5 Digital Marketing Trends (Plus One You May Not Know)

With 2023 speeding along, technology and marketing are continually growing and evolving. As a marketer, you know how important getting leads and growing are to your business. Making sure you’re able to adapt your strategies to popular digital marketing trends as you learn about them is critical to your marketing success. 

Here are five digital marketing trends, plus one you may not know about, and how you can take advantage of them.

1. Small Businesses and the Increasing Use of Influencers

Influencer marketing has gotten bigger recently, along with trending platforms like TikTok where authenticity is your brand’s key to success. More influencers are focusing on specific niches, which allows companies to be more specific in who they target with influencer marketing.

Small businesses are discovering an incredible opportunity to hire influencers for their brand. They could take the traditional route and build their own audiences on social media, sharing their products to make sales, or, they could take note of recent research suggesting 61 percent of consumers trust product recommendations from friends, family members or influencers on social media, while only 38 percent trust brand recommendations.

The best part? Influencer partnerships can help you increase your reach, build trust and drive sales. 

Try reaching out to local influencers or well-known names to see if they would consider endorsing your brand. Consider expanding your reach with influencer marketing platforms that help you manage and select influencers from all over the world who may be right for your brand.

2. Can You Hear Me Now? Increasing Chatbot Usage

Chatbots have become an innovative way for brands to connect with customers. A chatbot can serve as an entryway for your brand to be more accessible to users and more responsive to their problems and concerns. As an added bonus, you can use chatbots to gather customer information about them and their preferences.

Chatbots are going to continue to expand as AI, like ChatGPT, becomes smarter and more effective. If you think a chatbot could be the next big tool for your business, consider researching more about AI and how companies similar to yours have used chatbots to transform their digital presence.

3. SEO and Influencer Marketing as a One-Two Knockout Punch

Website design and search engine optimization have always been important for digital marketers, but they will be an even more crucial part of digital marketing strategy in 2023. SEO is commonly integrated into web copy. 

However, this year, we see more emphasis on optimizing different types of media, like photos and videos, to reach internet users. Backlinks and AI SEO tools are going to have an increasing role in digital marketing success stories.

Integrating your influencer marketing into your SEO strategies is important because influencers can provide social proof and drive digital authority to your brand. Ask the influencers you work with to link back to your website as often as possible while embedding anchor text keyword links to pass on their domain authority to your website.

4. Niche Content Gets More Niche

Your brand’s “niche” is your brand’s specific, narrowed-down audience. It defines what your brand does and who cares about your mission, service or product. 

Niche content is going to get even more specific as social media and Google search algorithms are continually fine-tuned to serve content to people who will engage with it. This means that you’ll need to use more specific keywords to get people interested in your niche brand.

Additionally, your brand’s community will continue to be an important part of marketing. We’ll see an increased focus on building unique digital communities centered around specified interests. The best way to build value around your brand is to create StoryBranded content that speaks directly to your audience and answers their specific questions.

5. Creativity on Social Media Will Be More Important Than Ever

It’s getting more and more difficult to grab attention nowadays. Digital marketers only have limited time to convey their message quickly, effectively and memorably. Recent social media trends have shifted toward short-form videos and storytelling as ways to get attention and keep it. 

Creativity will likely be more important than ever in 2023, and we’ll likely see more videos that incorporate lots of movement or a hook so that people will keep watching.

Making sure your organization is creative not only in the content generation process but also in your engagement strategies is the key to success. A great example to experiment with at your company is using YouTube Shorts. These vertical videos are 60 seconds or less in length and rival other short-form video content like TikToks and Instagram Reels.

Here’s another pro tip: If you’re using platforms like Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram, check out the insights and user data they provide. Knowing how long people viewed your videos can indicate which content was the most attention-grabbing. 

One You May Not Know: Audio-First Marketing

One of the more novel effects TikTok has had on the digital marketing trends scene is the rise of audio-first content. TikTok’s unique positioning, as not just a social platform for video but for audio-based content of all kinds, has contributed directly to this trend.

Consider this: 90 percent of TikTok users consider sound to be a vital part of the platform’s experience and are eight times more likely to recall branded content when distinctive sounds are used. Being audio-first as a digital marketing strategy currently drives many of the ads we’re seeing online, including how-to tutorials, product highlights and teasers, behind-the-scenes information and more.

Here’s another interesting audio stat: 81 percent of podcast listeners take action after hearing audio ads on their favorite shows. This “action” could vary anywhere from following up on what they heard with search engine research, following the brand on social platforms or talking about what they’ve heard with those around them. 

Pro Tip: Letting the podcast hosts themselves record the ad makes the content feel incredibly genuine to listeners.

Audio-first content can help promote authenticity in advertising. Whether it’s on a podcast or TikTok, hearing the comforting voice and tone of your audience’s favorite influencer as they describe your product means the audience will be more likely to believe in it and trust you as a brand.

Digital Marketing Trends: Where to Go From Here

No matter which strategies and platforms you use, the most important thing to keep in mind is how you will use these trends to enhance your brand’s presence. 

Need some marketing assistance?

BigOrange Marketing helps dozens of companies win millions of dollars in business while delivering what others just promise. We provide websites and complete outsourced digital marketing plans to help you get found, get results and get your time back. 

Schedule a non-salesy call with our marketing strategists for a better way to get leads and start growing your business today.