If you are about to create a digital marketing strategy that differentiates your brand from the rest, hold on. Read these top 10 digital marketing trends that will be dominant.

Target Demographic Shifts to Gen-Z From Millennials

Gen-Zs are ‘digital natives’ and more progressive than millennials. What marketers need to think about when targeting such customers is that they put values first before shopping. Statista states that 45% of the Gen-Z population is motivated to purchase from brands that are ‘trustworthy and transparent.’ Communicating in their vocabulary will be crucial too. Creating marketing strategies based on this customer segment would require the integration of social causes and adapting to the platforms they use.

More Concern for Privacy

Third-party cookies are going to be removed from Google in 2024. This would create the need for marketers to rethink marketing campaigns that rely on third-party data. The focus will likely shift towards first-party data, which comprises information collected from user surveys instead of cookies.

In 2023, it will also be important for websites to provide options for users to know that they can control the data they provide. According to Think with Google, users trust brands with better privacy experiences. Google researcher Jonny Protheroe, “People are willing to share their data when there’s some meaningful value in doing so”. Even Apple’s iOS 14 update allows users to block IDFA (Identifier For Advertisers) identifiers through the opt-out option. It does not block ads, but the user finds less targeted ads.

Omnichannel Marketing with MarTech

Marketing strategies will work better with the omnichannel experience. The key is to reach out to customers across all touchpoints so that stronger customer relationships can be built and maintained.

You can opt for more than a few ways to do so.

• Integrating the sales and marketing teams to understand the customer journey through the marketing funnel better.

• Leveraging martech (marketing technology) such as marketing automation tools for wholesome omnichannel experiences.

• Leveraging Google Analytics 4 that uses event-based data, ideal for customer journey mapping.

Short Form Videos and Live Streaming

Video marketing is one of the best ways to attract and grow a large audience with storytelling. Live Streaming creates a better connection with the audience. Apart from that, short ‘snackable’ videos about 10 to 60 seconds tend to get more views than other forms. You have YouTube Shorts joining in with TikTok and Instagram.

Google’s Multisearch for Better User Engagement

Google search update, multisearch, is changing the way users search and shop online. Consumers can take any photo using Google Lens and ask a question simultaneously. It opens up plenty of opportunities for marketers to make the user’s search faster and more meaningful.

More Content Creators than Influencers

Influencer marketing is not going away anytime soon, but choosing the wrong influencer with many followers is definitely the thing of the past. Marketers are focusing on content creators who are genuinely more interested in their niche and focus on creating unique content. Their follower counts may be less than influencers, and they charge relatively less than influencers.

The micro-influencers on TikTok, for example, are being used more today than last year. Even if you are hiring influencers, it is essential to have an expert community of them instead of hiring one who has a larger follower count. The key is to align the essential metrics and constantly monitor the performance when leveraging an influencer.

Google’s Helpful Content Update for Content Marketers

This recent update is necessary to think about in 2023 in terms of SEO and content marketing. It’s Google’s machine learning algorithm that trains on search-based data sets. If your website has more low-quality pages than high quality ones, it is a signal to that algorithm that it should not be ranked on searches altogether.

This update will affect your content marketing strategy to a great degree. Leveraging all types of content formats including videos, following inbound marketing best practices, etc., are more likely to help.

Conversational Marketing to Improve Sales and Interaction

According to Finance Digest, 95% of customer interactions will be powered by artificial intelligence by 2025. Using AI-powered chatbots for customer conversations is not a new trend but how advanced the AI works is. Real-time conversations, personalised interactions, etc., can boost sales exponentially.

Using AI for Social Monitoring and to Recommend Posts on Social Media

AI will dominate platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to provide recommendations on the user’s feed. This is common in Netflix and Spotify, where AI algorithms suggest movies and songs. AI can be very beneficial for social media marketing, where marketing can leverage this technology to offer hyper-personalised and targeted posts.

Repurposing Content For Video

The digital marketing landscape is opening many doors to video marketing. SERPs (search engine result pages) already show videos and more and more social media users prefer short videos on almost every social media platform, especially TikTok.

Experts from Search Engine Journal suggest that in 2023, written content to be repurposed for videos. This is not only economical, but also the most preferred format for a wider audience group. Ideally, you can try this with your top-performing blogs and summarise them for the videos.

Relevant Articles: Gen-z, Omnichannel Marketing, Short Form Videos, Google’s Multisearch, Conversational Marketing, AI Marketing