Put people back at the heart of the company’s mission, build a data infrastructure that is both robust and flexible, and design meaningful customer experiences by adopting the technologies that can best create valuable relationships. These are the three big trends that Deloitte, in its Global Marketing Trends 2023 report, called central to marketing this year.
Whether we’re talking about start-ups at the beginning of their entrepreneurial adventure or established brands with a long tradition behind them, small- and medium-sized companies that need to reinvent themselves in order to gain visibility or multinationals who want to redefine their reputation, the key aspect, in each case, is customer engagement: how to obtain it and how to make it last over time.
In this cycle of articles, of which this is the last, we have dealt with different themes: why data-driven marketing has been so successful in companies and how to do a market research in just 7 steps and how all these aspects are essential for creating effective lead generation campaigns. We close with the 2023 marketing strategies not to be ignored.
The 5 marketing strategies we will discuss in this post are born to meet the challenges of a market where the customer journey is articulated in nonlinear alternative paths: people integrate themself in digital and physical channels in a continuous flow and expect personalized offers from their target brands. If they hope to retain consumers, marketers cannot miss any opportunity to connect with possible customers.
The game is being played on several levels: to put 2023 marketing strategies in place that exploit the opportunities of a densely digitized environment, companies cannot underestimate the importance of dynamic data management. At the same time, they must respond to an ethical imperative that becomes more pressing every day: what are their values? How can they incorporate these same values into their production processes while remaining efficient and competitive?
One of the marketing strategies we’ll focus on in this post is personalization. Personalization stands out from the other strategies both because it is a necessary premise and because it pervades all of these strategies.
Finally, we will see how Doxee’s digital tools, which enable advanced content personalization, can contribute decisively to the success of the most innovative 2022 marketing strategies.
1. Invest in your own value system
According to Ipsos’ 2023 Global Trends, in the 25 countries surveyed–which include both developed economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy as well as the emerging markets of Asia and Africa – it’s imperative that any 2022 marketing strategy initiative must take the goal, intention, or purpose that is clearly aligned with that of its audience as its starting point. In our current world, this means being able to convey an authentic message that is able to connect the company’s value system with the beliefs of its audience.
The Ipsos report records a number of supporting points, testifying, among other things, to the complexity of the historical period we are living through:
- The link between consumer values and brand purpose has grown tremendously over the past 8 years;
- Concern for the environment and advocacy for social rights (e.g., on gender issues) are two of the topics where consumers expect brands to take a stand;
- Consumers in emerging economies are among the most demanding when it comes to social responsibility.
Consumers are looking for brands that truly reflect their ideals and are not limited to cosmetic actions that serve only to make themselves look respectable but do not make the slightest dent in corporate culture. In a climate characterized by widespread misinformation (or at least this seems to be the general perception) consumers, especially younger ones, are increasingly demanding consistency, concreteness, and “truth“ from companies. In fact, one of the most problematic aspects of this 2022 marketing strategy concerns the growing difficulty for brands to keep their reputation intact, to present themselves as reliable, to be considered intermediaries worthy of being believed. It then becomes essential, as well as ethically desirable, for marketers to make a greater effort to produce content that is correct, transparent, and verifiable.
2. Create virtual experiences
The construction of parallel worlds in which virtual shopping overlaps and coincides with physical shopping is a recurring theme. The AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) technologies currently available seem to have finally succeeded in empowering brands to independently create immersive places from scratch. It is a 2023 marketing strategy that has not yet unfolded its full potential but promises to take a giant leap forward in 2023.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, a technology that, from NFTs to cryptocurrencies, could produce a profound impact on the way marketers communicate with their audiences, deserves a separate discussion. A big-name brand such as Gucci, for example, has built a multimedia space, enabled by the online gaming platform Roblox, where some of its iconic garments, such as sneakers, exist exclusively in digital and therefore must be “worn” in augmented reality to be experienced.
In the metaverse, it will not only be possible to add a mode of contact with the public that could have disruptive communicative effects, but real conversation spaces will open up where companies can interact with consumers on a deeper level. Users will be invited to actively participate with their content in the fabrication of a collective imagination.
The advantages that this “metaverse marketing” strategy seems to offer – net of the still small number of successful cases – are numerous:
- increased brand visibility: “analog” visitors are joined by a potentially unlimited number of participants;
- possibility of conveying the company’s values, involving consumers in telling the brand story;
- new resources to strengthen brand identity, enhancing emotional and experiential elements;
- increased customer loyalty, who develop a more intense sense of belonging to the brand community by sharing events in the metaverse.
3. Rethinking events
Closely related to the creation of purchasing paths that are increasingly littered with online and offline touchpoints, we find another distinctly promising 2022 marketing strategy: one that focuses on designing sensory experiences. This is the events industry, which, after succeeding in moving into the virtual dimension with video conferences and webinars, is gradually returning to in-person meetings.
Today, however, the “new normal” can no longer disregard the possibilities of connection offered by new technologies and, which in the two years of the pandemic emergency allowed for continuity of production. Again, hybrid events will be the new standard. In this respect, technology will play a huge role: event organizers are prioritizing features that enable one-to-one networking, chats, and interactive surveys to integrate the human elements that are typical of off-line or face-to-face interactions into digital.
4. Focus on content marketing
Content marketing has a quality that makes it an indispensable element in companies’ communication plans: it can change rapidly to better adapt to the evolution of society and the market.
In the past two years, content marketing strategies have had to keep pace with digital transformation, which due to exceptional circumstances has accelerated dramatically in a very short time. The creative solutions that were developed at these dramatic junctures proved to be so flexible and powerful that they continue to be implemented today.
A content marketing strategy obviously depends on a variety of different factors: the industry, the business objectives, the product or service. Today it must also rest on a solid foundation, one that is provided by data collection, management, and interpretation technologies.
This is where content marketing intersects with data-driven marketing, which we discussed in a recent post. Here, it provides concrete support for process automation and helps generate new opportunities for improving the customer experience. With sophisticated data analytics, marketers can use more nuanced consumer profiles to personalize customer experiences and create and strengthen a bond of trust between company and consumer.
Among this year’s innovations that companies will need to carefully evaluate for their content marketing programs, a dedicated place certainly belongs to Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM), a search technology that is designed to reduce the number of queries needed to find the answer to a certain question. Although we are still far from its full application, it’s good to prepare and refine some SEO techniques that will be useful to get all the possible benefits from MUM in terms of ranking. We are actually talking about SEO techniques that have been referred to as best practices for years. Here they are:
- Create content. Make sure your content contains long-tail query keywords.
- Organize your content. Backlinko’s 2022 SEO Guide confirms what SEO specialists have been recommending for years: use H2s and H3s to organize the post into immediately understandable modules. Put another way: each of the H2s should cover a specific subtopic.
- Diversify content. Text, images, video: involve different channels to distribute different types of content that is consistent with your communication goals and editorial line.
- Use structured data. Schema markup helps Google clearly understand the type of information you are providing.
5. Personalize
Many factors influence the effectiveness of digital communications. But personalization succeeds in engaging and appealing like no other strategy. Indeed, dynamic and personalized communication raises productivity and drives the organization to standardize internal processes and digitize them.
To implement personalized strategies, brands must learn to extract value from the information assets they have access to. Beginning with the results made available by market research, which make it possible to harness a type of in-depth and articulate knowledge, especially operational knowledge, this is indispensable for creating rational expectations and for organizing business activities.
In the huge amount of data flowing into companies, the real treasure trove today is proprietary data: incoming customer data from primary sources, such as from CRMs, related to completed purchases, survey results, and customer feedback.
Proprietary data can be used to formulate more accurate insights about customers, tailor content to their preferences, and predict their behavior. In addition, using first-party data addresses the limitations that are slowing the collection of third-party data, limitations due to increased concern about consumer privacy.
Turning data into personalized experiences requires dedicated multichannel digital communication tools that are able to combine information, content and storytelling, and high-performance and easy-to-use tools such as those developed by Doxee.
Doxee: the technology that enhances data and personalizes communication
Through its interactive experience (ix) line, Doxee provides all the fundamental tools for corporate communication with which to create and manage personalizable, interactive content aimed at customers and employees. The product or service itself matters if its narrative is truly engaging for the user.
Doxee technologies transform data into personalized conversations, improving customer perceptions and increasing customer loyalty. This new way of communicating–personalized and interactive–is within the reach of any organization, applicable in countless contexts, and makes it possible to synthesize content, standardize information, and simplify messages by reaching the user in the format of videos and micro websites.
Video is the technology that best ensures a high degree of engagement: it attracts, engages, and excites regardless of the specific moment in the user’s journey. Each Doxee Pvideo® creates a unique narrative for each customer, anticipates their needs by proposing the products they want, and focuses on the most relevant information. With its Dynamic Storyboard feature, Doxee Pvideo® adapts the storytelling by images to the characteristics of the individual user, thus allowing the manipulation of sequences according to each recipient’s data (e.g., demographics, transactions, purchase history, geographic data, etc.).
Doxee Pvideo® and Doxee Pweb® can be distributed in multichannel mode via a personalized URL and become an essential element within any marketing strategy.
Communicating with empathy and immediacy using data enables moments when customer engagement is higher because the content offered is perceived as valuable. The commercial benefit is immediate: investments of business initiatives are rewarded.
