New Year, New Us. But how? We asked several seasoned marketers what their big ideas are for next year.
As consumers, we're overdoing it by 2022. We are anxious to recover from the epidemic years. In the year By 2023, we will stop our excesses to find balance and align our actions with greater purpose and our evolving values and changing world.
We reject outdated norms, embrace accessible technology and stop viewing sustainability as a novelty, obligation or choice. Seeking balance, consumers are redefining what's important to them and looking for ways to unplug and immerse themselves in these areas of life. This creates a huge opportunity for brands to connect communities and reach consumers with inclusive, accessible and point-of-interest experiences that allow consumers to escape the chaos of everyday life and live in the moment.
Lauren McFarland, Director of Influencer Marketing, The Next Journey: The Year of 'Brandformance'
With budget cuts, growth pressures and changing consumer behavior (and their advertising preferences), marketers and performance professionals are being asked to support each other.
Companies cannot succeed with a single strategy. It's time to adopt a "brandformer" approach where performance and brand teams share a common vision, vision and KPIs and use influencer marketing to bridge the gap.
The creative economy has changed the way brands reach their audiences. Platforms like TikTok are constantly releasing new features that make marketing campaigns from awareness to purchase easier.
Google may not recognize "product performance" as a term, but the separation of these teams soon became a thing of the past.
Benjamin Pipat, Chief Solutions Officer, Technology Solutions, Jellyfish: The Year of Automation
In the year By 2023, the industry will continue to move towards full automation for low-cost advertising. This change is driven by the platform; In the last few years we have seen the development of select products such as Google Performance Max (PMax) and App Campaign (GAC), Meta's Advantage+ and Amazon's Sponsored Display.
These products are growing in popularity as platforms make performance advertising accessible to non-people. Fully automated advertising is dramatically changing the way the advertising industry and brands interact with consumers. From choosing targeting (keywords or categories) to results (sales or clicks) it's one step towards a black box model.
Tasks such as keyword mining or segmentation will soon become obsolete, requiring restructuring and training of staff to focus on input (creative inputs) and algorithm performance analysis.
Jennifer Webb, Strategy Director, TrunkBB: The Gen Z Year
As big online consumers, Gen Z scrutinizes what companies say and do more than other generations. Understanding the complex set of drivers, attitudes and values of these digital natives is a challenge for many brands.
Gen Z is passionate about making a meaningful difference in their community, society and the planet around them. Mental health, body positivity, 2000s nostalgia, mistrust of government and corporations, diversity and social justice, consumer spending power, youth anxiety, peer power and gender change are the driving forces behind major transformational trends.
This inspirational generation is forcing brands to rethink their marketing strategy. Many brands are now focusing on how to build brand loyalty with a generation that wants a highly relevant and creative mix of digital and social content and channels.
Becky Sims, Founder and CEO of Reflect Digital: Thinking Years
With the continuous development of technology, advances in automation and AI, 2023 gives us the opportunity to think more often. The trick for marketers to be strategic is to use this opportunity for greater effectiveness.
Using a tool like ChatGPT for time-consuming research and content creation can free up time for your marketing team to be more strategic about positioning, optimization, and targeting the right audience.
This should be considered with common sense. This is a great opportunity to increase productivity with high profit potential. Proceed with caution and treat technology not as a lazy shortcut, but as a new process that gives marketers time to add value.
Tim Lardner, Vice President of Strategy, PMG: Years of Speed
The advertising industry is undergoing a transformational transition as consumer preferences change and newcomers like TikTok, retail media networks and TV streaming platforms disrupt traditional advertising models. Advertising has become increasingly complex and fragmented, introducing new challenges and endless opportunities to accelerate brand development and storytelling in new ways. In the year 2023 will be defined by brands that respond to these trends and challenge them with efficiency, discipline and creativity.
Stevie Johnson, CEO, Disruption: The Year of Performance Influencer Marketing
In this economic situation, all trading activities will have a downward movement in the fan, which will affect other trends that we see.
Traditional brand awareness channels like influencer marketing should be protected. Some argue that the dominant industry is moving to performance channels, but the real speed is yet to come.
We will see more campaigns based on performance and closer to affiliate marketing. The social media platform continues to improve users' buying experience with ever-improving features that ensure bottom-of-the-funnel activity for CMOs and procurement, ensuring true ROI is shared with their influencer campaign budgets.
Alice Stifferman, Director of Marketing and Corporate Strategy, Coegi: The Year of Content
Great marketing content will be more important than individual ads or campaigns. One could argue that it was the year of privacy as the target audience is rapidly shrinking due to strict regulations. But the answer to this limitation isn't to look for data or audience-targeted solutions. The key to success is integrating paid content and media under one strategic umbrella so your brand doesn't feel pressured by the changing privacy landscape.
Carly Pring, Marketing Manager, Tag: The year technology meets people
Smartphone social media. virtual reality. Artificial intelligence. The augmented reality. Marketing changes by the minute.
Technological advances are more than just connecting the post-pandemic world in ways other than human contact. Due to technological advances and real-time data analysis, we are less constrained by traditional sales and advertising. As a result, technology equips marketers with tools to help brands adopt a human-centered marketing approach.
The Internet of Things allows marketers to understand demographics and psychographics, create marketing personas from targeted customer archetypes, understand customer sentiments, and more. Demand for programmatic visualization will continue as marketers continue to strive for technological advances to make the experience (virtual or real) as human as possible.
Bridget Hoeppner, Head of SEO, Incubetta: The New Year of SEO
ChatGPT's content creation features appeal to marketers, but Google says AI-generated content is against webmaster guidelines. So what should we do after a major content update and a major content/experience update?
Bottom line: Both Google and people value unique, relevant, quality, and useful content. There are many instances where ChatGPT meets the criteria. Humans, on the other hand, have done a good job of putting garbage online, so the binary approach of "good human content" and "bad AI content" is unacceptable.
Experiment with ChatGPT to create content on things like product descriptions and FAQs. Don't expect it to replace compelling sales copy or nail your brand. As Google differentiates between human-generated and AI-generated content, expect references to knowledge, authority, and trust to become more important.
Liz Baynes, Director of Planning, Agency Space Savers: Years of Value
In the past decade, the role of advertising has often been paid even to everyday products. So we have added complexity and ambiguity to the customer.
As the cost of living continues to rise, many are under pressure to balance the books. It is not the quality of the product that helps, but the price . The advertisement should create full confidence and transparency in the value given by the customers.
This is nothing new at Specsavers. Our value to our customers is always "professional help, affordable and accessible to all". Whether our optometrists visit the homes of people who can't walk into our stores or continue to offer market-leading prices, we continue to proudly use our advertising to communicate our value to customers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Kristi Nakha-Faith Director of Strategy, Conference, Union Year
Community should be at the heart of a brand's future growth plans. It's important for brands to start thinking about how they can support communities in times of financial crisis (we've seen this change in the tone of the holidays this year), and it's time for media and marketing to adopt demographic (especially age-based) target profiles to leave target audiences.
Community (large and small, geographical and based on common interests) should be the main way of understanding groups of people. A deep understanding of relevant product communities will influence channels, platforms and targets. This enables a holistic communication plan to deliver products, content and messages to all touch points.
