As you prepare your digital marketing goals and priorities for 2023, here are some of the new trends you’ll want to incorporate. Staying ahead of the curve allows you to get the best ROI on your marketing efforts.

SEO: Search engines continue to evolve and improve and so do the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) processes. Here are some of the things we are excited about integrating more fully in 2023:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4): On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer process data. You’ll be able to see your Universal Analytics reports for a period of time after July 1, 2023. However, new data will only flow into Google Analytics 4 properties. Transitioning from Universal analytics to GA4 will be critical for businesses in 2023.
• Google Updates: Google continues to roll out new algorithm updates. Expect more focus on great content (written by humans) and great user experience.
• Search Feature Optimization: Google continues to add more search enhancements and features directly into the result pages. Things like product listings, instant answer results, review snippets, and video and image carousels are important to optimize for.
• Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT) Signals: Google and other search engines want to show sites that they know they can trust. In 2023 we will focus on helping our clients to show important trust signals like authorship, schema markup, security features, and site vitals.
• Link Quality: Google continues to promote sites with high-quality links and ignores low-quality links. Google is improving its link acquisition and authority-building processes to focus on content-led authority-building to gain top-tier backlinks and media mentions.

Organic Social /Video:

• Cross-Platform Video Optimizations: Video styles continue to overlap between platforms like Youtube shorts, TikTok & Instagram, but ways to optimize per platform change rapidly. Text styles, Text-to-speech voices, and features like ‘respond to comments’ all change quickly. In 2023 it is likely that they will continue to diverge in an attempt to fight for native in-app content creation & more user time. Knowing up-to-date optimizations per platform allows your video content to be more valuable and effectively used across more than one app. Simply reposting an exact video isn’t best practice now, but simply going to cut it in 2023
• Social Commerce: Social platforms are all currently battling for the best e-commerce experience. While it’s still not clear who will be the ultimate winner, it is obvious that the future of social media is critical to the Gen Z shopping experience. While Instagram, TikTok & Youtube all took a small step back from social commerce in 2022 to re-evaluate the clunky process, they’re likely going to come back with all new features to continue shaping the social experience. Soon, consumers won’t just be checking your social media for social proof and authenticity, they’ll be ready to buy.
• Social Search Engine: Social media is becoming the go-to search engine by more and more consumers each day. Platforms are not only becoming more shopping-friendly but actually optimizing their algorithms to better suit user intent. Keeping this in mind when creating/posting content can increase your brand’s likelihood of being discovered by new users/consumers. If you care about your organic traffic on google, you should care about showing up in social searches as well.
• Predictive Analytics Capabilities: The use of AI & big data to predict outcomes, trends, & behaviors is said to become more integrated into social media in 2023 making social listening more actionable than ever before.

Email / SMS:

• Make Segmentation a Priority:  The days of sending campaign blasts to your entire email list are all but over. If you want to keep a healthy email account in 2023 while increasing revenue, segmentation needs to be a primary focus. You can segment by engagement level, products purchased, time as a subscriber, total lifetime value, etc. The more segmented campaigns you send (in addition to focusing on automation and everything else), the better your ROI will be in the end.
• Optimize Emails for Mobile: Mobile will continue to become a more significant focus in 2023. Each year, more and more subscribers open their emails on mobile devices. As of 2022, nearly half of all people open all of their emails on a mobile device. In 2023, that number is expected to jump above 60%. For that reason, the bulk of your optimization efforts should be focused on mobile, going forward. This will put you in a better position to serve your subscribers, and drive them to purchase.
• Focus on Customer Loyalty: A common phrase in email marketing is that ‘the money is in the list’. That is definitely true, but that also means you need to nurture your existing subscribers and provide incentives for them to continue shopping with you, instead of your competitors. There are a number of loyalty-focused apps on the market, but outside of picking one, you need to optimize, test, and ensure the platform you use is helping you increase the lifetime value of your subscribers and customers.
• Invest in SMS: SMS used to be a ‘nice to have’ for anyone (especially eCommerce brands), doing email marketing. SMS has become a ‘must-have’ for almost every brand in the last year or so. You cannot argue with the average open rate on text messages. Many brands see open rates of 80% or higher on their text campaigns. Because those messages are easy to send and can be accessed quickly by subscribers, sending regular text messages and adding automation (like Abandoned Cart, Welcome Series, etc.), can impact revenue in a dramatic way.
• Utilize New Technology: New technology is emerging all the time, especially around email and SMS. In 2023, we are planning to implement some technology that will allow for ordering popular products within text messages, new automation to increase customer loyalty via email and SMS, and new ways to get more positive reviews from happy customers. Implementing all of these new tactics along with doing everything else well, will lead to more healthy email lists and higher revenue for your customers.

CRO: Now, CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of making changes to your website, app, form etc. with the aim of providing a more optimised user journey to increase conversion rate. When considering CRO there are a few essential areas that companies need to consider when planning a testing strategy.

• Technology: You need to make sure you are increasing efficiency around your tech stack: your website, your page load speed, core vitals, your cart & checkout, and your pixeling.
• Experiences: Depending on the new audiences that come to your site and the content they saw, they will need unique site experiences to come to, ideally landing pages. These landing pages should be uniquely designed for the source of the traffic and the reason they’d be interested in the product.
• Audit: With an initial audit you should analyze your site’s user experience and critical data points such as conversion, Lifetime Value (LTV), and Average order value (AOV) to create a roadmap for 2023.
• Accessibility: With accessibility lawsuits have been on the rise and making your site accessible has never been easier. Use an Ai powered tool to bring your website into compliance and not only avoid potential suits but also reach more customers!
• Data: Ensure GA4 has been set up on your site alongside any additional tools such as Hotjar to start collecting data as there is no time like the present! Be sure to set up those custom conversions where applicable within GA4 as well!
• UI/UX Design Trends: Some of the trends going into 2023 are still the use of large fonts, motion design, and more immersive imagery while getting away from some more outdated things such as no more parallax scrolling.
• Platform: With the integration of Ai into the website process there are a million different ways to build a website. Even still the bigger players (Shopify + WordPress) are the ones to watch as they incorporate Ai and other things into their platforms natively.

ADS

• Make testing landing pages a priority: There are a lot of different types of landing pages that can be utilized such as Faux Home pages that are geared towards different audiences, Listicles (5 reasons to try…) and Advertorial (designed to look like a news article). Run ads to these different ones and find what performs best.
• Utilize AI: AI tools are all the rage right now and marketers are utilizing these tools to compile different headline and caption copy to test with ads. Some tools will even rank how well they thing the headline will perform.
• Creative will continue to be key: With more and more brands finding success with broad audiences, creative is the biggest lever at your disposal. Test a variety of creative types such as images, videos, press mentions, User Generated Content and whitelisted ads from influencers on a consistent basis to find and iterate based on what’s performing.

NET Royalty /WEB3

• Advancements in Technology: Blockchain technology and web3 continues to grow and more companies are figuring out how to implement this exciting tech.  Mariketa and other new big companies are using web3 technology in their brand to reward their employees and customers.
• Blockchain Strategy: Nike has fully embraced the power of web3 and NFTs and is pushing the boundaries of how brands can utilize the tech.