As a business owner and marketer, the race of keeping up with the new digital marketing trends never stops. Today, all digital marketers realize that conventional trends like SMS marketing, email marketing, and omnichannel marketing are not enough to level up your game in 2023.
Whether you’re struggling to keep the business running or planning to skyrocket your annual sales, you’re at the right place. In this article, we’ll cover the upcoming digital marketing trends to integrate into your marketing strategy so you can maintain a competitive edge in your industry. Our 9 digital marketing trends will help you stand out, attract more traffic to your site, and boost your ROI.
Towards the end of this article, you’ll know whether you need to integrate advanced AI and machine learning trends in your website business or you need to refurbish your brand around a stronger vision and ethical concept. We’ve also covered each trend with real-life examples to help you better understand the concepts.
Let’s get started.
9 Must-Follow Digital Marketing Trends For Businesses In 2023
We’ve picked our 9 best digital marketing trends that you can follow in 2023 to escalate your website traffic and boost sales and revenue.
1. Interactive Marketing Trend
Active users can turn into leads and conversions if brands focus on interactive marketing. The key to interactive marketing is forming direct bonds with prospects and customers to gain their trust. Here are a few examples of interactive marketing that you can incorporate to boost business sales:
Now brands can go “live” on social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook to talk to their followers in real time. This form of marketing is efficient for B2C marketing models and especially for small brands. Some ideas for Facebook Live are:
- Hosting webinars
- Offering online classes
- Showcasing new arrivals
- Conducting live interviews
- Doing live Q&As and FAQs
- Providing live customer service
- Giving a behind-the-scenes look
- Doing a DIY project using brand products
Many eCommerce brands are integrating augmented reality technology to let customers virtually “try on” products before they make a purchase. For example, Sephora allows users to “try on” different cosmetic products including eye shades, lipsticks, mascaras, etc. to select the ones that better suit their face.
The use of interactive videos to engage followers and prospects is another great digital marketing trend. Followers can participate in discussions about video content or brand products in the comment section. The content for videos can range from entertainment to informative and casual to educational depending on your brand niche.
Quizzes and polls allow followers and visitors to interact and engage on your social media networks. Similarly, surveys that provide value to your customers are another great option for marketers. For example, this nutrition site offers a quiz to all visitors to help them evaluate their fertility health.
Similarly, this case study shows how a brand used marketing assessment quizzes as a lead magnet to attract a target audience and make them take action. In this case, the business offered digital marketing courses to visitors and a free assessment of their digital marketing skills lead them into signing up for the marketing course.
2. Conversational Marketing Trend
Other popular forms of conversational marketing are chatbots and AI assistants to help customers with brand queries, issues, and concerns. As the world is moving towards digitization, people are less willing to spend time interacting with customer representatives. They prefer quick solutions like automated responses to their queries which are now possible via chatbots and virtual assistants.
One major advantage of chatbots is their 24/7 availability to customers. This new marketing trend has revolutionized traditional customer service by relieving some burden off the representatives. Businesses can utilize their time more efficiently and reduce the costs of hiring a big team for customer service.
The best part, the chatbots can escalate customer queries to human representatives upon customer request. Similarly, online users tend to rely on virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri to search for products and brands rather than typing in. Hence, incorporating voice search SEO into your 2023 marketing strategy can help you reach more traffic, leads, and conversions.
For example, if a customer from Arizona is searching for a KN95 face mask, he might make a voice search “online face masks in Arizona”. If your eCommerce store is based in Arizona, and you’ve optimized your store for voice SEO, Google will show your store among the search results. This increases the chances of brand visibility and brand awareness.
3. Push Notification Trend
Another great digital marketing trend to follow in 2023 is using push notifications for upcoming sales, offers, and discounts. Push notifications are personalized messages that pop up on the mobile screens of customers in the form of message bubbles or SMS messages in the text feeds.
Push notification is a better marketing tactic compared to email marketing as smartphone users are more likely to read the notification compared to an email. With over 7.1 billion mobile users, push notifications allow brands to connect and engage with their customers.
Here are a few ways businesses leverage push notifications into their marketing strategy:
- Send digital receipts
- Updates about order status
- Updates on abandoned carts
- Questions about products/CTAs
- Updates on upcoming appointments
- Updates about a new product launch
- Updates about rewards/loyalty program
- Updates about sales, discounts, and offers
One of our favorite examples is the personalized push notifications by Starbucks that update the customers on their “happy hour” schedules. There are more chances of sales during the “happy hour” as customers can get the customized beverages of their choice including espresso, lattes, cappuccinos, macchiatos, and the famous pumpkin spice latte.
Starbucks incorporates the marketing idea of “happy hour” with “push notifications” to get the word out and benefit from maximum sales and revenues. These forms of digital marketing strategies work well for B2C business models.
4. Marketing Via Pop-ups
The use of popups is getting more and more popular as it’s directly linked to more sales. Many people find it difficult to make purchasing decisions. The goal of popups is to help people make decisions for themselves. They display the right information to your target audience at the right time. For example, displaying popups offering special offers, seasonal sales, coupons, etc.
One of our favorite examples is this house cleaning academy website featuring a popup that prompts prospects to start a “free trial” on their app. The popup is positioned at the end of the website and doesn’t take up a lot of space to make the user experience less distracting.
Another key factor is to display the information at the right time. For example, when a potential customer is about to leave your website, display a popup requesting to sign up for your newsletter or special future offers.
This tactic is necessary as 97% of website visitors never buy during their first visit. It’s best to keep their contact information and provide them with personalized promotional emails. They’ll end up making a purchase eventually depending on where they are in their sales funnel.
For example, if you visit this custom software development website, you’d be directed to sign up with your email to get the latest news and technology updates in the IT market. This form of marketing is a win-win for brands and potential customers. While the brands can direct personalized marketing towards prospects, the visitors get valuable knowledge in their niche in return.
5. Automated Ads Campaigns
5. Automated Ads CampaignsGoogle ads will drive more traffic to your website as well as boost revenue. According to Statista, Google’s ads contributed to a revenue of $224.47 billion US dollars in 2022.
You can run Google ads to offer in-feed shopping options for customers. When a user makes a Google search about a particular product, Google ads show up at the top results of SERP, making a brand more visible to the online users. The ads work by showing the products a user has searched for in Google search. The products appear as shoppable photos to users and make the customer experience seamless and time-efficient.
For example, if you want to buy laptops and make a Google search for “laptops”. The SERP will show a list of shoppable laptops from different eCommerce stores. Hence, optimizing Google ads for the right keywords makes your website appear in the Google SERP. Google ads facilitate marketers in reaching the target audience with minimum input.
Brands can run ads on social platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. The ads appear in the feeds of the target audience as shoppable posts. It works by linking your product catalog to social networks to make it visible to a larger audience.
Besides Google ads, you can run Microsoft ads campaigns to promote your business. You can reach tens of millions of people using Microsoft ads and the best part is the Microsoft Search Network audience is seen to spend more on online shopping. Microsoft ads also have 36% less competition than Google ads with a CPC of $1.54. On the other hand, the CPC of Google ads falls at $2.94.
6. Personalized Marketing Trend
Gone are the days when all customers were treated alike. Today, customers value brands that take care of their buying choices and preferences. Personalized marketing is showing the ads, recommendations, and content that’s relevant to prospects and customers. Content personalization helps the brand in the following ways:
- Better lead generation
- Increased brand loyalty
- Enhanced brand affinity
- Increased user retention
- Boosting sales and revenue
- Better customer insights and analytics
Content personalization is used in B2B and B2C marketing and focuses on solving the pain points of prospects and customers. With so much competition among brands and a constant challenge to increase brand awareness, content personalization is a suitable marketing trend to reach your target audience.
One reason why people don’t like generic marketing is spammy messages, emails, and irrelevant ads that provide little to no value. Sending personalized emails to prospects considering their insights like demographics, interests, buying journey, and consumer behavior, you’d have more success in generating leads and conversions.
As an example, if you’re a lingerie brand, you can show targeted ads and incorporate personalized email marketing to women in segmented groups to provide them with relevant content and a personalized experience:
- Aged 25-59 with a household income of $75,000+
- Brides or newlywed
- Aged 18-24
7. Influencer Marketing Trend
Influencer marketing is yet another rapidly-growing digital marketing strategy in 2023. If you plan to boost your brand awareness in less time and with little to no effort, we recommend reaching out to social media influencers in your niche. It works through a mutual partnership where a brand offers money or free products to an influencer. In return, the influencer promotes a brand on its social media accounts.
Potential customers perceive social media influencers as ideals and don’t hesitate to buy products that are recommended by their favorite influencers. If you’re a startup and don’t have hefty budgets for famous social media celebrities, you can reach micro-influencers. These influencers have around 1,000 to 10,000 followers and target a particular niche.
Small influencers also have strong bonds with their followers and are considered more authentic. So there are more chances of your product reaching potential customers leading to conversions. This type of digital marketing is equally beneficial for B2B or B2C business models.
Influencer marketing generated a revenue of around $13 billion in 2021 and this trend is not leaving anytime soon with the increasing amount of social media users. Some of the popular social media platforms for influencer marketing are:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Blog posts
8. Modern SEO Trend
Websites used to rank for black hat SEO practices. A new Google algorithm can detect negative SEO practices like content scraping, plagiarism, unnatural links to the site, and keyword stuffing. Moreover, the Artificial Intelligence algorithms can detect if the content is human-crafted or the work of an artificial intelligence (AI) rewriting tool.
However, having original website content that genuinely helps people answer their questions and solve their problems is vital for search engine optimization (SEO) in 2023. However, SEO marketers must use the right keywords, have appropriate backlinks, and design a user-friendly website to rank better in the SERP. If your website is SEO-optimized, it can offer an array of benefits including:
- Leads
- Customer trust
- Brand awareness
- Organic search traffic
- Competitive advantage
- Optimized website for mobile users
If you’re looking for ways to implement SEO into your business website, we recommend you have a blog for your website. It’s easier to rank for blogs because blogs target a segmented audience that keeps coming back to your site for more valuable and relevant information.
One of our favorite examples is this data pipeline website that uses its “blog section” to drive organic traffic and leads. Their target audience are businesses that use real-time data operations platforms. The “blog section” covers all technical concepts to help businesses choose, update, or scale data pipelines that better suit their business needs.
9. Ethical Marketing Trend
As the world is getting more conscious of social and environmental issues, brands have to put in extra effort to align with ethical marketing trends. Issues like climate change and global warming are more highlighted as it directly originates from eCommerce activities.
Ethical marketing focuses on the promotion of products that not only solve the pain points of customers but are also good for the society and environment. If a business believes in gender equality, cultural integration, labor rights, animal rights, and eco-friendly products and procedures, it can attract a certain group of loyal customers.
Moreover, 58% of customers buy and endorse brands based on their business ethics, values, and morals.
One of our favorite examples is the ethical marketing trend set by The Body Shop. The brand is known for its cruelty-free body care products. Besides, they launched their “Rainforest HairCare” products that are derived from natural ingredients and 10% of the profit is given to the preservation of the Atlantic Rainforest.
Moreover, the brand is known for its efforts to reduce paper and cardboard waste in its supply chain operations. Another brand, Toms, initiated a “One Day Without Shoes” campaign that aimed at spreading awareness about poverty and the lack of footwear for underprivileged children.
The campaign encouraged users to post a barefoot picture on Instagram with the hashtag #withoutshoes. In return, the brand donated a pair of shoes to a child in an underdeveloped country. The campaign was a hit as it was morally strong and helped the brand with customer affinity, customer trust, and customer loyalty while lowering the marketing costs.
Conclusion
As digital marketing trends are constantly evolving, there is more pressure on business owners and marketers to keep up their game. By now you’ve learned the 9 best digital marketing trends to help you attract more customers, generate leads, and boost ROI.
From integrating modern SEO practices to adopting sustainability marketing trends, there are an array of modern marketing strategies to adopt in 2023 to keep your business competitive and relevant.
AI in digital marketing has revolutionized the traditional marketing game. Integrate chatbots and automate AI personalized marketing tactics to work wonders. From automating product recommendations, calculating loyalty discounts, to incorporating voice-enabled assistants and low-level automated customer support, you can integrate AI for a sales boost.
Are you struggling to bring traffic to your website and tired of low conversions? Look no further than MeyerComputer where we take care of the marketing needs of your company so that you can focus on more important tasks for growing and expanding your business. Book a free consultation with us now.
Author Bio
Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum™. He helps innovative B2B companies implement revenue-driven SEO strategies to scale their organic traffic to 1,000,000+ visitors per month. Curious about what your true traffic potential is?