Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2023

We might be almost 1/12th of the way through the year but I think we can still call 2023 new, and as we slowly get to grips with it I thought I'd have a look at how I envisage things panning out from a marketing perspective. Obviously predictions can often fall flat and I'll set a reminder to revisit this post a year from now to see how close I got. Feel free to remind me in 2024 if I didn't hit the mark with my digital marketing soothsaying!

The world of online marketing moves at pace though there have been a few constants over the past decade (SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing just work). This has meant that whilst those embracing new technologies and new ideas can pull ahead, many who rely on the tried and tested methods and marketing channels haven't necessarily lost out. But at some point resting on your laurels will stop working and I'm curious to see the level of disruptive influence we’ll find in the year ahead shaking things up. Whether that's new and more effective channels for messaging and reaching target audiences or new tools and technologies making previously reliable ad tactics redundant.

So let's take a look at what's (possibly) to come in the world of marketing in 2023 and beyond.

AI Continues to Explode is Usage and Usefulness

The proliferation of artificial intelligence into our daily lives is nothing new. Apple's Siri AI-powered virtual assistant will celebrate its 12th birthday this year, whilst Amazon's Alexa has embedded itself in our homes for nearly eight years now. AI powers algorithms from search engines to Spotify playlists and has been doing much of the heavy lifting for big tech brands for many a year now. And yet, there's definitely a feeling of this being a new dawn of AI.

Perhaps the biggest driver of this explosion in interest in AI powered tools was the unleashing of OpenAI's surprisingly useful chatbot ChatGPT. In case you've been in a coma for the past couple of months, I wrote about this online sensation in December (Seems Like Everyone's Talking About ChatGPT and the Rise of the AIs). The natural language processing capabilities of this chatbot struck a chord with many people who quickly uncovered hundreds of real world use cases for its application, from acting as a doctor or an accountant to quickly testing and fixing lines of programming language code. There's a great list of some of the prompts you can feed ChatGPT in order to have it do your bidding here, though I'd still advise caution on taking anything it says as gospel. It's far from infallible.

What does all this mean for marketing though? Marketing automation has been an AI powered reality for most of the past decade, with countless tools and platforms available to individuals and agencies alike which handle repetitive, routine tasks from email scheduling to more complex retargeting behaviours (think "if marketed user does X then apply strategy Y" etc.) so AI and marketing are already old bedfellows. In fact it's an entire industry already worth an estimated $5.2 billion.

What we're seeing now however, is a progression from using AI as an effective scheduling assistant and data analyst, to having it contribute in far more creative ways. ChatGPT will come up with unique concepts for you and write out marketing copy (or any copy) in seconds. It's not even the first tool to do this and there are a wide array of AI powered content generation tools on the market (many of which I assessed in my previous post Machine Learning, AI and Content Automation - How Deep Does the Rabbithole Go?).

AI powered chatbots are just the tip of the iceberg however and the improvements in AI powered image generation tools have been significant over the past 12 months. Why pay for stock imagery or have a designer create you appropriate creative collateral when a robot can spit out photo realistic pictures for you in moments? The likes of DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are getting better every day at understanding what we want from text prompts and returning the graphical content you've asked for. In fact these tools have become so good that they're even fooling human judges in fine art contests. Don't believe me? Take a look at this Picasso style painting of a family of colourful cats, with zero human involvement beyond the text prompt to generate it:

There are so many potential applications of AI in marketing that I can't go into them all here but naturally many people will fear for their jobs, particularly those in more junior level roles whose lack of experience could be severely tested by the robots. But this leads me nicely on to my next prediction...

Increased Pushback Against AI

For every leap forward in the advancement in AI there will be counter movements to either debunk AI generated content or to provide a human powered alternative. Whilst smart individuals and businesses are already embracing AI to simplify and speed up their everyday working practices, saving time and money, much of what is possible with AI is still merely conceptual or at least in its infancy. We're not yet at the stage where we're replacing people wholesale with software (though that day will come).

One of the big sticking points with the interactions between man and machine is in how we communicate with the robots. Input is everything to an AI and some people better understand how to generate what they want from an AI than others. These people will become the 2020s equivalent of the lab coat wearing computer input technicians of the 1960s.

Then there's the issue of being able to rely on whatever output you've received from the AI in question. If a layman asks a robot to code a React native JavaScript application how will they know the code is accurate and functional? If it doesn't do what it's supposed to, how can they correct it? There are countless examples online of ChatGPT completely failing to grasp basic concepts such as rudimentary maths, in certain situations. If the inputter can't verify the output, mistakes will become commonplace and the AI hasn't actually provided any value.

Additionally we're already seeing the birth of a new industry as tools spring up aimed at detecting AI generated content, to allow us to dismiss it in the fashion Google says it will. The likes of Originality.ai and Detect GPT exist purely as a reaction to ChatGPT and its ilk, trying to catch out the AIs, by using AI. Machine generated content isn't as big an issue in the world of marketing as it is in education, where students can bypass traditional learning and rely on content generation tools to do their assignments for them, but the churn of speedily generated content to beef up websites and produce social media posts in bulk could quickly spiral out of control.

As of yet I've not found any evidence that ChatGPT or similar tools can pass the Turing Test and convince us that they're human. What's more, having played around a fair bit with different text generation tools I can confidently say none of them have been able to replicate my own unique, erudite writing style, that splendid combination of casual, informative and witty... ;)

Natasha 1 Robots 0

Of course this isn't to say the machines won't eventually fool us. In fact Google's own equivalent to ChatGPT, the as yet unavailable to the public LaMDA, is rumoured to be three times as powerful as OpenAI's groundbreaking chatbot and has already convinced an engineer it was truly sentient. When the technology reaches this point that's when marketers will be heavily shifting focus to the human interaction element that AIs will have little chance of replicating any time soon (if ever). For all the incredible time saving functionality of AI powered tools, we still have a desire to interact with fellow humans and even if an AI is doing a lot of the dog work, clients will still likely appreciate having a real person to speak with about their marketing needs and ongoing campaigns.

TikTok isn't Going Anywhere

Moving away from AI, the youth centric short form video social media platform has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years. Its popularity was accelerated dramatically by the pandemic hit period of lockdowns to the point where the app has now become more downloaded than Facebook, Instagram and even Whatsapp. But few people think it has hit its peak yet, which means you ignore TikTok at your peril.

The rapid rise in popularity and proliferation of TikTok, particularly amongst the younger generations, with close to 50% of its userbase under 30, has been so dramatic that it has rattled internet big beast Meta (you know, the stupid rebrand Zuckerberg came up with for his empire). If you're an Instagram user you won't have failed to notice just how heavily they are pushing their "Reels" element, encouraging users to share TikTok style videos through the platform. As the old saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, rip 'em off.

Though producing video content for marketing purposes is an already mature market, we are now reaching a stage where it just won't be good enough not having video content to share, no matter the industry or target demographic. You might think video isn't appropriate for your brand. Spoiler alert: it is.

Because recording and editing even short form video is more costly and time consuming than sharing simple text and image based social posts, learning to embrace TikTok and Instagram Reels will help sort the wheat from the chaff. Given that the robots are closing in on running traditional social media for you (consider Memorable Ad Maker's ability to generate Facebook and Instagram posts from a simple text prompt) the higher barrier to entry for producing quality video content only heightens its significance as a crucial marketing channel to utilise.

SEO Will Continue to Get More Challenging

Let's be honest, search engine optimisation is hard. Long gone are the days when ignorance was rife and the smart brands could follow a few standard playbook methods to pick off the competition in search results. Nowadays everybody knows full well the value of ranking on Google's first page for relevant converting keywords. There isn't enough room on that page for everyone so competition is fierce. Add to that the fact that Google are in a constant battle with SEO specialists, tweaking how their core algorithms work in order to make successful tactics redundant as soon as they become popular, and it's easy to see why businesses spend so much on getting the pros in to try and dominate this channel.

The global SEO market is projected to be worth over $122 billion in just five years. That's more than the gross GDP of Kuwait, to put it into perspective. And the harder Google (and its copycat rivals) make this artform, the more people will be willing to spend to have someone else look after it. SEO is far from dead, it's just not getting any easier.

Consider two recent algorithm updates unleashed by the Big G. The Helpful Content Update is designed to combat sites that generate content to appeal to search engines instead of putting humans first. Why do these sites generate their content to appeal to search engines first? Because that was how they ranked in the competitive positions and therefore got all the valuable traffic. It's not purposefully trying to cheat the system, doing what's required to appear in the top spots. It's simply playing the game, which Google keeps changing the rules for, in order to survive and thrive.

The second of these two fresh updates targets backlinks and seeks to neutralise the power of link juice passed from perceived low quality sites. The issue here is what Google does and doesn't perceive to be a good quality site to be linked from. They stopped sharing how they determine a site's perceived worth many years ago (the company's famous PageRank system was restricted to in-house use only about eight years back), opening the door for a number of third party search tools to come up with their own metrics as to how sites should be graded (usually on a scale from 0-100) such as Moz's Domain Authority (DA), Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) and Majestic's Trust Flow (TF).

Because Google won't share their grading metrics, only giving vague guidance on best practices for all sites to adhere to, it's incredibly difficult to know the value of a link from one site to the next. But the sites that feel confident about their value aren't linking out for nothing, which leads to a very complicated system of under the table link brokering. Even supposedly respected high authority publications such as forbes.com are known to accept cash for links, contravening Google's rules, but are they ever penalised in search? Are they b*llocks. The site shows up in search for over 22 million traffic driving keywords, with hundreds of thousands of them in the all conquering top three positions.

If we're told on one hand that paying for links from a site is bad but on the other hand can see the value this provides (sites with links from Forbes and the like regularly outperform competing sites without such links) what does a good SEO professional do? There's sticking to all the rules (white hat SEO) or there's doing everything underhandedly trying not to get caught out (black hat SEO) but the majority of what works sits somewhere in the middle. It's a very grey area and Google wants to make it more black and white. It really should be more black and white, but they can't make it too easy or they lose the ability to best determine which sites most accurately match various search queries.

If you want to succeed with SEO in 2023 you'd better have specialists glued to the latest updates and proven successful tactics, playing by the most recent recommended guidelines, else you've got no chance.

The End of the Era of Google and Meta Dominance?

This is perhaps the most controversial or risky prediction I'm making but hear me out here. 2022 was the first year in the past decade that the search advertising giants of Google, Facebook and Instagram didn't between them account for over 50% of all online ad spend. It could be an anomaly but I'm banking on it being the start of a trend.

For too long Meta and Google have dominated digital advertising, from the well known PPC text ads in search results to display ads and programmatic retargeting that follows users around the web. Their prying eyes being so omnipotent made them the most attractive ad platforms for marketers but that phenomenal market share has been eroded. Partly due to increased competition (did I mention just how big TikTok has become?) but also in part due to the likes of Apple making it harder for these companies to track and share data.

These platforms are nothing without their deep level audience understanding allowing for uber-niche targeting. Why carpet bomb a million random people with your ad if you can pick out the top 200k who have shown a genuine intent to buy what you're selling? Increased privacy protections having stripped Google and Meta from utilising their invasive tracking on a growing number of devices has begun to render them less useful. They're not going to get those tracking options back so the key is whether they can convince enough people to switch over to their own devices and circumvent the third parties controlling their data access (primarily Apple). For Google this means increasing the userbase of its mobile OS Android whilst Meta is desperately trying to make the metaverse a thing. Zuckerberg's obsession with this concept has lead the company to lose sight of its core business model (gather and sell personal data), gambling on a still vague virtual meeting space concept that most users don't seem at all convinced by.

Google meanwhile feel threatened by the emergence of rival firms' AI capabilities. Many commentators have made predictions as to ChatGPT spelling the end for Google search as we know it (though these claims seem a little far fetched right now and have been dismissed by a lot of the tech press). But it's still fair to say we don't know how advanced AI powered chatbots will impact online behaviours, particularly in a landscape where traditional search is becoming more challenging to navigate.

In Summary

Don't fear AI, but don't become reliant upon it. Remember the value we place on human interaction and if people skills aren't your forte, perhaps now is the time to brush up on this skillset.

Diversify your marketing channels and if you've not yet embraced video, make sure 2023 is the year you rectify that. If you aren't pushing video, you will lose ground on your competitors. Don't get left behind.

Don't give up on SEO but don't half arse it either. It's tough but when it works it really delivers. If you can't give it your full attention, outsource it to true experts who can put in the graft for you. I might know an agency who can help here...