After almost two decades delivering digital innovation for best-in-class brands, Digital On Six has developed a unique perspective on emerging trends.
We believe 2023 will be a particularly interesting evolution given the past three years:
- In the three years since the world went virtual a tidal wave of content has flooded our digital world.
- Gen Z’s recent debut in the workforce means four generations are now struggling to understand one another’s particular use of punctuation, emojis and social media platforms at work.
- Modern technology has created new problems in its attempt to solve old ones. Companies are juggling too many enterprise applications with too few technically-trained resources to support their use.
- The strongest forces of change, however, are the whiplash effects of pandemic-era policies and global politics combining to produce widespread inflation.
Content marketing proved to be very effective in 2022, yet still only half of businesses have a formalized strategy today. This is unfortunate as content marketing will no doubt reign supreme for years to come.
This year, we anticipate every single marketing team must reckon with one all-encompassing truth: They must do more with less.
Image source: www.lululemon.com
1. Do More Personalized Promotions
In 2022, companies got better at data-driven marketing which allowed them to execute more targeted and therefore more efficient campaigns. But consumers will behave differently in the current economic climate.
To start, price sensitivity will be the starting point for shoppers. In general, consumers will need more convincing to buy products and services they may not have thought twice about purchasing just six months ago.
At the same time brands will need to be selective on discounting to protect margins. Marketers will need to build on last year’s data-driven decision making to restrict promotions to specifically target customer segments motivated by price.
To thrive in this economic downturn marketers will have to think more carefully about how they’re positioning different products and services to different audience segments as price becomes a bigger decision factor in 2023.
2. Do More with Fewer Enterprise Applications
The majority of marketers feel under pressure to create and deliver more content, more quickly.
Personalization, as effective as it is, created a different kind of cost that snowballed out of control in 2022: the adoption of an increasing number of incompatible applications.
Marketers struggled with suboptimal tools and disjointed workflows, often leaning heavily on tech support.
It is ironic that this more efficient marketing strategy has become less efficient to execute. And it need not be this way.
For example, our audience segmentation tool, D6 Engine, allows marketers to easily create tailored web pages for different audience segments based on a single ‘core’ website. Marketers can simply build unique digital journeys for unique audiences in a single, seamlessly integrated tool.
As technology becomes more intuitive and users become more savvy, marketing teams will need to become more self-reliant (to the glee of tech support teams!)
We believe marketing departments will double-down on the few software programs that actually make their jobs easier and eliminate the half-baked applications.
Image source: www.elink.io
3. Do More with Automation
Content marketing has proven to be more effective but it could be much more efficient.
AI has become an increasingly useful technology for content marketers over the last five years. Text intelligence and analysis, image tagging and categorization and other repetitive processes can be done by AI giving real human resources more time to strategize.
Don’t fret if your team hasn’t jumped on the automation bandwagon yet it’s still relatively new. But advances in technology are happening more often than ever before.
AI allows marketers to create customized workflows in just a few clicks. There are certainly more exciting possibilities to come but today’s technology is already helping teams become more efficient.
- Find and reuse existing assets.
- Automate image manipulation and image creation.
- Produce and personalize content at scale.
The 2023 economy will leave little room for wasted resources and there’s really no reason for it.
Image source: Unsplash
4. Do More with Reels and Short-form Video
Short and snappy video content is here to slay in 2023.
Video is still the preferred form of content as measured by the degree of engagement. (Our attention spans aren’t getting any longer!)
What’s interesting is that video emerged as the preferred *starting point* for online searches in 2022.
Watching a video at the beginning of the journey gives potential buyers more information, more quickly, allowing them to set off on the right discovery path.
And since many employees are still choosing to work from home video is easier to consume than ever: you don’t have to worry about putting on headphones.
The same can be said for audio content. Podcasts have become a routine part of modern life. However, after exploding in popularity the past few years, listener growth is expected to slow.
Videos on the other hand, will continue to engage audiences everywhere.
Marketers who master short-form video for #WFH audiences will earn greater brand equity going forward; especially as Gen Z enters the workforce.
5. Connect More with Specific Segments
We’ve already mentioned how advantageous it is to personalize promotions and how marketers can hand off basic tasks to automation to focus on more meaningful work.
With more data and more time, marketers have the opportunity to cut through the noise and connect with a diverse audience more meaningfully than ever before.
Brands can direct specific messages about their values to segments who place the greatest importance on them when making buying decisions. Such content will resonate more deeply with audiences motivating more recipients to take action (and thus generate a greater ROI.)
In 2023, marketers will use technology to create a compelling sense of closeness with their audience and wonder how they ever managed without it.
