Digital Marketing
The thing about digital marketing is that it changes all the time. Keeping on top of digital marketing trends is the best investment you can make in the future success of your business. By understanding and implementing the newest digital marketing trends you are giving your digital marketing strategy the best chance of working to its zenith.
Why it’s never been more important to streamline your digital marketing strategy
If you’re working with the digital marketing trend that made sense in 2017, then it’s time to ramp it up. From artificial intelligence to influencer marketing, there are so many marketing trends to take advantage of in 2023. In this blog we’re going to look at the top digital marketing trends that are making waves in business.
Many businesses understand the need for a content strategy that incorporates multiple channels and various marketing tools but only those with an eye to the future are already incorporating the following digital marketing trends.
From influencer marketing to AI – the top digital marketing trends for 2023
Effective digital marketing is what will ensure your business or brand penetrates the customer experience. Compared with traditional marketing, a digital marketing strategy allows you to target customers on specific platforms. Customers and competitors alike exist online, and in order to compete your digital marketing efforts need to be cost effective and designed to reach a broad audience.
You’re looking for a way to ensure consumers interact and become loyal customers, whether that’s through content creation, marketing campaigns, messaging apps or social media trends. Crafting a digital marketing strategy in 2023 is very different to earlier iterations that may have focused mainly on email marketing, for example.
Today, digital marketing trends must be quickly assimilated and implemented.
5 digital marketing trends to explore
The following are the most significant digital marketing trends around right now and, in our opinion, are likely to be your best bet to achieving your digital marketing goals. Among the top digital marketing trends are some stalwarts, such as content marketing and some more innovative suggestions including influencer marketing.
1. Digital marketing trends – Influencer marketing (micro influencers and nano influencers)
Anyone who has been working with a marketing strategy over recent years already knows just how important influencer marketing is. Just check out any social media platforms with big name influencers directly speaking to their massive follower counts.
This digital marketing trend has been around for a while but it shows no signs of falling out of fashion as social media users find their place on platforms including TikTok and Instagram. With the rising popularity of influencer marketing on social media channels, the cost has also risen. Even for an influencer with between 50,000 and 500,000 followers (this is considered mid-tier for social media marketing), you will be paying up to £1,000 per single post.
And while this can form part of a digital strategy, it may not be the most sensible step for marketing teams of small businesses or start-ups. Instead, they can think about working with micro influencers.
Why are nano and micro influencers becoming more popular with potential customers?
There is evidence that the huge success of big name influencers is actually now going against them, with consumers increasingly turning towards smaller, more relatable figures on social media.
- This gives digital marketers a whole new avenue for influencer marketing that not only reach your potential customers with relevant content on their social media platform, but also help the budget stretch further.
- It’s a way of facilitating personalized marketing to specific groups of potential and existing customers via social media posts.
- In a digital world with millions of young consumers primarily using mobile devices, this is a no-brainer for marketing teams.
2. Digital marketing trends: TikTok
We’ve pulled this social media platform out specifically as it is a huge winner for marketing content. Data pulled from the marketing world by iwoca, shows that 10% of business owners (under the age of 45) use TikTok for digital marketing.
According to the latest data, as summed up by Forbes here, TikTok generated more than $350 million from in-app revenue in the last quarter of 2022. This was up from $150 million in the same quarter of 2021, showing just how fast its star is continuing to rise.
It’s also worth noting for anyone considering a new marketing strategy, that TikTok generated $205 million more than Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook combined. Part of the reason TikTok is so popular with the zeitgeist of the marketing world is that it’s cheaper to advertise there than on the likes of Instagram and Facebook.
But it’s also the fact that conversion rates are exponentially higher than the other platforms.
Many marketers have grasped the fact that ads on TikTok feel far more native to the user. While on other social media platforms they feel they’re being bombarded by obvious marketing campaigns, on TikTok the personalized marketing makes it blend in more with the content they’re consuming by choice.
3. Digital marketing trends: artificial intelligence
Content marketing has long played an important role in any company’s digital marketing strategies. And, content marketing is also a time-consuming and skilled practice for digital marketers. So what if artificial intelligence took on the content creation – whether that’s marketing messages for email marketing, social media feeds or anything else that forms part of the marketing strategy, and freed up the digital marketers to spend their time strategising?
That’s the idea behind one of the newest digital marketing trends – using machine learning and AI writing tools to create content.
Just like with any other use case for machine learning, the biggest sell for this is the time it saves. And it could also feasibly improve digital marketing efforts by increasing the amount of content output. While many marketers are embracing AI, there is also recognition that content is only useful if it’s quality content. Machine learning often works for creating answer based content in particular, and while this could work for digital marketing plans, it’s also important to have a human double-checking it – at least for now.
4. Digital marketing trends: should the metaverse become one of your marketing channels?
Most of the marketing industry today is familiar with digital marketing dependables, such as user generated content on social media, written content, predictive analytics, smart insights, email marketing, data collection, Google search and Google analytics.
But how many are willing to take their digital marketing activities into the metaverse? The idea of the virtual world created by Mark Zuckerberg is still fairly ne to most of us. But there are plenty of signs that digital marketing executives with an eye to the future are already figuring out how they will manage their marketing efforts while incorporating new technologies.
For example, statistics pulled from Sprout Social 2022 report show that 85% of digital marketing executives using social media fully expect to incorporate new technologies, such as the metaverse and virtual reality into their strategy over the next 12 months.
Furthermore, the report shows that 40% of brands and their digital marketing leaders intend to invest up to 50% of their budget into some kind of metaverse strategy over the next two years. This shows just how much the predicted customer experience is changing and how this will force marketers to make changes.
5. Digital marketing trends: marketing materials being generated by AI
We’ve talked about natural language processing and AI written content, but there’s another area for the marketing sector to utilise artificial intelligence. In the same way that AI can create marketing messages using words, it can also create marketing messages in the form of graphics. DALL.E is a machine learning programme that was developed by OpenAI (who also developed ChatGPT).
The programme can create images directly from just a few words of text. Digital marketing experts believe the tech could totally revolutionise the way that marketers create content for people to find on Google search. There are lots of other AI tools just about to break into the market, including Meta’s ‘Make a Video’. When these become more easily available, we could see some big changes.
