Stay Ahead of These Five Emerging Marketing Trends Throughout 2023

March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 / marissapick / Leave a comment

In the exciting and fast-paced world of marketing, change is constant. Marketing trends are constantly evolving, and it’s up to brand leaders to stay up to date on the latest developments and adapt their marketing strategies to stand out from the competition. Keeping up with these changes isn’t always easy, but it’s essential in order to remain relevant with your audience and build enduring customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Trends happen for a reason. In many instances, they provide valuable insight into how your brand can best reach and connect with your target audiences. Staying on top and ahead of the trends is the first step. Determining how to best utilize the trends to your benefit can be an important differentiator.

As the second quarter of 2023 begins, these are the five biggest trends you should be tracking and maximizing:

1. Personalization: Customers are increasingly expecting personalized experiences from brands, and this trend is likely to continue throughout 2023. Customer expectations around personalization are also on the rise with 73% of shoppers expecting brands to understand their unique needs and expectations. (Source: Insider Intelligence). While personalization was once a nice-to-have bonus, it is now essential for standing out within an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

To meet customers’ needs and preferences, brands will need to use data and technology to better understand their customers and tailor their marketing messages and offers accordingly. If you’re able to get this right, you can win a loyal customer who feels deeply connected to your brand.

2. Video marketing: If video marketing is the future, the future is here! It’s not a major surprise that video is becoming an increasingly popular form of content, and this trend and demand is expected to continue for the remainder of 2023. A recent study shows that as many as 91% of consumers want to see more online video content from brands (Source: Wyzowl). And since 2017, the amount of online video consumed monthly has more than quadrupled.

Brands will need to create high-quality video content that engages their target audience across a range of platforms, including social media, websites, and more. In my opinion, short and sweet is the way to “win” with video content. In fact, according to Sprout Social’s recent survey, short-form videos are found to be the most engaging. As many as two-thirds of consumers (66%) say they pay the most attention to short-form videos—2.5 times more than long-form videos. This is in line with the increasing number of videos on channels such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram and video becoming an expected part of the online and social media experience.

3. Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing has become a popular way for brands to reach new audiences and build brand awareness. Throughout the rest of 2023, I expect to see more brands partnering with influencers to promote their products and services, particularly on social media platforms including shorter form video platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Creator marketing can help drive brand growth and overall visibility across the entire purchasing funnel and many companies have begun to leverage online as well as offline influencer strategies over the past few years.

I believe the rise of micro-influencers will be where brands can stand out and successful leverage influencers as well as social media overall. As consumers are looking for more relevant and relatable content, marketers are turning to nano- or micro-influencer collaborations. These often-unpaid content creators with 1,000 to 100,000 followers have very active and engaged audiences. The benefit in my mind of these “smaller influencers” is that they often have a greater ability to truly connect with their community, which can give them significant influencing power. Consumers in general are likely to trust them for their expertise, product reviews and service recommendations. When brands activate them at scale, nano- and micro-influencers can be a great way to target niche audiences, drive awareness and boost sales.

4. Sustainability: Customers are increasingly concerned about environmental and social issues, and they expect brands to act on these issues. Sustainable marketing is the promotion of environmentally and socially responsible products, practices, and brand values. If you’ve ever spent a little bit more on something because you knew it was locally sourced or 100% recyclable, you’ve taken part in supporting sustainable marketing.

Within 2023, we can expect to see more brands promoting their sustainability efforts and highlighting their commitment to social responsibility. There are several ways brands can begin to approach becoming more sustainable including donating profits to sustainable causes, sourcing sustainably materials or packaging, and creating products that aides in sustainable living or more. One of my favorite brands and category sustainable commerce leaders, Patagonia, pledged 15% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment since 1985. In 2022, that amounted to a total of over $140 million. They have also set a target to become completely carbon neutral by 2025.

The big picture of embracing sustainable marketing is that you’re able to position your brand as an active figure in an environmental or societal issue. It can humanize your brand messages and create another reason why customers should choose you over your competition.

5. Voice search optimization: Consumers are beginning to search for more things using their voices. In fact, the number of voice assistants is expected to reach 8 billion units in 2023, up from 3.25 billion in 2019. (Source: Statista)

I maintain that 2023 is the year of voice search optimization. As more people use voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, brands will need to optimize their content for voice search. This means creating content that is easily discoverable and readable by voice assistants and making sure that the brand website is optimized for voice search. Voice search is not just a component of today’s digital marketing landscape, it’s the future. Search engines are becoming more advanced and voice assistants are getting better at understanding the incoming questions and will provide more accurate results. In turn, that accuracy can encourage more people to take advantage of voice search instead of the more traditional time-consuming search process.

By focusing on personalization, video marketing, influencer marketing, sustainability, and voice search optimization, brands can stay ahead of the curve in 2023. What else are you working on this year? Leave a comment below.

The Future of The Micro vs. Mega Influencer – Why User Generated Content is Poised to Win for Businesses

July 9, 2019 / marissapick / 1 Comment

Guest Post from Matt Gibbs, Co-founder and CMO of UPshow

Millennials and GenZ might be the curated selfie generation, but a shift is happening, and businesses are taking notice. The cultural pendulum is swaying away from brand-sponsored mega-influencer-celebrity-endorsed posts to organic content that’s generated by people you know, or even those you feel like you know. Capturing more natural moments and promoting them within a more intimate circle of followers versus big ‘on the main stage’ posts is what’s now in-vogue. An industry 2018 Trust Barometer Report revealed that 60 percent of people no longer trusted social media and reported that immediate friends and family are better for recommendations than influencers.

That said, Kylie Jenner-esque paid posts aren’t going away, but they have become tarnished, and millennials and their younger counterparts are gravitating towards more natural interactions from those within their inner circle or for relatable micro-influencers. As a result, more brands are gravitating toward user-generated content to increase engagement and build trust and community.

According to a study, 56 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product that they’ve seen in real-life images posted by another consumer – a shift away from the rainbow-colored preplanned photos that dominated platforms like Instagram in late 2017.

UPshow, the company I co-founded, is a social TV platform that companies such as Crunch Fitness, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen and ATI Physical Therapy are using to transform their customers into immediate influencers. The platform entices customers to post on social media by projecting them on big screens in-venue. As a result, friends and family, also see and are often influenced by the posts. The content and choice to participate is totally in the hands of the consumer.

Other companies also provide services that cater to this trend, such as Guest Crew and Woobox. Their platforms harness user-generated content and boost it organically. Guest Crew leverages a community of organically generated influencers and Woobox turns user-generated content into contests. Filtergrade uses professional photo grade filters (such as Adobe Lightroom presets) to help brands generate more professional quality shareable images that are unique and micro-influencers can use them too to make their posts mimic celebrity influencer quality.

It’s a new era for user-generated content and if brands want to appeal to younger audiences, such as millennials and GenZ, they need to embrace the social media trends that will improve their engagement rates by putting the power in the hands of the consumer in a genuine way.

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Matt Gibbs is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of UPshow, a consumer engagement platform that transforms a business’s existing TVs into its top marketing assets. Gibbs is responsible for branding, lead generation and advertising for the

company. Gibbs is a genuine entrepreneur and trailblazer in digital media with deep roots in the Chicago start-up community. Along with college friend and UPshow CEOAdam Hirsen, Gibbs co-founded SparkReel in 2011. SparkReel created a more efficient way for friends and family to share mobile videos online and evolved into a social media agency that created user-generated content campaigns for Verizon, Oreo, Condé Nast, Apartments.com, among others. UPshow was born out of SparkReel when customers wanted social media engagement screens at events. Gibbs graduated from Miami University of Ohio and resides in Chicago, IL with his wife, two children and corgi.

Authority, Impact, and the Future of Influence Marketing

April 14, 2015April 14, 2015 / marissapick / 1 Comment

Influencer marketing is the most powerful tool in getting a brand’s message to an interested audience in a relevant and authentic way. Whether launching a new product or just trying to raise brand awareness, it’s effective in driving engagement, visibility,quality traffic, and more. Last week I spoke at ClickZ Live New York on Authority, Impact, and the Future of Influence Marketing.

The future of influence marketing is up and coming as marketers are trying to hone in on how to develop relationships with key influencers with hopes to lift awareness of their brands. It’s not enough to market through influencers, now it’s crucial to find a way to collaborate in partnerships with influencers.

Within my speech I discussed the four rules of influencer marketing:

1) Popularity Does NOT Equal influence.

2) To be influential, a person has to be actively writing on topics which matter to your audience.

3) To be influential, a person has to have authority.

4) Influencer’s drive action.

Platforms like Instagram and YouTube have led to the rise of a new generation of influencers that have amassed huge followings on niche subject matters. A research study by Nielsen showed that buyers trust experts and influencers over branded content. It’s important start a campaign with a precise set of goals, and understand the purpose of your influencer outreach plan. Whether its to get them to be a brand advice, guest blog, or vouch for your brand you must begin by defining concise targets and have various KPI’s for various social media networks.

So how can you find Influencers? Great Question, here are some of my favorite (and free!) tools:

1) Follower Wonk Enables you to find, analyze, and optimize for social growth, and search bios of those influencers you’re after (especially very niche topics!).

2) Twitter provides free analytics which outlines top followers, influencers, and also gives a nice overview of your impressions, mentions, and more. I also find using twitter lists to be an excellent way to tap into and influencer and “digest” twitter in a more streamlined manner.

3) BuzzSumo allows you to find the most shared content and see what content performs best, as well as discover key influencers.

4) Topsy is one of my favorite tools to search all tweets and measure social trends, but they’ve also got an influencer option which has proven quite helpful.

5) Klout is the original tool to rank influencers based upon social networks and reach, they’ve started a content first approach, but hey, I still get free perks, and i’m still a fan!

Once you’ve found your influencers it’s important to get closer and engage with them using social media. Being socially active you’ll be one step closer to your influential audience. When reaching out to an influencer you’ve got to recruit, initialize and grow your relationship, and then nurture. Make sure your outreach is relevant. Taking time to research your target influencers interests, and understand who they are and what they like is crucial. Engage on social media by sharing an article, providing an opinion, and engaging when them in conversation without an ask. Once you’ve built your initial conversation pitch free it’s important to reach out offline to discuss next steps, and if possible remind them of your discussion and engagement to spark the conversation.

My slideshare from ClickZ Live is below, and remember Jay Baer’s quote, “Content is fire. Social Media is Gasoline.” When done right tapping into this new generation of influencers can put your brand on the map, increase traffic, engagement, and so much more.

What do you think of the presentation, send me a tweet @MarissaPick, or leave a comment below.