, and what businesses choose to do with them. As with most digital trends this is something we’ve started to see at the end of 2022, and we expect it to gain traction throughout 2023. The shift to signal-based marketing.
Signal-based marketing is where you as a business (or marketeer) actively anticipate what customers will want and when, and then feed it into an automation process that can deliver it. Rather than the traditional technical-based marketing that focuses on providing information once a customer is looking, marketers will start to analyse all of the data they’ve been collecting for signals in customer behaviour. Those behavioural signals can tell you what a customer is interested in, so that you can present your offering ahead of the need, putting your brand front and centre for the purchase opportunity. Driving this is GPT-4, a cutting-edge tool that can help marketers automate many tasks in a signal-based fashion, and we’re definitely excited to see more of this!Can we predict the future? Of course not! We don’t have a crystal ball in the digital jungle. But what we do have is years of knowledge and experience, and a lot of data, to help us understand what new trends are emerging, and which might be the ones to take hold in the next 12 months. But ultimately, we can’t wait to see what happens! If you’d like to stay on the cutting edge of marketing for the new year, just get in touch with our team and book a free, no-obligation consultation.
0 Comments