A lot has changed in the world of digital marketing in the past two years. And…
2023 is shaping up to be a turning point.
The Heyday of Privacy-First Solutions
The Increasing Complexity of The Customer Journey
Consumers and Brands are Financially Worried
Embracing Automation & Machine Learning
The digital marketing world is changing, as always.
Something is certain in the world of digital marketing, it’s always evolving. From new solutions, to new tactics, marketers have to welcome change with open arms and adapt their strategy frequently.
The aftereffect of COVID-19, the uncertain economic climate and privacy concerns will have an impact on your 2023 digital marketing strategy. Read on to get a sense of what to expect in the next few months.
The Heyday of Privacy-First Solutions
Although we still have a full year before Google fully phases out third-party cookies (set for the end of 2024), privacy is still a rising concern for consumers, governments and tech companies.
This desire for heightened privacy features led to new solutions and new regulations that are impacting your marketing strategy, today.
New Ways to Track and Attribute Conversions
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, introduced in 2021, has changed the way brands can track and attribute conversions on a variety of applications including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok and more.
In brief, apps on iPhones are required to ask for a user’s consent before tracking them. As shown here, a lot of iPhone users block app tracking which directly impacts are ability to attribute conversions to social platforms, optimize performance, and retarget users based on online behaviours (a very common marketing tactic called remarketing).
To address this issue, ad platforms have turned to server-side tracking technologies called Conversion APIs. This conversion tracking method is more flexible, accurate and customizable compared to standard tracking pixel.
✅ Implement Server-Side Tracking When Possible
Marketers should quickly jump on this new tracking bandwagon in order to reduce the impact on their performance.
For example, the Facebook Conversion API will soon be mandatory for brands advertising their business in the Facebook ecosystem.
Google has also introduced the Google Conversion API (Google Enhanced Conversions), so did Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and more.
The Google Analytics 4 Takeover
The rise in privacy concerns is one of Google’s motivation to update its widely popular web analytic tool: Google Analytics.
As of July 1st 2023, Google Analytics Universal will stop processing hits, which means you won’t be able to collect and analyze information in the old version of Google Analytics, Universal Analytics (UA).
✅ Make the Switch to Google Analytics 4 ASAP
It’s imperative that business implement GA4 as soon as possible. As part of this process, you must not only create your GA4 property, but also custom events to ensure crucial data does not get lost.
New Privacy-First Laws and Regulations
The Canadian government is currently working on Bill C-27, which seeks to replace the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act with a modernized and stronger privacy and data protection legal framework. This new Bill reinforces the consent requirements and will impact the way we collect and store data online.
Similarly, the Quebec government adopted Bill-64 (Law 25) which regulates the management of personal information within the private sector. To ensure compliance, every organization doing business in Québec must understand the new requirements. Some came into force in September 2022, but most will take effect in September 2023.
✅ Understand and comply with new laws
We’d suggest reading about the new Quebec law and the new Canadian Bill to understand how these new regulations will impact the way you collect, store and use personal information online.
Legal professionals will be in the best position to understand your needs and review your cookie policy, consent banners and more. You might also have to change the way you track activity on your website to comply with these new regulations.
The Increasing Complexity of The Customer Journey
Because of the large number of platforms, publishers, channels, and touchpoints, buying journeys have never been more complex.
Nowadays, customers can go from awareness to purchase in a matter of minutes, and their journey can start and end on almost any channel, online and offline.
It is imperative for marketers to remain agile and develop a robust and cohesive strategy that allows them to reach users at the right time and at the right place.
Social Commerce is Booming
Social platforms are now a huge part of our everyday lives. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, BeReal, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn are used by brands to sell products or services, that’s what social commerce is. Some social platforms like Instagram or TikTok let users discover and buy product natively (without leaving the app).
According to Shopify and eMarketer, Canada is behind when it comes to social commerce, some shopping features are still only accessible in the U.S. Most of the Canadian social commerce today is still within the discovery and consideration stages.
✅ Lay the Ground work for social commerce
An optimized product feed is the first step to selling your product on social platforms. Your product feed is essentially a list containing your product information and shared with marketplaces to shop and showcase your products.
Then, set up your Instagram, Facebook and TikTok shop (U.S. only) and start tagging your product on posts, stories and Reels.
Pinterest also offers tons of Shopping features that help users find what they are looking for. Again, uploading your product feed to Pinterest will help show your product when users are actively looking for something similar.
✅ Build on social selling
Social selling is your brand’s ability to use social platforms to build relationships with users. Social platforms play a key role in connecting with users in a space where they’re already active and engaged in conversations.
As social commerce features are still slow to appear in Canada, continue working on your social strategy to build and publish content that put your products forward and speaks to your target audience.
Short-form video content (Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts) will be the best way to reach users in 2023.
Blurred Lines Between Performance and Brand Marketing
There used to be a clear line between performance marketing and brand marketing.
On one side, performance marketing is all about sales and return on investment. It’s measurable and often includes tactics such as search and social advertising.
On the other end of the spectrum is brand marketing. It’s all about creating awareness and emotional connection with consumers. Much harder to measure, brand marketing is often associated with inspiring creative briefs and resource-intensive campaigns.
But, in today’s world, where marketing is going full-digital and privacy-first solutions are taking over, brands need to find a balance between brand marketing and performance marketing for organizational growth and long-term success.
✅ Invest in Brand Building
Performance marketing is associated with bottom-funnel tactics like remarketing. And, although these ROI-focused tactics are vital to a strong digital strategy, brands shouldn’t sleep on brand-focus advertising, even online.
Brand building can take a variety of forms, such as relatable social media content or brand awareness campaigns that emphasize your brand’s rational and emotional benefits.
Brand marketing will help feed your performance marketing campaigns and increase overall performance.
The numbers of channels continues to grow
We’ve been taking about omnichannel marketing for years now. Consumers use multiple channels to discover and buy products online or in-store. The number of channels and touchpoints available to speak to your target market continues to rise: Connected TV, Digital Out of Home, TikTok, BeReal, Programmatic, SMS, etc.
✅ diversify your marketing touch points
Google and Meta are usually a brand’s go-to when building a digital strategy, with reason because they’ve proven their worth time and time again. That said, brands should consider testing other channels to diversify their investment and reduce their reliability on Google and Facebook. Snapchat, Programmatic, Email, TikTok could bring a lot of value and differentiation to your strategy.
However, it’s also unrealistic to think that your brand needs to be present on every single channel. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin, and you want to be where it matters most. Through consumer research and competitive analysis, you’ll be able to pinpoint which channels are worth testing out for your brand.
Note that your content and strategy will need to be adapted to each channel’s specificities.
Also, don’t sleep on proven organic channels like email marketing, SEO and social media that are sometimes pushed aside as they don’t have the same immediacy as other paid tactics.
✅ Leverage Data for seamless user experience
Having an omnichannel approach to data means collecting and analyzing data across various touchpoints (website, apps, offline, ad platforms) to create a holistic view of the consumer journey. And, that’s no easy task: in 2023, marketers anticipate an increase in the number of data sources used each year, projecting an average of 18 data sources in 2023.
Brands that have the expertise and tech stack to collect, store and leverage data across multiple channels are able to create a personalized and coherent experience for users.
✅ create a coherent story across channels
For a successful omnichannel strategy, brands need to their usual customer journey and offer a seamless approach across channels.
Using similar branding and messaging across platforms will help create brand recognition.
Building strong brand guidelines and community management playbooks will help keep your story coherent across channels.
Consumers and Brands are Financially Worried
The uncertain global economic outlook has been top of mind for many businesses and consumers in the last few months.
The macroeconomic headwinds are strong. With interest rates rising, the war in Ukraine, inflation reaching staggering levels, most expect a recession to hit in 2023, some would say we are already in one.
The Change in Consumer Behaviour
Consumers are worried and throughout a downturn, they typically reevaluate their consumption priorities. Most consumers become more price sensitive and less brand loyal during recessions.
Despite the post-pandemic momentum, it is expected that low-income and vulnerable consumers will cut most of their spending on non-essential goods. As for higher income people, they might delay purchasing big ticket items, or seek better quality for the price.
✅ Build on trust and engagement
According to the Harvard Business Review, worried consumers, even those with a comfortable lifestyle, consider familiar brands and products to be a safe and comforting choice in trying times.
A good way to build trust with your consumers base is to adopt a reassuring message that demonstrates empathy. Also, try reinforcing your connection with your clientele through a loyalty program or special offers for returning customers.
Finally, you also want to reiterate, as much as possible, that your brand is the perfect choice for customers and a sound decision.
Marketers Will Have to do More With Less
Consumers aren’t the only ones worried about the economic climates, it also directly impacts businesses.
To mitigate the impact of a recession on their bottom line, businesses will look for different ways to cut costs and be more efficient, and marketing budgets will be under high scrutiny.
✅ Keep investing in marketing
A recent survey by Matter Communications found that 89% of CMOs and senior marketing executives plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2023, although 80% anticipate a recession over the next 12 months. It became clear to most marketers that investing in marketing is essential after the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data also backs it up. Tons of research, some even dating back to almost 100 years ago, say that cutting your marketing budget isn’t the way to go during a recession. Research shows that advertisers that maintained or grew their ad spending increased sales and market share during the recession and afterwards. And, most importantly, they did so at a lower cost than during good times.
Also, don’t just rely on performance marketing for short-term success. As suggest by the Harvard Business Review, the best way to minimize business risks is to build and maintain strong brands—ones that customers recognize and trust.
✅ Weed out Inefficiencies quickly
As you plan for 2023, it’s the best moment to revise your marketing strategy and reallocate investments based on previous performance and new channels.
Tough times provide an imperative to cut loose poor performers and eliminate low-yield tactics. – Harvard Business Review
You don’t want to slash your marketing budget, but you do want to weed out inefficiencies.
Deep-diving into your campaign to identify wasted resources is key to optimizing your performance and doing more with less.
Digital marketing agencies like Bloom can audit your accounts and find optimization opportunities.
Embracing Automation & Machine Learning
Digital marketing has relied heavily on automation and machine learning for a while now, but it feels like it is gaining more traction every year.
Automation and Machine Learning makes every marketer’s life easier and is now present in every marketing field, from advertising to email marketing.
In 2023, marketers will have no choice but to adapt their practices and increase their use of machine learning and automation to stay competitive.
Automation and Creative Production
Automation and machine learning are increasingly used by ad platforms in every step of creating a campaign, especially in targeting media and data analysis. But, we started to see an increase in use in the creative process itself.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for advertisers to deliver creative at scale while maintaining relevancy (and consistency) to match today’s rapid pace of content consumption and ever-increasing number of screens, channels, and formats. That’s where automation comes in.
✅ Leverage new technologies and Adapt
Your automated experiments should go beyond A/B testing in 2023. The use of automation and machine learning can also help produce a variety of ad variations in a matter of seconds.
For example, with Google’s Performance Max campaign type, you can create countless ad formats and creatives by combining photos, videos, and copy.
Similarly, on Facebook, dynamic creative takes multiple media (images, videos) and multiple ad components (such as images, videos, text, audio and calls-to-action) and then mixes and matches them in new ways to create. Facebook can also automatically crop your images, create videos from images, apply minor image enhancements, and more.
It allows advertisers to automatically create personalized variations for each person who views your ad, in a scalable way.
Don’t be afraid to let ad platforms participate in the ad creation process, chances are, you’ll see a positive impact on your performance.
Automation doesn’t mean you won’t need a creative team anymore. Use automation as a time-saving tool to spend more time thinking about your creative concept for maximum impact.
In addition, automating this part of the process should leave you more time to focus on creative concept.
Balancing Machine-Learning and Human-Led Decision-Making in Advertising
Advertising platforms are allowing for more and more machine learning in every step of the ad campaign creation.
1. We’ve seen Meta rebrand its line of automated products and launch new ones in 2022.
2. There is also a lot of buzz surrounding Google’s new automated campaign type, Performance Max.
3. Responsive Search Ads have become the norm in 2022.
4. Using Automated Bid Strategies as also became an incredibly popular Google Ads practice.
All these automated features have been design to help advertisers improve performance and reduce the need for manual optimizations that are time and resource consuming.
But, used blindly, these automations can also lead you down the wrong path and eventually waste your resources on irrelevancies.
✅ closely monitor automated campaigns
There are many benefits in using automation and machine learning in digital marketing, especially in media. If marketers want to stay relevant when creating campaigns on ad platforms, they need to incorporate automated tools and machine learning in their strategy.
That said, we suggest closely monitoring your automated campaigns, measuring performance and optimizing frequently. Even a super-advanced AI still needs human supervision and oversight.
Welcome Change
With Open Arms.
There are challenges ahead, but marketers who are agile, flexible and proactive should have the upper hand.
These obstacles are also an opportunity to rethink current marketing practices and update them in a way that builds stronger relationships, in a privacy-safe way.
About Bloom
Bloom is a digital marketing agency in Canada and the U.S. with over 15 years of experience in performance marketing. As the digital landscape evolved, we introduce our brand acceleration methodology, called BOREAL, specifically crafted to leave lasting impressions without loosing sight of the ROI.
Work with an agency that’s ahead of the curve