Marketing Trends to Try in Your Next Campaigns

Key Points About the Latest Trends in 2023

• The main marketing trends that will be in the spotlight throughout 2023 are aimed at personalizing the customer experience and creating more authentic connections
• Campaigns with micro-influencers, snackable content and voice search will be some of the most used strategies by companies in all sectors throughout the year.
• Instagram and TikTok will be the two leading social networks for marketing campaigns.

What Are the Marketing Trends? Examples

Marketing and advertising trends are all those strategies, practices or approaches that gain popularity among companies to promote their products or services to target audiences.

Trends arise from the evolution of technology, changes in consumer behavior and the needs of the increasingly demanding market. A clear example of trends revolves around influencer marketing, as brands enter into partnerships with leading content creators in their niche to connect more genuinely with segmented audiences and convert those users into potential customers.

To determine which marketing trends work best for your company, you must stay up-to-date and evaluate which ones align best with your brand objectives and, of course, your audience to make a significant impact on your marketing campaigns in 2023.

What Are the Marketing and Advertising Trends for 2023?

The main marketing trends that will be the key players throughout 2023 are aimed at personalizing the customer experience and creating more authentic connections. Here’s a summary of the marketing strategies that can help you optimize your budget and get the results you expect.

1. Immersive Marketing: Metaverse and Augmented Reality

Using emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to create immersive experiences can strengthen the user experience and generate greater brand recognition. This can be especially effective for companies in the travel, fashion, real estate or entertainment sectors.

But without a doubt, the protagonist in the field of virtual experiences in the coming years will be the Metaverse, a three-dimensional, digital virtual space where users can interact, socialize and participate in activities very similar to those that take place in the real world.

In the Metaverse, companies can create immersive and personalized experiences for users, allowing them to interact with products and services in a more immersive and realistic way. For this reason, it is more frequent to find companies betting on the use of Metaverse experiences to target their audience.

Today, the Metaverse for some companies is important as they are betting everything on it. Proof of this is Facebook, when they announced the change of name from Facebook to Meta as part of an ambitious project around the Metaverse, in which people could socialize, interact and learn in this virtual scenario in October 2021.

Related article: The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing and Virtual Influencers

2. Artificial Intelligence Tools

80% of marketers have used artificial intelligence tools for their digital marketing tasks. In fact, in 2021, the marketing for artificial intelligence (AI) was estimated at €14,129m, but it is estimated to reach €85.89bn by 2028. These figures reinforce the importance of artificial intelligence in the creative and strategic processes for companies, not only for 2023 but for the following years too.

Source Statista

AI has gained great popularity as it can automate many repetitive marketing tasks, such as sending emails, scheduling social media posts and managing advertising campaigns. This frees up time and resources for marketers to focus on more strategic and creative activities. In addition, artificial intelligence provides data-driven insights and analytics to support strategic decision-making in marketing, which helps reduce uncertainty and increases the likelihood of success in implemented strategies.

3. Marketing automation

Using marketing automation tools and platforms allows you to segment and send personalized messages to your audience at the most appropriate time. Automation is an efficient way to save time, optimize your marketing efforts and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. These tools, which incorporate machine learning features, allow you to optimize processes, including email marketing or influencer campaign management. With them, you can segment your customer database according to different criteria, which facilitates the personalization of messages and the delivery of relevant content for each audience segment. In short, marketing automation gives you the ability to deliver a more individualized and meaningful experience to your customers.

Read also: How Can Automation Help Your Influencer Marketing Campaign?

4. Micro-influencers marketing

In addition to traditional influencers, i.e. the mega and macro-influencers who amass millions of followers on their social networks, throughout the year we will see brands in differant niches working with micro-influencers, with smaller but highly engaged audiences. These influencers tend to be more accessible in terms of budget, generating a significant impact on the perception of your brand. Although micro-influencers have fewer followers compared to macro-influencers, their participation and engagement rate is usually higher. This means that people who follow micro-influencers interact more with their content, which translates into greater effectiveness for your branding strategies.

5. Voice search

Voice search is a trend that has gained strength in digital marketing recently, mainly due to the popularity gained by virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and others. Some users prefer voice search as a fast and convenient way to get information from any web page.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of voice search is that queries tend to be longer and in complete form rather than short keywords. This trend has impacted the area of digital marketing in a significant way by having voice search also included as a tool within companies’ marketing and SEO strategies. When a user performs a search on Google, websites that load faster and provide a smooth user experience are more likely to be selected as answers for voice queries. Optimizing site performance and loading speed is crucial for SEO in voice search.

Voice search is often used for localized queries, such as asking for nearby businesses or services in a certain area. Therefore, businesses should pay attention to local SEO to take advantage of these opportunities and appear at the top of relevant results within major search engines such as Google.

6. Livestream Shopping, Live Streaming and Live Broadcasts

Livestream shopping or live shopping is a trend that began to be part of the strategies of some brands back in 2014. With the pandemic, the format experienced exponential growth, being an ideal tool for companies to showcase their products online without the presence of obstacles.  

This year, it will continue to be a strong trend. Brands or influencers broadcast live through various social networks, messaging applications or websites, showing products and their possible uses in real-time. Viewers can watch the video live, interact with the presenter or influencer, ask questions and make purchases directly from the broadcast. The advantage this format offers is a more interactive and personalized experience compared to traditional e-commerce.

Livestream shopping has gained popularity in different parts of the world, especially in countries such as China, where it has become a mainstream trend known as “shoppertainment” (commerce + entertainment). In these broadcasts, hosts entertain the audience with engaging content and offer exclusive discounts or rewards to encourage shopping during the live stream.

In Spain, for example, Adolfo Dominguez managed to increase sales by 30% through a Live Shopping strategy. Among the objectives of their campaign were to attract new audiences, reinforce their online channels and generate actions that position the brand at the top of their target audience’s mind. To do this, they decided to carry out a series of live shows to present their new collections with the help of a stylist-influencer.

The results: More than 19,000 visits to the website. Each live session had an average of 2,000 viewers and a dwell time of 10 minutes on average. They also reported 188% of new users and more than 70% of the users consulted the garments that were discussed during the live session on their website.

The successful implementation of this strategy that began during the pandemic has led the brand to continue developing live sessions so that customers can get a better view of the product.

For Digital Marketing, What Are the New Trends in 2023?

Although many of the trends described above also apply to digital marketing, some specific strategies will be essential for campaigns created by the marketing teams of companies in Spain and the world.

Snackable Content, the Star Content Format in Social Networks

Now more than ever, users prefer short, creative and direct content. This is precisely what snackable content offers. As the name suggests, it is content “consumable in small bites” that offers people quick information without having to spend a lot of time or effort. These are short and attractive pieces of content that can be consumed quickly by the audience, similar to how an appetizer or snack is enjoyed.

This format has become popular thanks to the growth of platforms such as TikTok, in which the short stories told captivate and encourage the consumption of more content within the same platform. For many companies, this format is useful to stand out from the information overload faced by online users.

Some examples of snackable content include:

• Infographics with summarized and visually appealing data.
• Creating short videos with key messages or practical tips.
• Images with inspirational quotes or motivational messages.
• Humorous or entertaining GIFs.
• Micro-stories or short stories.

Companies such as KFC Spain, for example, have been able to take advantage of these formats to connect with their followers, especially the Z generation. In this case, the company is widely recognized for its use of memes that instantly capture people’s attention. In fact, at the end of 2022, we saw how the company took advantage of the success of Eduardo’s “most viral” meme to transform it into a special Christmas campaign that directed customers to its restaurants.

The advertising piece, which went viral, was inspired by the traditional Christmas ads of the 90s, turning the famous Eduardo chicken leg into a Christmas ornament, being also the center of this special season. In just 48 hours after its launch, the video reached 1,300,000 views on TikTok and more than 3,100,000 views across all social networks.

The chicken leg was available for a limited period, and the users who had the App could get it only for €1.50. The strategy proved to be perfect for the company as KFC managed to sell more than 25,000 “Eduardo” ornaments and reached 28,000 downloads in one week of its application, positioning itself, at that time, in sixth place in the ranking of the most downloaded retail applications in Spain.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform. It is a significant evolution of the traditional Google Analytics and was designed to provide a more customer-centric and event-driven approach to data analysis.

As of July 1, 2023, the standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data and new data will only be sent to Google Analytics 4 properties.

For Google, this represents the future of measurement and is a fundamental piece for marketers to take into account since it is from the results in search engines like Google and data analysis that companies can understand their customer’s journeys, their interests and create more appropriate strategies.

You might be interested in: Data-Driven: The Power of Marketing Data for Brands.

Growth of B2B Influencer Marketing

Finally, an interesting trend for the coming months will be the use of influencer marketing in B2B strategies. Previously, influencer marketing was mainly associated with products and services aimed at the end consumer. However, more and more companies are recognizing the value of working with influencers in the B2B space to promote their business solutions. These influencers are experts in their field and can help build trust and credibility in the industry, which is especially important in corporate purchasing decisions.

What Are the Current Trends for Influencer Marketing?

Current trends for influencer marketing are also marked by authenticity, diversity, inclusion, exploration of new technologies and the use of diverse formats. Advertisers are increasingly adopting more strategic and customer-centric approaches to working with influencers to connect with audiences and generate effective results.

Streamers and Gamers Are the Favorite Influencers of 2023

When reviewing market trends, we see that a fundamental part of upcoming campaigns will be geared towards collaborations with streamers or gamers. Through platforms such as Twitch, digital content creators have managed to build strong, engaged and loyal communities. This has been recognized by brands who want to build brand awareness or generate sales, especially among younger audiences.

Instagram and TikTok Are the Favorite Platforms for Brand Advertising

Social media remains and will continue to be an important channel to connect with target audiences. Using creative strategies to generate quality content, interact with your followers and take advantage of the advertising features of the different platforms will allow you to reach a wider audience and motivate their purchase decision.

In 2023, the top two platforms for influencer marketing and business advertising campaigns will be Instagram and TikTok. In the case of Instagram, with more than 1.2bn monthly active users, it will remain one of the most popular social networks in the world and one of the leading channels for enterprise marketing. Its focus on image and video, along with features such as Stories and Reels, provides multiple formats for influencers to create engaging and authentic content for brands.

At the same time, TikTok has started to position itself as a strong competitor for all social platforms, achieving its integration into marketing strategies. With more than 1.051m monthly active users, TikTok has become an essential platform for influencer marketing, especially for brands looking to reach Generation Z.

We recommend you read on Kolsquare’s influencer marketing blog: Is TikTok Becoming the Main Source of Information for Younger Generations?

Focus On Diversity and Inclusion in Communications

In a world increasingly aware of the importance of diversity and inclusion, brands are paying attention to working with influencers who represent a wide variety of experiences. Focusing on diversity and inclusion is not only a matter of social responsibility but also a smart marketing strategy. Campaigns with influencers that reflect the diversity of society can generate greater empathy and connection with the audience, which translates into greater brand loyalty and a stronger relationship with consumers.

Remember that in influencer marketing there is no single way to create successful campaigns, as it all depends on the objectives and characteristics of your target audience. The important thing is that you keep up to date with the trends and implement the ones that have the most potential to help you achieve your goals.