Digital Marketing Trends & Best Practices- Where To Win in 2023

The global ad market is predicted to continue its recovery from the 2020 downturn with 9.1% growth in 2022, after 15.6% growth in 2021- according to industry experts. Global ad spend will expand by 5.7% in 2023 and 7.4% in 2024, while brands & organizations are predicted to leverage an increase of exposure in social media, digital video, and ecommerce channels.

Advertising across all digital channels is predicted to exceed 60% of global ad spend for the first time in 2022, reaching 61.5% of total expenditure; in which their share will rise to 65.1% by 2024.

Furthermore, data privacy & restrictions are going to come into effect in 2023.

This data is evidence that the digital marketplace is and is going to become more competitive and saturated. It is even more important that we focus our ads and digital marketing strategy where it will produce the highest ROI and impact.

Where should we focus our efforts as we prepare for what promises to be a dynamic new year?

Your Website

Your Sales & Marketing Tool # 1

All roads lead to your website and is the foundation to how other marketing channels will perform. A slow, clunky, or cluttered website is no longer an option.

In 2022, you’ll need to prioritize user experience, information architecture, content, landing pages, site speed, and mobile optimization to keep pace. Otherwise, your visitors will just go elsewhere, or worse yet, never even view your website because it was not found (as it is not optimized or structured for search engines and search keywords).

Furthermore, your website should be built and designed with marketing initiatives and requirements at the forefront- not an afterthought, as this will cause for more complications & redesigns (more cost) down the road.

Start with a comprehensive website audit that examines:

• Technical red flags and crawl issues
• Domain authority
• Keyword rankings and traffic
• User experience and information architecture
• Content (top-performing, redundant, unnecessary, outdated)
• Mobile experience and speed scoring

Don’t bother investing in top-of-funnel advertising, social media, or even paid ads if your website needs a lot of work. Rather, put your budget into your sales & marketing tool- your website as a foundational step #1. Do what you need to so that your site adheres to web, CRO (conversion rate optimization) SEO, and UX best practices as this is your prerequisite to the rest of your success across other channels.

Omnichannel marketing refers to creating your brand or business presence across multiple online (search networks, display networks, website, app, social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp) and offline (retail store, events, call-center) channels while ensuring a positive and seamless experience throughout the customer journey.

The word ‘positive’ and ‘seamless’ is crucial to note because 67% of the customers cite bad customer experience as the reason for churn. So, if you are looking at winning and retaining customers, it’s important that you must take your omnichannel marketing strategy seriously and strengthen it to offer a positive experience to your customers throughout their journey.

Omnichannel Marketing

Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important?

Omnichannel marketing is essential because it helps you create a positive experience for the customer at every stage of their lifecycle, reduce churn, and build a positive reputation of your brand or business.

5 Big Benefits of a Solid Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

 There are a myriad of reasons why investing resources into your omnichannel marketing strategy is highly impactful & beneficial to your digital marketing results. Research has shown that companies with effective omni-channel marketing strategies often see significant increases in:

• Annual Revenue — Companies with an effective omni-channel strategy enjoy an average 9.5% year-on-year increase in annual revenue. A near 10 percent increase in annual revenue is a respectable accomplishment in any economy.
• Customer Retention — Companies with effective omni-channel strategies typically retain 89% of customers.
• Customer Lifetime Value — The customers of companies with an effective omni-channel strategy generally have a 30% higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Customer Spend — Customers spend up to 10% more after being reached via omni-channel marketing campaigns. The rewards of making yourself available across channels are truly measurable.
• Customer Satisfaction — Companies with an effective omni-channel strategy see their customer satisfaction increase as much as a 23x. This will also cause customers to share with their peers and become advocates of your brand or business.

 

SEO & Sematic Search

SEO

SEO is ever evolving and it is more vital than ever in 2022 to stay on top of the latest trends in order to ensure your content strategies are effective.

What this means is, if you are still relying on the same SEO tactics you’ve been using for years, you are going to find a lack in results, wasted resources, and a high amount of frustration in the process. The fact is that many older strategies (“older” in the digital marketing world meaning- last year or longer) are not only ineffective in today’s SEO landscape, but some even further outdated tactics such as keyword stuffing can even negatively impact SEO. This makes it imperative that you continually adapt your SEO strategies to the latest trends.

Sematic Search

Relying on a variety of signals and data points, the Google search algorithm is getting better and better at matching people with the information they need. The algorithm now takes into account more than just keywords—it’s factoring in intent, context, and more. This is what is referred to as Sematic Search.

Design and optimize content with search intent in mind. This comes down to looking at the search result pages for a particular query and identifying the three Cs of search intent:

The Three C’s of Search Intent:

• Content type – What is the overall type of content? Is it a blog post, product page, or video?
• Content format – Some common formats include how-to guides, list posts, reviews, comparisons,
• Content angle – The unique selling point of the content For example, “best,” “cheapest,” and “freshness.” Can you guess what the angle of this article is?

Once you identify the three C’s of search intent, you should have a pretty good idea of what type of content Google “recommends” to its users for particular search queries.

How to integrate Sematic Search into your SEO Strategy:

• Focus on topics and cluster themes of keywords
• Make sure you understand user search intent: Is it to buy? To reach a particular page of a brand? To learn?
• Build relevancy through links (both internal and external).
• Use schema
• Use semantic HTML like <header>, <footer> and <article>.
• Answer all relevant questions around your
• Be answer-based and structure your sentences to be easily

 Paid Search

Paid search is a valuable marketing channel that will amplify your messaging and effectively grow your business. This proven tactic is a long-time favorite for many advertisers and continues to grow in popularity. However, given the competitive landscape, and ever rising cost of CPC’s, brands & businesses need to be very strategic in their PPC planning both short and long term to win.

Paid Search & AI Advancements

In the paid search world, advertising platforms are increasingly relying on AI and machine learning to serve ads to the right audience, automate bidding, and automate optimizations. Today, you can use AI to target audiences, predict CTR, and select the best ad copy. We can rely on AI to automate bid strategies for our marketing initiatives, optimize ads against revenue goals, and generally reduce cost across the board. There are many advantages to AI in paid search, however we must be aware that AI is no where close to where it can be to be turned completely onto autopilot and perform optimally.

Keyword targeting Fading Out- More Testing Required (NOT less!)

Many industry “experts” argue that as the audience-centric approach to PPC becomes more popular, the importance of keywords will decrease. I do agree that this will take effect and is a progression that is already in place- however this does not mean that the management of keywords is not any less important- in fact, from what I have seen thus far, it will be a long time before this system can run on autopilot without wasting a significant amount of ad spend.

It is more important than ever to ensure that we are driving traffic to our ads from our qualified customers, not allowing Google to decide how quickly to eat up our budget (drive more revenue for Google) by loosely matching search queries to keywords.

Does this require more keyword management? YES. Does this require an optimally structured account with more tightly knit ad groups and keyword groups? YES. Is it worth the additional time to do this to make sure all of our ad spend is accounted for in driving qualified traffic, not Google’s machine (for profit) that is still essentially in the “beta” phase? Absolutely!

This trend is becoming apparent with the new features that are released on its platforms. Google wants to streamline and improve the user experience, and they want to present more relevant ads to its users- however please keep in mind, that Google’s main revenue source is from their advertising- they are also building systems in their advertising tools to achieve this simultaneously for their benefit, not yours.

Essentially, there needs to be a renewed focus on deeply understanding customers and how they search for information, solutions, products and closely aligned with keyword selection and optimal match types (which have become much more loose). This process is an ongoing test that the machine CANNOT accomplish for you.

This will require a combination of conducting research, researching deep into historical consumer behavior, and develop overarching messaging strategies in our ads.

Paid Search expands into all stages of the marketing funnel

While paid search is most commonly used as a lower-funnel tactic, it is predicted that more brands will use search as an upper-funnel tactic, too.

Prepare for these changes now by learning everything you can about your target audience, so you can understand how to reach them using paid search during every stage of the customer journey.

 

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

“Friction” is the fastest way to degrade the conversion rate on your ads. Friction can come in the form of steps or processes that are difficult to navigate (forms that aren’t mobile-optimized, for example). It can also come from disjointed experiences (a user clicks through to a landing page that doesn’t have anything to do with the ad, for example).

With CRO, you’re looking for opportunities to make the journey from click to conversion frictionless. Otherwise, there will be wastage, even for your highest-performing campaigns. That is, ad spend that isn’t yielding cost-efficient conversions. Or non-brand terms that are costing you more than they should.

UX and CRO are closely interconnected. They’re mutually beneficial in many ways, and strong UX in the following areas inherently supports better conversion rates:

• Mobile optimization
• Social proof and trust signals
• Website built to map each stage of the funnel
• Strong calls to action
• Simple and accessible messaging
• Relevant site navigation and content hierarchies
• Personalization