As we reflect on 2022, it’s valuable to gauge what trends will be at the forefront in 2023, so you can prepare and adjust your strategy accordingly. We’ve surveyed our talented Marketing Strategy and Services team to discover what will be the most relevant marketing trends in 2023. Here are our findings:

Trend #1: Demand for Personalized Experiences Will Increase 

With so much noise in today’s market, customers expect businesses to provide more personalized experiences. According to Salesforce’s 2022 State of Marketing Report, 83% of marketers say, “their marketing organizations engage customers in real-time across one or more marketing channels.” Even if you don’t realize it, you do provide an omnichannel experience. But is it an experience that provides your customers with what they need and want in the right place and time?  

In 2023, it’s going to become more important to provide consistent experiences across a variety of channels. To provide a well-tuned omnichannel customer experience, you need to be able to centralize multiple data sources and ensure your zero- and first-party data collection strategy enables you to understand how your segments interact with your brand. Fortunately, there are modern solutions for that.  

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are a powerful tool when it comes to personalization. Since CDPs unify customer data across disparate data sources, you can gain a real-time view of customers. With centralized data, you can target and segment more efficiently. This enables your organization to act swiftly as you will be able to track campaign performance more rapidly.   

Combining CDPs with intelligent customer journey and personalization engines, you can begin to build highly customized experiences spanning across email, social, and web, ensuring you are providing the right message at the right time across all channels.

Trend #2: Maximize the Value of Your MarTech Stack  

Let’s address the elephant in the room: With more layoffs occurring across many industries, such as tech, finance, and consumer goods, we can expect marketing budgets to remain stagnant. As a result, there will be pressure to do more with less.   

That doesn’t mean you have to do more work to reach your goals if you use your existing resources. Most marketing teams do not fully utilize their marketing tech stack. If your team is in a similar situation, it’s critical to evaluate the features you are not utilizing to their fullest. This can help you discover potential features that will make it easier to achieve your goals. 

What does maximizing the value of your current martech stack look like? Perhaps you are:  

• Looking to centralize marketing data? If so, it’s valuable to evaluate your current reporting strategy and how you can utilize data analytics and intelligence tools to create dashboards that help drive real results  
• Evaluating how to provide more personalized email and web experiences? Real-time personalization and interaction management tools, like Interaction Studio, can enable you to provide more customized experiences across a variety of segments as they browse goods and services and engage with email communications  
• Examining how to provide consistent customer journeys across multiple channels?  Customer lifecycle management platforms, like Journey Builder, can help you create a consistent omnichannel experience for customers as it tracks their behavior in real-time and enables you to create rules to respond to those behaviors  

You don’t have to maximize the utilization of your martech stack alone. With our winning combination of next-level marketing strategies and deep technical experience, we’ve helped many clients across a multitude of industries maximize their marketing technology investment and provide more personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.  

Trend #3: The Need for Automation Will Continue to Grow 

To reach your growing KPI goals with constrained resources, automation is a necessity. Utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence can help your team automate tedious, manual tasks so you can focus on providing excellent customer service. One way innovative marketers are using this new technology is by investing in AI-powered chatbots and conversational marketing platforms.  

Chatbots and conversational marketing platforms empower your team to generate targeted messages that answer customers’ questions in real-time instead of directing them to manual lead capture forms and waiting for a response.  

AI is also becoming increasingly used for trend spotting and analysis. Einstein Recipes within Interaction Studio are powered by machine-learning algorithms that curate content based on the “ingredients” selected by the user to provide recommendations on-site, in emails, or on mobile apps. These suggestions will increase cart value and encourage continued engagement when strategically placed.  

The customer insights from personalization and interaction management platforms help to form a better picture of your customers, enabling you to better analyze and optimize your go-to-market strategy.

Trend #4: Customers Choose Brands with Similar Values 

With brands constantly shouting over each other online, customers are becoming increasingly selective about the brands they purchase and interact with, especially Gen-Z. According to Salesforce, 66% of customers have stopped buying from companies and brands whose values do not align with theirs.   

It’s essential to understand what your customer segments value, so you can provide messaging and products that speak to their values. You must ensure your zero- and first-party data collection strategy provides you with enough information to determine those values and cater to their needs accordingly. Establishing loyalty programs or other direct communication channels is an exceptional way to collect the data you need to ensure your customer experiences are frictionless, personalized, and memorable.

Other Marketing Trends to Consider

As you know, a lot goes into your digital marketing strategy. It’s critical to understand how marketing trends, no matter how large or small, can affect your go-to-market strategy. Here are some other trends to consider when re-evaluating your 2023 digital marketing strategy: 

Email Marketing

• Privacy Protection - With other providers adopting policies similar to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, marketers must rely on many more metrics to determine engagement, such as clicks, conversions, unsubscribes, and complaints.  
• Interactive Emails – We’ve seen impressive results in helping clients make their emails more dynamic and interactive. One example is how we helped Sonos. By assisting Sonos in creating interactive, personalized emails using Ampscript, they exceeded their benchmark as well as increased attributable revenue, average order value, and repurchasing rates within their target audiences.  ‍
• Accessible and Inclusive Design - To stand out from the noise, accessible design is a necessity as it ensures a better customer experience. In fact, according to Litmus, 77% of marketers say accessible design is a priority, but only 8% follow best practices rigidly. You can make your emails more accessible by creating dark mode versions of emails and making your CTAs and text easily readable by using color-blinded accessible color schemes and increasing the font size to make text more legible. 
  

Digital Marketing + Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Gearing Up for a Cookieless Future- Due to GDPR and Apple’s third-party cookie tracking updates, maintaining compliance while serving up relevant, personalized experiences is going to continue to be a challenge. To bridge this gap, marketers need to begin pivoting away from third-party data and adopting more zero- and first-party data collection strategies.  
• Increased Focus on Mobile Delivery- Global mobile phone traffic has increased 3% from 2021 to 2022. Visitors will continue to demand high-quality, trustworthy content delivered quickly and in a range of formats that work well across desktop and mobile. 
• ‍Prioritization on Zero-Click Pages- Google's SERP listings are leading to more zero-click CTRs. This year’s zero-click CTRs accounted for 25.6% of CTRs on desktop, meaning that visitors got their information without leaving Google. If you want to meet your customers at the right place and time, it’s critical to focus on ranking for SERP listings.  
  

Paid Media

• The Double-Edged Sword of Privacy Concerns and Personalization- Customers want more privacy but also want more personalized experiences. In 2023, marketers will need to find ways to balance the two and speak appropriately to customers.  
• Customers Trust Influencers- 90% of consumers have made a purchase after seeing a product promoted by an influencer. Additionally, some marketing teams that have used influencer marketing have reported an ROI of more than $5 for every dollar spent. We imagine this trend will continue to increase into 2023.  
  

Begin Leveling Up Your 2023 Digital Marketing Strategy

As the market increasingly demands marketers to do more with less, you don’t have to handle more of the work on your own. With a trusted partner, like Lev, you can ensure your martech stack enables you to connect with your customers at the right place and time and adhere to best practices.  

Check out our latest blog, “How We’ve Helped Clients Lay a Solid Marketing Foundation Going Into 2023,” to discover how we've helped many clients establish processes that set them up for success into the new year.