Tech advancements in the last year have paved the way for new and exciting marketing opportunities and new consumer behavior. To give your strategies a higher chance of success, here’s a forecast of what marketing trends to look for in 2023. Integrate them into your marketing plan to keep pace with changing times. 

1. More Video Content

With the rise of TikTok, more brand awareness strategies involve video than ever before. Over 548 billion hours of streaming occurred on mobile phones last year alone, according to Data.ai. 

The content you share next year can make or break your brand. You can keep posting on Facebook, which may be an outdated strategy, or create more TikTok and Instagram Reel content in 2023. Help new audiences discover your brand on the platforms they engage with the most. Find out who your target market and competition are and where they hang out, with market research.

2. Organic Content

User-generated content is not only a great marketing trend for 2023, it’s a valuable commodity and accounts for significant social media attention. A Stackly survey revealed consumers are 2.4 times more likely to trust content made by users than brands. 

To catch this organic wave, followers need to engage with your content on their terms. One way to do this is by using unique hashtags in your posts so followers who want to create their own content about your brand can lean on those hashtags to share your message.

3. Stronger Influencer Relationships

Brands don’t need to reinvent the wheel if they build relationships with influencers and work with them to create unboxing videos (just like it sounds, a video of unboxing a product) or product reviews on their behalf. 

This kind of marketing works, but there’s no need to give influencers carte blanche. Like your employees or outsourced team, establish the freedom to create guidelines for your campaign. Just remember to track where your influencers’ content is posted so you can measure its performance and determine if similar strategies are worthwhile.

4. Improved User Experience 

Have a website? Chances are you’ve visited it more than once, and on more than one type of device. Do you notice anything different between mobile and desktop? If not, you might have a problem. If you haven’t audited your website from a UX (user experience) point of view, you may want to before 2023. 

Test your site and its pages on your phone, desktop, and tablet to start. Edit the layout of your website, so it’s mobile friendly, easy to read and navigate on the most common devices. If you have pesky pop-ups, bland colors, or ugly fonts that scream 2010, you might want to make a change. Viewers are savvy and fickle. 

5. More Voice Assistance

If you ask Alexa more questions than your kids, you see where I’m going. From voice assistants at home (mine is in the kitchen) to voice controls in your car, more people are searching by speech than ever. By creating content on your website that reads like how people speak, you can help video assistants match someone’s query to your site. 

Think about it: if you write a blog about how popular your crunchy tacos are in Boston, when someone asks Siri, “Where can I find crunchy Tacos in Boston?” your keywords will match, and your website will more likely display at the top of the results page. What kind of questions would people ask to find your business? Start generating content and FAQs about it, too.  

6. Outsourcing Becomes the Norm

As small business owners, there’s so much to do, and it’s not always necessary to have an in-house team to get it done. Implementing marketing tactics and following a marketing plan doesn’t have to be done by one person. 

A reliable and talented outsourced team can add efficiency and bandwidth to complete projects faster and often with more skill than your own team. Consider using a freelancer website to find marketers to assist you. With the right strategy and direction, you can make bigger, bolder moves and concentrate on working ON your business, not IN your business. 

7. Create Answer Based Content 

As an alternate approach to creating content based on knowledge or your latest special offer, look at developing an answer-based content marketing strategy. Last year, more than half of all Google searches were zero click searches, which means that when someone searched on Google for an answer, about half of users didn’t click on anything after their search. 

Keyword search data gives marketers an opportunity to create content that answers questions quickly and to the point so that they find your company as their answer. With this marketing trend, the goal is simple. Create content that’s seen, heard, and remembered on the platforms that your customers will see. 

8. Develop Strong Partnerships

A continued trend for 2023 is to combine marketing forces with similar brands that align with your community and message but don’t compete. With strategic partnership marketing, look for brands with an overlapping audience who add value to your audience and grow your reach. 

Strategic alliances and co-branding with the right partners add muscle to your marketing efforts and build new audiences. Create a model for what this looks like, find brand partners who align with your short-term and long-term marketing goals, and give the partnership a test drive. There’s no reason you can’t amplify your message and build relationships at the same time. 

9. Email Marketing Hasn’t Gone Out of Style

You may think that email marketing is old-fashioned, but it continues to be a strong digital marketing trend with about 36% ROI for every dollar spent. In fact, over 80% of marketers favor email newsletters as a top method to promote their brand and services. 

With social media over-sensationalized and moving at lightning speed, email still comes into your inbox – in most cases, regularly and with your permission. To see the potential of your email list, take the average price of your product or service and multiply it by your number of subscribers. Say you have an average product price of $500 x 10,000 subscribers. If every person bought your product, you’re looking at $5,000,000 in potential revenue. Nurture every one of your subscribers to become lifelong customers. Why wouldn’t you? 

In all your marketing efforts and throughout your 2023 marketing plan, be sure that your brand voice, message, and tone communicate the same message on all platforms. Though delivery may differ from channel to channel, consistency is important. That’s why you follow a roadmap and stop along the way to see the view. 

Have questions about these 2023 marketing trends and how they can work with your small business? Robin Samora is a marketing consultant in Boston with over 20 years of experience. She’s happy to discuss these trends in more detail for your business.