Trends in online marketing are not always easy to assess. Companies will also have to adapt to the rapid changes in the digital world in 2023. This is especially true for marketing departments that need to keep up with new online marketing trends of 2023 and new technologies. The future of marketing is all about AI, real-time, content and segmentation. Mobile data traffic has grown exponentially in recent years.
UPDATE! Read the current forecast now:
Online Marketing Trends 2024
Content production must be geared more to customer needs and less to corporate needs, but still grow. Companies and customers live in a time where we are surrounded by our own echo chambers, where we only see what we want to see. AI amplifies this effect and is also a technology that can help companies better understand their customers and provide them with the right content at the right time.
The online marketing trends for 2023 will be heavily influenced by the advent of artificial intelligence and the other developments above. AI will play a huge role in the future of online marketing by analyzing data and generating content ideas. It also helps with segmentation, tracking, and real-time marketing.
So there are a lot of new developments and influences that are not always easy to classify. In this article, we summarize the development and dare to look ahead to various online marketing disciplines, fields and technologies.
Trend 1: Mobile Marketing
Contents
Let’s start with the old shoe mobile marketing and increase and slowly. Please use the menu to show newer trends and recommendations that you are particularly interested in.
The proportion of smartphone owners has already broken through the 90% mark in 2022 and continues to rise. One of the main reasons for this is that contactless payment and the management of vaccination certificates with the smartphone is more convenient and hygienic. That’s why smartphones have become more interesting today for seniors who have so far escaped this trend.
For online marketing agencies, this results in another urgent need to optimize campaigns and customer products for mobile devices and to reach target groups through mobile marketing.
Trend 2: Content Marketing
Continuing to rise in prices for traditional online advertising in websites, search engines and social media will continue to increase the need to attract, inform and retain consumers with attractive content in the coming year.
Informational vs. Conversational
A growing area of online marketing trends for 2023 is native ads and influencer marketing. They reach mobile and online-savvy target groups (over 90% of consumers) where a large part of public and social life takes place today. In order to enforce the variety of native ads and informative online offers, online marketing agencies must increasingly rely on visual content and moving images.
Photos, videos and graphics are able to generate attention even where a certain saturation can already be seen. It is even more important to remain in the customer’s memory. With the rise of newer formats, it can hardly be flashy enough and surprising enough .
Master the search engines
In the meantime, the organic area of search engines has been moved more and more to the lower area (below the fold). At the top are ads and snippets. These areas are very scarce. Where ads are of course still calculable and offer good predictability, snippets are comparable to gambling. They have a huge impact on the user experience and contribute to branding, but can hardly be forced.
Precisely because of the potential and poor predictability of snippets, it should be communicated by every online marketing agency in 2023 that SEO features must be used extensively. Formatting and HTML markups, schema, and embedded media help search engines rank content and position it prominently in search results.
If you only think of Google’s classic search engine when it comes to online marketing trends in 2023 , you have to rethink it now. All forms of online search must be mastered:
- Information Search
- Search for virtual knowledge
- Search for places
- Search for providers
- Product
- Search for products
- Search for services
- Search for events
- Voice Search
- Search in the SmartHome environment (e.g. Alexa)
- Search with your smartphone
- Headless Search in general
- Media Search
- Search for images
- Search for sounds and music
- Search for videos
If something is missing in the list: feel free to write in the comments!
Trend 3: Thinking outside the echo chamber
The past few years have led to a strong differentiation of the echo chambers. Agencies operate in a highly focused environment, but have tools to understand niches, industries and target groups. Agency clients are less aware of their focus.
A particular challenge for online marketing agencies is to overcome the limits of the echo chamber of agency, agency customer and target group and to communicate the differences in an understandable way. Opportunities await here in 2023 that have so far gone unnoticed by the competition.
Trend 4: Artificial Intelligence and Automation
The tools of online marketing are changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence (AI) not only helps the online marketing agency to create and evaluate campaigns, it also supports consumers in a variety of ways – often completely unnoticed.
Chatbots request data at an early stage in support and complaints and forward only a fraction of the inquiries to expensive customer service employees. This results in a win-win situation for customers and companies, because accessibility and satisfaction are increased, while personnel expenses in the aftersales area decrease.
Another increasingly important role of artificial intelligence is to support purchasing and product selection. On the one hand, it is easier for the customer to find the right product, which facilitates direct conversion and increases the conversion rate. On the other hand, a buyer learns about other, well-fitting products directly in the purchase process.
The optimization of upsale and cross-sale by AI will represent an important competitive advantage in online marketing in 2023, which will finally become affordable for small shops and service providers. Especially in the segment of small business and freelancers, customer lifetime value (CLV) has often been neglected.
Trend 5: Customer segments and personas
Customer behavior has changed in recent years of the corona pandemic. For one, the seasonal difference has changed dramatically, with a winter of restrictions and a summer of relaxation. Even if this political requirement will not last forever, customers have come to terms with it.
Behavioural change caused by corona
In addition to the temporal change, the points of contact have also changed and seasonalized. People in the home office no longer experience posters so often. Sponsoring in live events is almost completely eliminated in winter for health reasons. In addition, customers appear less frequently in stationary retail and have deliveries delivered instead. Similarly, service providers are preferred by appointment – spontaneous consumption thus decreases.
All this in summary, online channels will continue to have a stronger influence on the customer journey in 2023 and the following years than before. Needs must be awakened more sustainably, almost completely replacing spontaneous and casual consumption, at least outside the warm months.
Micro segmentation: know the customer (better)
In conjunction with the increasing use of artificial intelligence, current analysis tools allow the finer segmentation of customers – the “micro-segments”. This is further facilitated by technological development and the dwindling value of privacy. People today are willing to reveal more about themselves if it benefits their safety and comfort.
Of course, this does not mean that privacy will be unimportant for online marketing trends in 2023. On the contrary! The handling of personal data is moving towards a productive plateau where consent to data processing interacts with tracking and analysis. New security concepts such as 2-factor authentication and encryption are now standard, while cookies are less relevant and the individual behavior of the customer is used to create the precise buyer persona.
Tracking will continue to decouple from data protection
What began in recent years as “cookieless tracking” is being further refined and finely woven with the current data protection legislation. The illusion that a customer is capable of consenting over his data is obsolete at the latest when algorithms combine groups of similar people into a persona that consists only of automatically optimized attributes. The group “middle-aged women with a penchant for German literature who own pets” is neither capable of giving consent nor being tracked individually. This means that analysis and tracking will elude the cookie-based data protection requirements of the legislator in the foreseeable future.
Trend 6: Real-time marketing
There is hardly anything sadder for an online shop than when a buyer cannot be served. Real-time marketing means that customers can see which products are in stock and in what quantities. In 2023, however, it will go far beyond pure inventory management. If products are not available, delivery times should be displayed accurately and alternative products recommended.
While such features were previously only to be expected from large providers, the time has now come when retailers should specifically address their online marketing agency for this optimization opportunity. The expectations of customers grow immeasurably and every dissatisfied customer and every wrongly managed product has a direct effect on the shop reputation through reviews.
Nowcasting: (not) a look into the crystal ball
Another important part of real-time marketing is nowcasting. It not only enables direct communication with customers and suppliers as well as your own infrastructure in real time. Nowcasting is a strategy that uses social media and other emerging technologies to unlock trends in real time. If the demand for a certain product increases, modern online shops establish stocks and supply chains in good time.
For small and medium-sized online retailers, this is still in its infancy, but in 2023 and the following years, many cloud providers and start-ups can be expected to take advantage of this trend and enter this market.
Trend 7: Content and copywriting are getting cheaper
For some years now, content has become mass-produced. Quality content from the pen of qualified authors will finally lose the battle against machines in 2023. One indication is that the market for AI-powered authoring tools was at an early stage in 2021 and 2022 and is now gradually consolidating. Premium providers call lucrative subscription prices, smaller providers practice price dumping and save on quality and multilingualism.
AI tools for bloggers, writers and translators are coming of age
In 2023 and the following years, new technology providers are expected to enter the market of writing assistants and authoring tools with the support of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is already capable of producing texts at a high level. Internationalization has become very cheap with translation programs. These markets continue to mature and consolidate until there are only a few big players left.
Authors write less themselves
All this continues to be at the expense of the human services of bloggers, authors and translators. They can only survive if they get involved with the new authoring tools and translation programs , use them to optimize their own work and gain their added value in quality management and the editing of automatic texts and translations.
Trend 8: Agencies become technology consultants
While online marketing agencies have often created, manually evaluated and optimized ad campaigns themselves, a break will also take place here in the next few years – perhaps as early as 2023.
The big providers such as Google and Facebook have long had AI in the background, maximizing their own profits. This partly explains the continuous increase in campaign and click prices. More and more, such algorithms also help in the creation and alignment of campaigns. Campaign design is done independently by advertisers with a wizard or assistant.
Responsibilities of agencies
However, agencies still have a lot to do, but in areas such as psychology in business, marketing automation, company building and email automation. Technical online marketing managers combine the tools and infrastructures of different providers into a tailor-made infrastructure for their customers. Project managers in agencies acquire clients, bring together in-house and freelancer experts, while ensuring that all projects are carried out on time and in a targeted manner.
In the future, it will become even more important for online marketing agencies to employ qualified and motivated agents who know trends, recognize opportunities and respond to changes in the technology market with intelligent and efficient solutions for their customers. The trend to assert oneself in the market through the increasing use of interns and low-wage workers is generally over for marketing agencies.
Conclusion and prognosis
“Forecasts are difficult, especially when they concern the future.” is a saying that also applies to this article.
We cannot know what changes 2023 will bring. But we can assume that once initiated and already productively recognizable changes will continue on their way. For the time being, artificial intelligence will not replace humans, but will assist them. So people remain in the decision and in the responsibility and agency customers are well advised to explore technologies and qualifications when choosing an agency.
Technologically, mobile marketing and mobile-friendly websites will become even more important in our Online Marketing Trends 2023 . However, one must not lose sight of the fact that monitors and TVs are also becoming larger and more powerful. Shops and websites should therefore not only work well on small and medium-sized displays, but also use the space wisely on the living room wall at over 48 inches.
We are curious about your opinion: Are we completely wrong with the online marketing trends for 2023, or do you agree with us? What important trends have we missed to date? Write it in the comments. Thank you!