Marketing trends for 2023.

Now that 2023 is upon us, why not take this opportunity to anticipate some of the directions that your sales and marketing campaigns may be headed in the months to come? Armed with information about these potential tendencies, you can be better prepared to advance one or two steps ahead of your competition.

Focus on customer experience.

• Today’s savvy buyers want more than a generic currency-in-exchange-for-product transaction. Increasingly, they are demanding that they be noticed, recognized, and rewarded for their uniqueness with a shopping journey curated specifically for them. Fortunately, the widespread use of technologies such as point of sale systems has made it exponentially easier to create and maintain targeted loyalty and marketing campaigns that can pinpoint which products to sell, when to sell them, and to whom. This can all be based on the location, buying history, and personal data that is voluntarily supplied by each customer.
• This personalization also must include an emphasis on efficiency. With the help of automation and intelligent data usage, you can give consumers a seamless buying experience that feels like you have created it just for them.
• The same social media channels that should already be helping you to spread the word about your store and highlight your products are also an excellent customer service avenue. Since many of your shoppers are probably checking their Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram feeds multiple times a day, this gives you the perfect opportunity to leverage your pages to answer their customer service needs. As a bonus, publicized solutions to individual problems can help the entire community to gain added trust in your brand.

Local searches will be prominent.

• Amid all the fuss about social media, don’t discount the continued importance of local searches. For that reason, it remains vital that you keep your listings in engines like Google up-to-date and prominent in the rankings to ensure that yours is one of the first sites a consumer sees.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best strategies to use to accomplish that goal. Be sure that you have the financial resources and knowledge to mount a marketing campaign that is compatible with what your customers are looking for. In particular, conduct analysis to learn the best words to focus on in your content so that interested buyers are directed to your page every time.

Mobile optimization continues to pick up speed.

• With each passing day, more consumers are preferring to use their mobile devices to browse for and buy items online. This underscores the need for all websites to be optimized for all device types and screen sizes.
• Today’s businesses cannot afford to let themselves fall behind the curve when it comes to being welcoming to all mobile devices.
• Even small businesses need to put forth the financial resources necessary to stay abreast of this trend. Otherwise, they will find themselves swallowed up by big box behemoths and online giants like Amazon.

Influencer marketing becomes more mainstream.

• Like it or not, people tend to follow the lead of celebrities. The good news is that businesses don’t need to break the bank to capitalize on this fact.
• An additional 17% of marketers have recognized the power of influencers and plan to put their money where their mouths are by investing in this surging form of selling. You would be amazed by how quickly sales can jump when a product or store is endorsed by someone with that all-important X Factor.
• While high-profile global corporations might have the means to court the highest of the mighty TikTokers and YouTubers, most sellers don’t. Even so, they can harness this lucrative trend by partnering with micro-influencers, less recognizable but still compelling luminaries in a particular niche. The result can be a mutually beneficial relationship and higher sales.

Native advertising will see a boom.

• This form of paid advertising is designed to match the type of content of the media source it appears on. An example is to feature video content on YouTube, which is a video format in itself.
• Almost one-quarter of the marketing professionals surveyed anticipate that they will adopt native advertising in the upcoming months, probably due to this format’s tendency to appear familiar and thus to inspire trust in consumers.
• Another reason for the increased popularity of native ads is that they are proving to be a highly effective mechanism to generate sales. In fact, 50% of the marketers currently using the format say that it is the most prominent return on investment in their sales bag of tricks.

Video will be the top form of content marketing.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video might actually multiply that by another thousand. Short-form videos, the most popular of this format, are relatively inexpensive and easy to make and can be absorbed quickly by potential customers.

• You can thank TikTok for this upsurge. More than 60% of the young consumers surveyed look at their TikTok feeds at least once every day. You can’t afford to miss out on that opportunity.
• Considering that your likelihood of making a sale goes up by a whopping 85% once shoppers have watched your short video, you can’t deny how compelling this virtually free form of advertising can be for your business.

Automation will keep innovating.

• Automation does not need to be synonymous with impersonality. In fact, businesses will be increasingly using it to create a more interactive, individualized shopping journey this year.
• AI tools can work in tandem with automation to streamline the customer experience. Once intelligent chatbots (guided by software such as Chat GPT), are integrated into company websites, consumers get faster, higher-quality answers and an even better path to human assistance if the situation warrants.

At the speed automation and artificial intelligence are evolving it, the sky's the limit. In even just a few months, these technologies have the potential to change the landscape of marketing and customer service once and for all.

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