DIGITAL MARKETING – TRENDS FOR 2023

Every day, new technologies emerge, new skills capable of impacting potential customers and selling again to those who have already bought before. It is precisely because of this strong dynamic, that following trends without understanding them and how they work can go wrong more than right.

Digital Marketing does not have a written formula and this becomes very explicit when a company tries to do everything alone. It is important to safeguard a series of factors when we communicate digitally, namely:

. User experience

In recent years, Google has made several updates to its algorithms to improve search results, making it increasingly clear that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very important.

But just as important as optimizing content to be found in search engines is offering a user experience (UX=User Experience) of unrivalled quality. Essentially, a website should be easy to navigate, lightweight, to load quickly; and have really useful content.

A quick analysis of website or social media metrics can provide valuable insights into improving your product or service.

With the user experience at the center of everything, the concern with the accessibility of the content is not limited to the experience on the “site” or “blog”. Every ad published, every email sent in the Marketing Email campaign… needs to be clear, objective and useful!

. Marketing and Sales getting closer

Merging Marketing with Sales is a practice that has become more and more common – professionals already call this union “Vendarketing” or “Smarketing“, in the future it will be an independent department, supervised by a specific manager who is knowledgeable about these definitive merged areas.

. Social Selling

“Social Selling” is not a new trend: for years, this practice of person-to-person sales has been consolidated in “LinkedIn” as a B2B (business to business) tool. What is new in current “Social Selling” is the expansion of the one-to-one selling concept to a mass strategy within other social networks. On platforms like Instagram, for example, certain contents are created with the intention of encouraging followers to contact the company through private messages. Once in the “chat”, face-to-face with the brand, the probabilities of selling a product or service increase considerably, because both the approach and the objective of this proximity (the sale) are closed.

Social networks — and even instant messaging platforms such as “WhatsApp” — have introduced “Social Selling” tools to further standardize these sales, maintaining contact with the user. Product catalogues, “chatbots” (automated assistants that prepare the consumer for a sale) and the practice of “live commerce” (sale through live transmissions) are just a few examples.

. Voice search

The amount of voice-only navigation updates on mobile phones and computers has been frequent and is increasingly intelligent. The public has demanded ease of use through commands and voice searches, and large companies have launched smart devices with an “interface”, completely controlled by speech (without buttons). Alexa (the device with a virtual assistant produced by Amazon) is a strong example of how this field of voice-only navigation is not yet consolidated, but it has a lot to offer for the curious, who enter this exploration in 2023.

. Images featured on Google

A definitive proof is that, when doing a Google search, images have appeared at the top of the page: they are priority in the results. Google knows that images capture our attention, calling our attention immediately to a text or video, which is important to be read or viewed.

. Artificial Intelligence

The “ChatGPT Software” became the most practical and humanized free artificial intelligence available on the Internet today.

. Video Marketing

“TikTok or YouTube Shorts” (including Instagram and Facebook Reels and Stories) is a type of multimedia with high viewing potential, capable of making a company grow organically overnight. In addition to short videos, the old practice of using audio-visual content to increase the conversion of “landing pages” by up to 80% will continue to be valid for years to come. The main focus is on educational content, reinforcing the company’s humanization and honesty in transforming the public’s life through the products and services it offers. The more useful, easy to understand and dynamic the video is, the more likely the material will stick as a source of traffic or a conversion, possibly for life.

. GDPR

The GDPR – (General Regulation on Data Protection), is effectively a regulation consolidated by law — the General Regulation on Data Protection Act. In fact, Law 2016/679 is a European law regulation on privacy and protection of personal data, applicable to all individuals in the European Union and European Economic Area that was created in 2018. It also regulates the export of personal data abroad of the EU and EEA, and aims to protect the privacy of consumers.

. Automation

Using marketing email sending automation tools and metrics monitoring is no exception — it’s already routine. In addition to multiplying the generation of “leads”, closer to the company’s communication channels, automations save time and increase productivity.

Everything listed above is easy to apply and monitor for anyone who has an online channel, a brand or even a blog. These are some recommendations to guide the difference between those who communicate in a structured way and those who just “travel” through this digital world.