With 2022 being another year filled with momentous events, we have compiled our top 5 predictions for 2023 to help you stay ahead in your digital marketing strategy.
1. Creative Is King
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Creative is King!
With ever-increasing time being spent on video platforms such as TikTok, short-form creatives are more important than ever for garnering audience attention.
Due to the never-ending availability of short and easily-digestible videos all on one platform, attention spans have dropped across the board making it more important than ever to focus on quick and simple messaging on video. This has changed the way we produce video content; dynamic and highly visual videos which get to the point have become the only way to capture your audience on mobile.
Our top tips for video creatives
1. Prioritise relevance and authenticity
Audiences want to see who you truly are and what your brand stands for. Take the time to work out your brand’s priorities on video channels, and turn these into short and simple ideas for communicating with your audience.
2. Short and simple messaging
Short-form videos have taken over. To capture attention, craft short and simple messages which can be communicated to your audience in an innovative and interesting way.
3. Capitalise on trends
a) New Year’s Resolution: capitalise on trends and try out popular short-video formats!
b) Not every trend will be relevant to your business, but you don’t have to just focus on TikTok! YouTube Shorts has 1.5 billion monthly users and is a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to get more views and connect with new audiences.
4. Variety
The nature of short-form videos means that audiences can get bored very quickly when they see the same creatives over and over. Test different versions of your creatives to boost engagement and to see which type of creative is most resonant with your audience.
5. Testing
There is no ‘one size fits all’ formula for creatives. Testing will allow you to continue improving your performance, so try new things, be unafraid to fail and let the data steer your strategy.
Our top predications trends in 2023
If you wanted to have a go at capitalising on some of the latest TikTok and YouTube trends, these are our top predictions for 2023:
1. Travel & Fashion
Fashion and travel are always popular on TikTok, with creators setting new trends and providing inspiration on what to wear to different places.
2. Self Love
Authentic and raw content is currently really popular with audiences for being so relatable. Users want to see people showing their true experiences and personality, steering away from the more polished and perfected content that we see on other channels such as Instagram.
3. Influencers
Audiences are interested in the small-medium size creators rather than influences with mass followings.
4. Group content
There has been a rise in group events where TikTok creators come together to create group content for online brands.
If you want to learn more about the importance of creative and how it can be used to reduce your advertising costs and improve conversions, join us on the Thursday 19th January for our webinar “Why creatives will be critical to scaling your business in 2023”
2. Privacy, Privacy, Privacy!
A new generation of analytics is upon us with Google Analytics 4, which focuses on collecting event-based data on websites and apps.
GA4 should be teamed with Enhanced Conversions to improve the accuracy of conversion measurements and to unlock more powerful bidding. It supplements your existing conversion tags by sending hashed first-party conversion data from your website to Google in a privacy-safe way. Offline Conversion Tracking has also been a major development over the last few years, and in 2023 we expect that it will be further integrated into campaigns to help connect digital marketing activities with conversions that happen in the real world.
One major consideration with GA4 is its introduction of new privacy controls such as cookie-less measurement, and behaviour and conversion modelling. Online privacy has become a topic of increasing importance with online users, with brands now needing to ensure that their customers feel in control of their data. In fact, Google found that when brands respect customer privacy and give control back to their customers, their ads perform better!
This year Google asked 20,000 people about the consequences of good and bad privacy experiences and the results were simple:
1. Privacy experiences impact user trust and can make or break digital marketing
2. Consumers view bad privacy experiences as almost as damaging as a theft of their data
3. 43% of recipients say they would switch to another brand after a bad privacy experience
So in 2023, invest time into protecting customer data and give customers the opportunity to manage their own privacy.
3. The Resurgence of SEO
With an increase in businesses running online ad campaigns over the pandemic, businesses have been returning to SEO strategies to complement Paid Search channels and to help them stand out.
High quality, visual content is now a must for SEO. Look at how you can leverage images, video, infographics, and other media to drive engagement and traffic, and make your site more user friendly.
You can use Google Analytics for a number of SEO insights such as:
1. Mobile traffic monitoring to gather data on bounce rates and engagement
2. Search bar tracking to understand what users are looking for when they come to your site and if there is a content or service gap you could be filling.
Most businesses need at least six months to start seeing results through SEO and it can take years to perfect. But please don’t let this put you off! The marketing results from SEO tend to be immense, with experts predicting that you will see £1 or more in business revenue for every £1 spent on SEO.
4. Collecting First-Party Data
In a cookie-less future, marketers will have to increasingly rely on first-party data to retarget and nurture audiences. Collecting first party data not only allows you to learn about your audiences, but also helps you to make informed decisions and changes to your processes or products based on what your customers say they do or do not like.
With the death of third-party data on the horizon, first-party data is the future. We recommend employing the following strategies to ensure you are ready for the switch:
1. User registration when logging onto websites
2. Event based tracking
3. Surveys and polls
4. Warranty or product registration
5. Customer feedback and reviews.
This level of data collection will give you the insight needed to understand your customers and prospects better. From our benchmarking, companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450% increase in qualified prospects. Those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.
5. Balancing Short and Long-Term Success
Finding the balance between short and long-term success in digital marketing can be difficult as marketing isn’t a linear process. Whilst it could be easy to launch a new campaign today with the intention of driving customer engagement for the most efficient budget, this might not play into where you want your brand to be in a year’s time.
Therefore, we recommend that this year you dedicate time to thinking about how you can drive sustainable growth and long-term success for your brand. There are a number of ways that you can do this, but our top picks are:
1. SEO
Employ our earlier recommendations and consider how content marketing can improve your SEO through specific keywords.
2. Content Marketing
Create high quality content that demonstrates your core offering. Think about how blog posts, articles and other texts can be used to achieve long term goals such as lead generation.
3. Organic Social Media
Build credibility using organic social media. Use platforms to engage and interact with your audiences, post relevant content, and research your competitors.
Whilst all of this can seem like a lot of changes to your strategy, think about where you could be in 2024 if you started with these now!
For advice, a tailored strategy and results, get in touch today!
