Top 13 Digital Marketing Trends in 2023

Digital marketing trends and strategies are evolving with each passing day. In December 2022, AI in Digital Marketing and ChatGPT were trends unknown. Fast forward to 2023 and ChatGPT is the talk of the town.

AI tools have the potential to change the digital marketing landscape. Today, AI is to digital marketing what Google Meet was to virtual meetings in 2020.

2023 is going to be a year of changes for digital marketers, content creators and brand managers. From artificial intelligence and voice search optimization to the rise of video as a channel, these emerging digital marketing trends may change the way you reach out to your customers. By learning the basic digital marketing skills and getting your basics right, you can easily master the So, what are the digital marketing skills you need to learn in 2023

Read this blog to know the top digital marketing trends of 2023.

13 Latest Digital Marketing Trends of 2023

• The Rise of Voice Search Optimization

Today, voice search has become so popular that more than 25% of the global virtual population uses this feature from their mobile devices!

From offering regular weather updates, and assisting “near me” searches, to eCommerce, these voice assistants are real game changers!  In fact, a stat by Statista suggests that by 2023, the value of eCommerce transactions done via voice assistants worldwide will cross the $19 billion mark!

These stats make one thing clear: voice searches are the way forward! That’s why it’s essential for marketers to make their websites responsive to voice searches. Further, ensuring accuracy in voice searches and supporting multiple languages will take you a long way!

For instance, Google Voice Search supports a bunch of regional languages such as Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and more in addition to English and Hindi. Similarly, Amazon India has been offering a voice shopping experience in Hindi to its users!

• Chatbot Marketing

Chatbots have become part and parcel of every business in today’s digital era. With these AI-driven conversational tools, businesses can offer 24/7 customer support, answer commonly asked questions, and guide customers, while saving up on time, money and manpower. That’s why chatbots are a huge success! In fact, the size of the global chatbot market is forecasted to reach $1.25 billion by the year 2025. 

Interestingly, chatbots are a huge hit in the online retail segment with a 34% of acceptance rate. Since customers shopping online face a lot of issues (such as refund, replacement, and order tracking), having a prompt chatbot system in place can allow businesses to resolve the issues as early as possible. Even for B2B businesses, chatbots can also help in lead generation and lead nurturing.

All in all, having a sound chatbot system in place on your website is a must in 2023! Also, note that customers reaching out to customer support are tense (and at times frustrated). So, make sure that your bot is advanced enough to solve their queries as fast as possible. If not then at least it can direct them to the future course of action.

Moreover, chatbots can further be used to market your products or services. For instance, a lot of students have queries related to competitive exams. BYJU’s chat support ropes them in by offering free materials and guiding them through paid courses!

• Short Form Video Marketing

As per a stat by Statista, the average time spent by people watching online videos is 17 hours (per week) in 2023. That shows how popular video content is among people! In fact, 91% of customers want to see more video content from brands online. It can be either on blogs, YouTube, or social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

But, with the gazillions of videos available across channels, the audience’s attention span has been dropping.

With the TikTok boom, the market for short videos expanded exponentially in India. As a result, people demand entertainment, information, and education within 60 seconds. The ban on TikTok paved the way for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.  Entertainment videos, product demos, instant tutorials (such as food recipes), BTS, and user-generated videos are the most watched short video content types.

With 92% of marketers admitting video content brings them good ROI, having a sound video marketing strategy is a must in 2023!

At IMS Proschool, we started creating short form videos (mainly Instagram reels) from January 2023. And guess what, we saw a growth of 1000+ new followers every month. Moreover, when we boosted the reels, we were able to generate 100’s of leads which then turned into our happy customers.

• Well-targeted Email Marketing Campaigns

Let’s see one stat, for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you’re likely to generate $40! Amazing right?

Emails are the old-school marketing channel that still has not lost its relevance. In fact, 2 out of 3 marketers use emails for distributing content organically.

Further, emails are the best way to inform your subscribers about product launches, sales and offers and bring back those who have abandoned their cart. With the right copy, you can also communicate with your subscribers and get a peek into their expectations of your business.

Also, nobody wants to read generalised and boring emails. That’s why personalisation is the key! With the right tools and strategies at hand, you can personalise your emails, set the timer for automatically sending them, and sit back and watch the results.

Apart from this, a good copy as well as a clear CTA is a must-have for your email to win the war fought daily in inboxes.

• Influencer Marketing

The power of influencer marketing in today’s digital age cannot be questioned. In India itself, the influencer marketing industry values more than 16 billion as of 2023. (Statista)

With the widespread popularity of video content and social media platforms like Instagram and Youtube, social media influencers have gained a loyal fan base.

By onboarding such influencers brands can shine among their potential customers and reap strong ROI for their business.

For instance, let’s suppose you have a protein powder business, who do you think will people believe more: you or that fitness influencer they follow? The answer is obvious. When their favourite fitness influencer gives positive reviews to your product, they’re likely to try it themselves!

Also, while onboarding influencers, make sure that the person can bring value to your table. It simply means that s/he has a similar niche and an engaging audience.

Moreover, being clear about your goals with this campaign and infusing it in the form of CTA is important. Is it the downloads that you’re aiming for, signups, or sales? You might have heard YouTubers saying “Link is on the eye button/description/ pinned comments, go check it out”. Without a clear and bold CTA, your marketing efforts will be in vain. Influencer marketing trend will continue to dominate in 2023.

• Personalising Your Marketing Campaign

Personalisation is undoubtedly one of the top digital marketing trends in 2023. With heavy competition in almost every sector, your business is likely to get sidelined. But, personalisation is what can keep you afloat and dear to your customers. As per one stat, 75% of customers prefer purchasing from a brand that offers a personalised digital experience.

Personalisation ranges across various touch points from content to emails, products, sms, notifications, and much more. While including first names in your campaigns is the bare minimum, hyper-personalisation seems the way forward.

With AI, machine learning and deep learning, processing huge chunks of data and monitoring customer behaviour has become easier than ever. By employing these technologies, you can offer unique solutions to customers and keep them attached to your brand!

Platforms like Netflix and Amazon are already leveraging this technology by offering highly personalised recommendations of movies, web series, and products based on your past activities.

• User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC) is a hit as they’re cost effective, drives greater engagement for businesses and generates a higher CTR. As per some stats, consumers find UGC content 35% more memorable than traditional content and 79% admit that UGC positively influences their purchasing decisions.

The popularity of UGC owes greatly to the people. People online love to interact with brands in creative ways. Thus, when some brands come up with challenges and tasks for them, people get on board and start participating in the trend.

Since people participate in the challenges of their free will, it boosts the brand’s awareness and presents the user as the brand’s advertiser. Brands can then easily repost such content on their page and drive engagement. UGC is particularly famous on Instagram where people have the ease of tagging the brand and reposting.

You might remember Coca-Cola’s “Share A Coke” campaign or the recent Netflix hashtag “Stranger Things” campaign. With such tactics, brands drive engagement and boost awareness and sales.

• Artificial Intelligence Boom in Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the digital marketing landscape like none other. From AI-driven chatbots to churning mammoth data and offering viable insights, segmenting customers, personalising content, you name it, and AI has something to offer to you!

Last year, it amazed us again with the introduction of ChatGPT. This AI-driven tool soon became the talk of the town and marketers can use it to their benefit too. Some of the ethical use of ChatGPT for marketers is improving content for SEO, brainstorming content ideas, generating code for schema markup, getting feedback about the creative and much more.

With the right prompt, the tool can do wonders for you. However, a lot of people struggle with delivering the right prompt to the chatbot. The best way to do this, in our opinion, is to give as simple prompts as possible. For instance, “generate a list of best marketing automation tools”, “generate a customer feed survey”, etc.

• Augmented Reality

This is another cutting-edge technology that combines the virtual world with real experiences. Brands like L’Oreal and Sephora are leveraging AR technology to offer the ultimate shopping experience to consumers.

You can see how different shades of lipstick, makeup or foundation look on your face or also see how an outfit will look on you. The AR technology will be a complete game changer for the online shopping industry.

For emerging D2C founders looking to keep up with digital marketing trends, this is a good-to-have feature that can drive engagement and also improve conversions.

• People First Content

Here’s the deal: technology is upgrading at an unimaginable pace and so to keep up with it Google’s algorithms are also constantly changing. In 2023, the primary aim of Google is to find the most relevant answer to a search query and showcase it on the top of SERP.

Thus, it’s imperative for brands to offer value to customers to shine bright both in their viewer’s eyes. Writing promotional and gimmicky content will not take you a long way. Instead, derive an SEO strategy that delivers top-quality content and adds to the knowledge of your viewers. Once they’re impressed by your content, they’re more likely to engage with your brand and have good reviews about the same. 

• Clickbaity & Targeted Push Notifications

Push notifications are one of the best channels of personalised advertising in today’s digital era. With pop-ups, marketers can encourage users to take specific actions and boost user engagement and open rates of their app/web.

But, who wants to read plain and boring push notifications? That’s why, highly targeted push notifications generate 30% higher CTR. Further, reports also suggest that sending personalised and targeted push notifications with emojis, rich formats and industry-specific times can boost their opening rates. 

Let’s look at a few clickbaity push notifications to give you a fair idea.

“You might not be invited to shaadi…..

But you can still have shaadi food!😉

Tap for a feast made with top secret ingredients”.

This Swiggy’s push notification dates back to the partial-lockdown period when there were restrictions on the gathering of a lot of people. It was relevant, interesting and had a clear CTA.

Take another example,

“Shahina, what is this behaviour?”

“I’m sorry I cooked by mistake”

“You can’t cook by mistake. It’s No Cooking July!”

Zomato went a step ahead in personalising its push notifications by using the first names of users. It clearly hits the spot!

All in all, for push notifications to do their wonders, it has to be creative, personalised, relevant, crisp, and catchy.

• Marketing Automation

In the competitive world that we live in, every second counts. Marketing automation is a real game changer for businesses willing to streamline and automate processes so as to deliver quick, smooth and effective campaigns. Although a lot of people think marketing automation is all about automating email marketing campaigns, let us tell you it’s way more than that!

Marketing automation software can help you streamline lead generation, nurturing, scoring, audience segmentation, targeting, analytics, A/B testing, upsell or cross-sell activities and much more.

For instance, if you get a lot of traffic to your website, you can use this to your benefit by employing marketing automation and CRM tools to use. With this, you can collect and nurture these leads systematically and boost your conversion rates.

From our personal experience, we’ve seen a massive boost in engagement & conversions via automating whatsapp messages via our CRM – Leadsquared. All the leads flowing in through a particular source are sent an intro message where the receiver can either choose to get more info via a video or directly download brochure.

He/she can then choose to either talk to our academic counsellor or keep on watching more videos.

This has helped us qualify leads in a much better way and helped us save resources & improve conversions & revenue.

• Social Commerce

A recent report by KANTAR suggests a whopping 51% year-on-year growth for social commerce in India. It means that social media platforms are likely to become the new spot for eCommerce.

Social commerce, a subset of eCommerce, has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent times owing to the widespread usage of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Unlike SMM and social selling, social commerce allows people to complete the purchase of products within the app (without being navigated to the business’s website). This convenience is a hit among users and has transformed the customer journey by leaps and bounds! In fact, as per Statista, the market size for social commerce in India will cross the 30 billion mark by 2026.

If you want to reach a larger audience and offer a frictionless online shopping experience in 2023, social commerce is the way forward!

How Can You Upskill Yourself to Stay Updated with These Digital Marketing Trends?

The ocean of digital marketing is vast and deep and with every dive, you’re sure to discover something new. With emerging technologies like AR and AI, the future of digital marketing seems brighter than ever. Keeping up with these emerging trends allows you, as a digital marketer to stay relevant in the industry and bring out the best for your clients.

One of the best ways to upskill yourself is by investing in a comprehensive digital marketing course such as that of IMS Proschool.

IMS Proschool’s Digital Marketing Courses are designed to keep you updated with industry-relevant skills such as SEO, PPC, Influencer Marketing, Email Marketing, and even new age skills like applications of ChatGPT and its prompts. The course is thoroughly updated to keep up with industry standards and is taught by professional faculty. With our dynamic learning experience, students will learn from real-life case studies and get hands-on experience!

Sounds fascinating? Check out our digital marketing courses TODAY and kickstart your career in digital marketing!

FAQs

• Which trends will drive the future of digital marketing in the next 2-3 years?

By 2025, video content, virtual reality and social commerce will take the lead in marketing trends. Brands can invest and build these technologies to gain an edge over their competitors. 

• Is Digital Marketing a good career option?

Yes. According to LinkedIn, Digital Marketing remains to be one of the top career options in 2023. The digital media marketing market may further scale to a value of over USD 24 billion.

• Which is the most in-demand skill in digital marketing in 2023?

According to Linkedin, skills like Content Writing, SEO, Performance Marketing, Data Analyst, Analytics are some of the most preferred skills in digital marketing in 2023.