Trends in Performance Marketing for 2023

2023 is here and we are all wondering what it has in store for us. If there’s one thing we’re sure about in Digital Marketing, it’s that it will never stop evolving. So let’s discover together which are the most important trends that will dominate the digital landscape this year and how you can effectively use them to your advantage.

Which digital marketing strategies will get us results in 2023? What are the updates that we will find in Google or Meta Ad Manager accounts? What is the recommended type of content for Social Media platforms? Does YouTube remain a must-have in 2023?

You will find answers to all these questions and others in the lines below.

2023 Market Trends in Online Marketing

As Online Marketing continues to evolve, we see that automation is increasingly in the spotlight and we believe that in 2023 it will become even more important. You will discover this in the sections below.

Another important trend for 2023 is omnichannel shopping. Users, more than ever, want an omnichannel experience, they document online, but they can buy offline; they can check the stocks of the products they want online before going to physical stores.

So the customer journey is omnichannel, not just online or just offline. Therefore, integrating offline elements into the online strategy is something to consider for 2023.

In 2023, diversification of advertising efforts and resources will be crucial to reach new audiences through diverse media and platforms, especially when there are more and more platforms that users are constantly using.

This is not a new concept, but in the current context, it has become essential, especially when the costs for the classic platforms (Google and Facebook) are constantly increasing due to high competition. Some examples of platforms you could try in 2023 are TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Bing, Huawei, Spotify or Yahoo. Find out where your audience spends their time, then test the platforms to see if they’ll work for your brand.

Digital Marketing Trends: Google Ads

• Automatically created assets

One of the most important updates for Google Search campaigns in 2023 is the Automatically Generated Assets – this is a campaign-level setting that generates custom headlines and descriptions in addition to those entered by you.

To create them, Google will use the relevant content from the landing page or site, existing ads and Ad Group keywords. Newly created assets will be combined with existing ones so that Responsive Search Ads generate the best-performing combinations for each user. This update is still in the beta stage, but, most likely, it will be released by Google by the end of the year.

• New customer acquisition goal in Search campaigns

In 2023, the New Customer Acquisition Goal option will be available not only in Performance Max campaigns, but also in Search campaigns. We already see the option available in some client accounts.

This option allows you to optimize campaigns for generating new customers, either by assigning a higher value to them or by exclusively targeting new customers, excluding those who have previously converted.

• Voice search integration in PPC campaigns

In 2023, as people increasingly use smartphones and personal digital assistants (Cortana, Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant), voice searches will increase. According to Think with Google 27% of the global online population use voice searches on mobile devices.

Therefore, integrating Voice Search into PPC campaigns and targeting voice searches with custom ads is an opportunity worth considering.

• Searches are becoming increasingly complex

Over the years, searches have become increasingly complex and nuanced as users use more specific language to navigate the vast amount of digital information available online. Therefore, the potential for the keywords used to not cover relevant searches increases significantly.

The solution is to use Broad Match keywords along with Smart Bidding to cover all searches that have the potential to result in a purchase or use Dynamic Search campaigns.

• YouTube Ads & Video

YouTube, the second-largest search engine, remains a must-have in 2023. Brand Awareness & Reach, Consideration or even Conversions, video ads help us to successfully achieve all our goals.

Video-for-action campaigns with integrated product feeds should not be missing from your strategy in 2023. Even though we think of video ads as brand awareness & reach, this new type of campaign offers great opportunities to increase conversion generation.

• YouTube Ads: Masthead

YouTube Masthead ist die ideale Lösung für Reichweite und Markenbekanntheit. 2023 ist das Jahr, um diese Strategie zu testen. Sie funktioniert auf Buchungsbasis und bietet Zugang zu Premium-Placements, die eine enorme Reichweite garantieren. Sei das Erste, was dein Publikum auf der YouTube Homepage sieht!

BONUS: Bumper-Anzeigen werden erfolgreich als Erinnerung eingesetzt, aber hast du schon einmal versucht, die Nutzer mit einer solchen Anzeige neugierig zu machen und sie dann mit einer langen Anzeige erneut anzusprechen? Wir haben diese Kombination bereits getestet und die Ergebnisse waren hervorragend.

• Google Display + Google Discovery Ads

If you haven’t integrated Display campaigns into your Digital Marketing strategy, now is the time to do it.

With Display Campaigns you can reach users interested in the products or services you sell through well-thought-out audiences.

A good strategy stands out when it reaches each stage of the marketing funnel, so Display campaigns help you create awareness and make yourself known among the audience who still doesn`t have many details about what you do.

Do you want to generate traffic? Nothing simpler: use Display campaigns with traffic objective. Like this, you focus on audiences that bring you new traffic, but for a complete strategy, you must not forget about remarketing audiences. With their help, you make sure that you maintain a close relationship with your target audience.

Choose to use Discovery campaigns to reach users interested in the products and services you sell, through Google feeds. Most users are present on mobile devices, so Discovery campaigns are tailored to capture the audience’s attention through visuals.

Discovery ads are meant to drive users towards the purchase process, so it’s important to use it in lower stages of the marketing funnel., targeting audiences with a higher purchase intent.

Similarly to previous years, 2023 will come with significant changes in the targeting options. Starting from May 1, 2023, Similar audiences will no longer be available in Google Ads accounts.

• Performance Max

Performance Max campaigns are the newest type of machine learning based campaigns that maximize ads, keywords and landing pages with minimal effort. They are the best option for those who want immediate results through online advertising.

Performance Max campaigns are definitely a must-have of strategies for 2023! Work smarter, not harder!

Digital Marketing Trends: Smart Bidding

It is no longer news that Smart Bidding is becoming more and more essential for the performance of any business.

By using Machine Learning to optimize in real-time each individual auction, Smart Bidding delivers much better results compared to manual or API bidding methods that cannot keep up with the increasingly dynamic behavior of users. So, the more data we get, the better our campaigns will perform.

It is good to remember that these bidding methods put at our disposal all the ways that facilitate the achievement of the promotion objectives. During 2022, Google simplified the bidding methods by combining 4 of them into 2 options. Thus, Target CPA and Target ROAS disappeared as stand-alone methods, becoming an option within the Maximize Conversion and Maximize Conversion Value bidding methods.

Do you want to evaluate if your Google Ads Account is leveraging all the Smart Bidding possibilities? Or maybe you need help in aligning your account to the Modern Search approach? Leave us a line here and take advantage from a free, non-binding call where we give you custom feedback regarding your campaigns.

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What can we expect in 2023?

Since 2022 Google tried to promote the new Modern Search structure, with focus on Smart bidding and broad match as the successful recipe for targeting searches with the highest possible performance. Although their efforts were extensive, there are still a lot of proffessionals that use the “old” approach.

We expect the “push” of the modern search approach to continue throughout 2023 and in time to remain the only option available, becoming the standard.
For Meta Ads, the new Advantage+ Cmpaigns are the signal that Meta is following the same path of increasing the reliance on AI and automated campaigns.

Also, we expect that artificial intelligence and Machine Learning will continue to evolve making it easier to delegate tasks that are repetitive or that a person cannot do efficiently.

Last but not least, while AI and Machine Learning becomes more important the product feed management and complex tracking that “feeds” the right signals to the advertising pixels will become increasingly important. An AI can only perform as good as the signals it receives from the website that is advertised.

Digital Marketing Trends: Facebook & Instagram Ads:

When we think of Social Media, the first platforms that come to mind are definitely Facebook or Instagram. Even though, as the years go by, new platforms appear that seem to steal all the attention, they still remain at the top of the most used social networks, which is why we must definitely include them in our 2023 strategy.

• Short videos

Given the success of TikTok and Instagram’s Reels, short-form videos are clearly a must in the coming year. Users continue to be more attracted to video formats compared to static ones and tend to spend more time watching them. Thus, any brand needs to adopt this type of content, whether we are talking about the organic or paid area.

P.S. Don’t forget to use attractive content and introduce the brand from the first seconds.

• Creative copy

Each user is bombarded by dozens of advertisements every day when browsing social networks. To capture their attention, we need to differentiate ourselves from our competition, and the first step is to create creative, short and impactful ads. We believe that 2023 will be the year when success will be achieved by thinking “outside the box”.

• Advantage+ Campaigns

Last, but not least, next year promises to be a year full of experiments and automation. Facebook recently launched Advantage+ ads, which allow brands to test creative and drive conversions through fully automated campaigns. These have brought good results for many of our clients, being a real help for catalog ads and app installs.

Digital Marketing Trends: Animation & Video Production

Everything changes with technological progress. From the era of black-and-white ads to 360-degree Ads, brands have updated their marketing strategies. Competition has increased, consumer preferences have changed, and standard marketing practices have evolved and will continue to evolve.

Video content is and will be for a longer period the best marketing strategy. However, if you want to be one step ahead of the competition, you need to follow the latest trends for video content in 2023.

If you want to have an edge over the competition in 2023, start your video marketing strategy by preparing short videos. Introduce your products and services in short clips with dynamic elements so as not to bore the audience. Also, make sure to keep your videos concise and optimized for the platform you plan to upload them to.

Video consumption changed over time and there is a significant increase among the users that are watching the videos without sound. Take this in consideration when you create the video concept and even if most of the platforms add automated subtitles, we advise you to create and add your own. You can do this by using voice to speech softwares.

Advances in technology now allow us to capture 360-degree videos, also known as immersive videos. Where any angle of a place or product can be easily captured. As a result, the audience can see what the product looks like from different angles.

One area where immersive video is already being used is real estate, where properties are presented to users who cannot physically reach the desired location, thus increasing the chance of buying or renting the location.

If you are interested in increasing your conversion rate, take advantage of this latest marketing trend and enjoy an increase in sales by using 360-degree videos.

These days, AI technology can help you create engaging videos, find the right moment to post on social media, and provide detailed reports on how users are responding to content on your brand’s communication channels.

After we finished 2022 with ChatGPT on everyone`s lips, we expect that AI technology will keep momentum and until the end of the year 2023 AI automation will be increasingly present in most marketing activities. We are already able to generate videos based on a text description; We expect that the ad networks will offer the possibility to create video assets directly in the ad managers, based on a small descriptio or, why not, target group preferences that are identified from campaign signals.

Marketing is becoming more data-driven and personalized than ever before. The new era relies on fast-paced information and content to engage with the ever-changing customer base. Thus, brands that will integrate AI technology into their marketing strategies will react faster and can become more personal to their target audience.

Digital Marketing Trends: Pinterest Ads

With an increasingly complex user journey, we expect Pinterest to be one of the main channels that Brands will you can turn towards in 2023

Although Austria has only ca. 800.000 users, Germany is the 4th country in the world after the number of Pinterest users (more than 15. mil)

Is Pinterest still the right channel for you? Let’s find out.

From a demographic point of view, over 60% of users are female, and the predominant age segment is 25-34 years old.

In the top of the most searched topics on Pinterest we find the following categories: animals, architecture, art, beauty & fashion, design, DIY, education, technology and finance.

Pinterest is a visually-dominated platform with many possibilities for targeting users and has all the necessary tools that even the biggest platforms have. If your target audience is not found exactly in the ones mentioned above, the targeting methods ensure that you can reach any type of people.

Also, Pinterest has some advantages that we cannot ignore:

• In many situations you will experience lower costs of promotion than on the other big platforms like Google and Facebook
• It is a perfect source from which you can attract relevant traffic to the site.
• 85% of users say they go to Pinterest when they start a new project. And we know that for every new project started we need resources
• 80% of users who log into Pinterest weekly have discovered a new brand or product on the platform. This means that they trust the brands promoted on Pinterest.

Let’s not forget that users use social media predominantly on mobile. This happens on Pinterest, where 82% of users enter from mobile, so the winning strategy is a strong, mobile-friendly visual.

In 2023, add Pinterest Ads to your media planning and take advantage of all the opportunities it offers you.

Digital Marketing Trends: TikTok Ads

In the last 2 years, TikTok has triggered many changes among entertainment platforms, but also on the consumption of interactive content in general. That’s why we expected that in 2023 it will set the tone “in the market”.

As the platform generated a lot of controversy through their “track all” policy and recentkly through their fail to protect privacy for kids under 13, we are always advising our clients to be weary about all these issues when they decide to advertise on the platform.

TikTok recently released a report with predictions for the coming year so we made below a brief summary of them.

The marketing trend predictions are divided into three categories:

Actionable Entertainment – refers to how brands communicate promotions – which on TikTok should be done in a more fun, native and organic way;

Making Space for Joy – refers to how TikTok users seek to “celebrate life” on the app, which brands should follow;

Community-Built Ideals – emphasizes the importance of building community within the platform to maximize message resonance.

Broadly, the direction for the strategy in 2023 is the same: keep your messaging in line with how people use the app. The more you can align with usage behaviors, the better placed you will be to connect with TikTok’s audience.

You can access the full report, in english, here.

Digitale Marketing Trends: Social Media

Social Media has become an integral part of people’s lives and daily routine.

A first trend of 2023 tells us that users demand authenticity from brands, with 86% of consumers saying that transparency is now more important than ever.

Video content remains one of the Social Media trends in 2023. If at the beginning on Social Media platforms the focus was on static and text content, now content creators, brands and users are competing with each other to create videos as more creative. Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Facebook provide us with a lot of internal tools that we can use to break out of patterns.

In 2022 the Silicon Vaey investors pumped at least 1,37 billion into Generative AI companies, almost as much as they invested in the previous 5 years, combined. We are witnessing now a similar feeling with the beginning of the internet or the launch of the first iPhone.

We believe 2023 will bring an exponential growth in this area and we expect a high impact of the Generative AI on the Social Media Content and content consumption.

We can already see an explosion of AI generated content in our feeds and Meta already introduced AI recommended content for increasing the engagement in the platforms.

To succeed in 2023, marketers and brands will need to adapt to social media trends rather than fight against them. Authenticity will govern all aspects of marketing and serve as the main ingredient that makes a good ad campaign great.

Digital Marketing Trends: Data Analytics

For several years, the digital landscape of marketing has been in constant change, but in 2023, more than ever, we see the need for a mass migration to data-driven strategies, which plan and act based on concrete, tangible data, not on intuition. So, below we have extracted some trends from Digital Analytics, for the coming year.

• Google Analytics 4

To begin with, we must recall the importance of Google Analytics 4. The closer we get to July 1, 2023, the more crucial it is to make the transition to the new version of Analytics, in favor of the classic Universal Analytics.

Although Google has confirmed that the latter data will not be deleted, Universal Analytics ownership will go into “read-only” mode, which means that beyond viewing historical data, its usefulness will be limited and it will not be able to be used in efforts marketing news.

• Data regulation

Because we can’t discuss data analytics tools without also talking about existing regulations, we expect to see a gradually greater focus from governments on all things online data regulation over the next year.

In an article posted on their blog, Gartner analysts claim that in 2023, 65% of our personal data will be protected by regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). We take advantage of their conclusion to remind you that it is vital to have the cookie policies on the website in place.

For the marketing environment, this means that businesses will need to document their processes for collecting, storing and managing user data, as well as using new tools that focus on their privacy.

Both in the Analytics platform and in the Ads platform, Google already provides us with some tools to help us in this regard, such as Privacy Controls, Consent Mode and Enhanced Conversions.

As expectations for 2023, we expect a significant increase in the usage of third party attribution softwares like trueroas.io and tracify.ai which will help businesses and agencies to get clear insights regarding the attribution across all used media channels.

2023 Trends for Digital Marketing Strategy

Based on the learning of 2 years of Covid pandemic, companies know they can’t hit the pause button if they want to continue growing or even surviving ion some cases. So what should the business leaders choose as digital marketing strategies for 2023?

Here few of our recommendations:

• More inclusive media planning:

Track your audience and try to incorporate elements of the content your audience consumes into your communications and campaigns.

Trends show that it is no longer about providing users with the fastest and easiest e-commerce experience – this now comes naturally. It’s about creating a rich and detailed environment that your users can happily get lost in.

• Advertising with a purpose:

People prioritize quality and connection with the external goals of brands, so brands are expected to impact society more than ever and align promises with actions.

The recommendation is to avoid simulating purpose, because a commitment to causes must be genuine, long-term and supported by actions.

• Privacy

Retailers need to differentiate themselves in 2023 as they compete in an uncertain market. They will need to demonstrate their values to retain and win customers, and with people managing more of their daily lives digitally, online privacy has never been more important.

We recommend updating and checking your privacy settings and at the same time implementing services that help you get as much information as possible, while keeping the users’ privacy limit.

• Meet your customer`s needs

A complete analysis of the sales & marketing will bring to the surface the interests of the users and the way they perceive certain key aspects of the brand. We recommend that brands interact with users and learn their needs so that they know where and when to meet them.

• Adapt to the audience

If your audience is Gen-Z, consider that they are the first generation to fully grow up with the Internet, and the way they navigate and interact online continues to evolve. The most relevant platforms for this generation are those that are dynamic and highly visual, and they respond to the user ever-changing needs in new and innovative ways.

In 2023 don’t try to bring Gen Z audiences into your world, meet them in theirs. Understand their unmet needs, prioritize relevance and authenticity over homogenous singularity, and embrace the diverse visual worlds they inhabit.