Brief: Once again, as we do every year, we welcome you to our annual event where we present the marketing trends, insights, digital goals and strategies including the latest ideas and tools for the online and digital marketing industry. This is our 27th annual report and we hope we can continue in our tradition of offering you great forecast of what is about to come.
Changes in business environment, such as higher interest rates, higher cost of borrowing, lower availability of funds in the equity market, diverging economies, and national conflicts once againg together bring on market changes that force companies and their business model strategizing to pivot and reinvent their new operations, marketing methodologies, and product strategies - all to find new business advantages and differentiations to improve their ROI, growth, and marketshare expansion.
In a recent survey conducted by Anaxstar.com with 753 CEOs and CMO’s, the respondents said they are continuing to shift their marketing implementation and execution towards digital marketing and online campaigns and promotions.
As predicted in the last year's report, AI (artificial intelligence) in marketing is playing a great role in changing digital marketing envionment with Microsoft and Google, and others, playing a crucial part. Also, Google Advertising platform as Microsoft Bing Advertising platform, both are seeing either a decline in the number of users, and a remarkable dissatisfaction from their advertisers because of cost increases in marketing expense and lower quality of leads and sales being generated.
Smaller businesses (less than 100 employees) are leveraging blog marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing through viable and profitable digital media channels to replace expensive online advertising on Google and Bing platforms as they no longer seem to deliver a profitable ROI.
As always, you can review Anaxstar.com’s previous years' reports: 2022 Digital Marketing Trends, 2021 Digital Marketing Trends, 2020 Digital Marketing Trends, 2018 Digital Marketing Trends and 2019 Digital Marketing Trends studies, released prior to the pandemic.
As it has been our long tradition now, each year, we contact about a thousand online marketing experts and industry leaders, and top 100 Marketing Agencies, as well as the top PR company executives to conduct a 30-min phone interview to find out how they interpret the marketing trends and ask questions about their predictions for the upcoming year, and what changes or transformations they witness during the previous year. We then compile the data and have an in-house discussion among our own leading marketing experts, each of whom have at least 20+ years of digital online marketing experience. Once all the data is compiled, we produce our report: this Annual Online/Digital Business Marketing Trends and Predictions.
AND THANK YOU IN ADVANCE, FOR YOUR TIME.
And we also like to thank all the people who were involved and provided their expertise and knowledge for us to put this report together, and express our deep appreciation for their support.
FINALLY, see if you notice how we tried to make key points
and avoided long and boring sentences, or pages and pages of reading.
Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for visiting us.
Content marketing is king of marketing, both from point of view of effectiveness and ROI.
Today, most successful business owners and managers know and understand why 'content' is the key to online marketing success, and hence business success. We can no longer argue that businesses are missing out on achieving all the promises of content marketing. However, content development is still a huge effort and therefore costly. With the nearly 50% increase in cost of Google Advertising platform in 2022, and, reduction in the quality of the leads obtained through it, marketing departments can no longer avoid to have a serious content marketing development and campaigning strategy for their business to thrive, or even survive.
87% of respondents said they use content marketing to get website traffic
84% of respondents said they use content marketing to collect emails from visitors (landing page)
81% of respondents said they use content marketing to get website product promotion or engagement
73% of respondents said they use content marketing to get search engine (SEO) ranking to produce organic search traffic which they also claim are the best quality leads compared to all others
69% of respondents said they use content marketing to reduce cost to acquire a lead/subscriber or customer
67% of respondents said content development of blog posts/articles/social posts for the purpose of SEO is still the cheapest form of marketing and an incredibly cost-effective way to grow your brand while it is 6 times more cost-effective to find customers than PPC ads through platforms like Google and Microsoft Bing
TIP: Content marketing is not about "amount of content" produced, is about the quality and effectiveness of content, or often referred to as "compelling content". Think of it this way: great content is not about YOU, or your brand, or your vision, or your objectives. It's about delivering the right information, sought-after and valuable, to your prospects at exactly the right time in the customer journey.
Increased efficiency and effectiveness of AI marketing tools can help analyze huge amounts of marketing metrics and campaigning data to identify patterns and insights that can help strategize and implement calculated marketing strategies and executable plans.
AI marketing tools can deliver on improved targeting and personalization to help identify and target the right audience with an effective message that is based on personalized experiences of consumers to improve engagement, build brand loyalty, and achieve an effective call-to-action.
AI Marketing Tools are being used for:
Well, you use AI Tools. Omnichannel marketing takes a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics. But it could hardly deliver as data analysis was often too time consuming and too much of a burden. Customer journey is all about sending the right message, at the right time. Right message at the wrong time will not work, neither will wrong message at the right time. But how can you do that if it takes so much time to analyze the data?
AI Marketing Tools is the answer.
Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of branding, messaging, content marketing, social media engagement, and online touchpoints as consumers move down the sales funnel process, enabling a more impactful customer experience. When performing an omnichannel content marketing campaign, let's say through article blogging or the social media networks, you need to respond to your audience promptly when they reach out to you, otherwise you will lose their interest and their loyalty. If you have performed a marketing campaign and they have signed up as a new subscriber, then establish your authority and explain to them the value you provide with your products and get them excited about you and your brand.
Walgreens saw a 379% increase in store traffic using IBM AI Marketing Tools with native ads in blogs and website content. The AI tools helped Walgreens to identify the right consumers and reaching them in the right moment and hence experienced a huge increase to its store traffic, and sales.
People of sick of cold email marketing and generally much more cautious about opening an email that potentially would have embedded virus, trojan, or some other online security risk or phishing attacks.
Most people receive so many emails per day that they just don't have time to read unsolicited emails anymore and they just don't trust them either.
Consumers are tired of being bombarded with unwanted, unsolicited emails that are irrelevant and potentially a threat to their computer, while businesses can now focus on improving the quality of their email list to help their marketing department target their customers with better quality of engagement and information for a higher conversion rate.
Video/Blog marketing are the center of all successful digital content marketing campaigns. Even though content marketing methods such as blog posts and articles are very cost effective and generate leads, they almost always perform better when accompanied with videos that convert.
By end of 2022, 84% of marketers used video and blog content marketing because they found it to be cost effective and produce results, especially helping SEO organic search results. In 2023, it is expected that this trend will continue to grow. According to Social Media Week, majority of consumers want to see more video content as long as they are short and concise. Blog articles in the form of guides and informational lists, are hugely popular because people can quickly study it to see if the content is relevant before they invest time in reading it - something they cannot do with watching of videos.
PPC (pay-per-click) is fast losing favor with business owners and marketing professionals.
PPC advertising use to be a very effective way to drive traffic to a website or a landing page and get attention and audience for your products and campaign. But then with Facebook falling flat on it face as a result of December 2021 privacy issues, losing almost half of its advertisers in a matter of months, and Microsoft Bing not able to take advantage due to poor customer support, resulted in Google Ad platform increasing their Ad cost so dramatically that overnight it was not longer a viable marketing method with a decent ROI.
Google's arrogance and increase pricing also went hand-in-hand with business owners experiencing irrelevant clicks which resulted in wasted advertising budget.
Marketers in 2023 have to adapt to a new audience expectation where consumers want to have a more memorable experience.
For the past 25 years, the Internet and faster PCs have been used essentially to facilitate connection, networking, simplification and alleviation of user frustration and limitation of applications or access. Now this year will be the year of faster and better engagement and interactivity.
While change can be intimidating; unlike the dinosaurs, digital marketers should be confident and embrace this next evolution targeting capabilities (AI tools and interactivity) based on page content and consumer mindset and measurement solutions built on measuring real people, and their choices, across platforms.
The use of interactivity and game elements on a website or aspects of your social media account is called gamification.
Many online websites are incorporating game design interactivity to boost visitor engagement. Consider that about 80% of smartphone owners play games on their devices and this is what companies want to use to pull these consumers into an ecommerce experience, and to increase brand visibility.
By tailoring your marketing campaigns and the intended messaging to coordinate your content to individual preferences and desires, brand marketing can create more relevant and effective marketing that resonate with customers.
Creating customized content that speaks to individual preferences and interests can increase engagement and improve the quality of engagement, for instance offering customized pricing based on individual preferences to increase conversions and loyalty.
Business owners have accused Trustpilot and others of being a "pay-to-play" platform, where businesses that pay for subscriptions or advertising receive preferential treatment over those that do not.
Accused for allowing angry, irrational, disturbed individuals use Trustpilot to demonize business owners, creating an environment where review websites like Trustpilot make money off of the reputation destruction of businesses.
Trustpilot, ScamAdvisor and other review platforms, have faced countless issues related to fraudulent and fake reviews by angry individuals using these platforms to exert pressure to sooth their anger tantrum psychotic episodes, which can damaged, may be forever, the credibility and usefulness of these platform. Profiting from unpleasant and disruptive behaviors or emotional outbursts by emotionally sick individuals consumed by irritability, has made these sites lose credibility with the rational public.
1. Content marketing, Video, and Blog articles in native ads will continue to be the best and most effective marketing method of 2023. This method of content marketing is relatively much lower in cost, (than Google Ad platform), and offers much better ROI, and with as much as 6 times more leads, and substantially lower cost - especially now that Google Ad platform is facing U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit for fradulent advertising manipulation of ad results and/or reporting
2. AI-powered marketing tools will be adopted by small and large companies and lead to conversational marketing, and there will be more AI search features, and AI tools for interactive website engagement, and for social media posts featuring videos of real people enjoying a product
3. Video marketing, streaming, usage, searching, and viewership will continue to soar (even more) in 2023, and introduction of short educational videos as well as video testimonials of customers talking about their recent experience with a company or brand and there will be live stream of videos of people unboxing products
4. Review sites like Trustpilot, Scamadvisor, and Yelp will continue to face backlash of the public and the business community as well as the authorities for allowing fradulent reviews and using business owners and irrational angry disturbed individuals to make money off of an adversarial society - "pay-to-play" bullying of business owners and deceptive practices has resulted in regulatory scrutiny, but reviews on Google will continue to grow
5. Marketing personalization will continue to grow and increase profitability by offering interactive website features like personalized quizzes and tools for answering questions for site visitors
6. Social messaging Apps will be used by business owner even more than before, in 2023
7. AI speech searching, will continue to grow as search engines will leverage AI
8. Gamification will be in widespread use by end of 2023
9. Voice search, will continue to grow, and can help conversational marketing to enhance interactions with customers online
10. Instant messeging integrated with conversation marketing will continue to grow exponentially, allowing businesses to help customers and website visitors with questions they have
11. Metaverse growth is slow will continue to diminish as it is difficult in both adoption and use, as long as it is difficult to implement and challenging to incorporate into a logical ROI within marketing
12. Interactive content marketing will be introduced to the public and will be used more and more, in 2022, including augmented reality ads
13. Omnichannel Marketing will continue to grow, the strategy as ripe, effective, and relevant as ever
14. Influncer Marketing will be probably the most effective way to blend content marketing, interactive marketing personalization, and cost-effective ROI promotional campaigning
15. SEO the most effective, the best quality leads, the only logical long-term approach to sensible marketing, and the smartest marketing strategy for almost all businesses