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The year 2023 is just around the corner, and eCommerce marketers need to start planning for it. The new year is bringing a great deal of uncertainty caused by many challenges, such as geopolitical conflicts, economic instability, and pandemic-related issues. However, there is a way that eCommerce can try to shield itself from these threats, and that is by regularly embarking on the latest marketing trends.
Today, digital marketing is on the rise, and it can be of great help to your eCommerce business in increasing revenue and maximizing sales. Digital marketing is constantly developing, evolving, and changing in different ways. In other words, almost every day, digital marketing introduces us to a new trend. Therefore, it is expected from eCommerce marketers to take into consideration the most recent digital marketing trends while planning for 2023.
In this article, we are going to present you with the top 2023 digital marketing trends for eCommerce. If you don’t want to miss the opportunity to grow your eCommerce business using the latest digital marketing trends, keep reading this article.
Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends for eCommerce for 2023
- Influencer Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Short-Form Videos
- Artificial Intelligence
- Metaverse
- No-Third Party Cookies
- Personalization
- Social Responsibility
- Omnichannel Marketing
- Marketing Automation
Staying up-to-date with the new digital marketing trends is no easy task. However, it is extremely crucial for the growth and success of your eCommerce business. The following points will open your mind and pave the way for you to develop a great eCommerce digital marketing plan for 2023.
1- Influencer Marketing
Did you know that, in 2022, the global influencer marketing size reached 16.4 billion dollars? (Brandwatch, 2022).
Influencer marketing has been growing throughout the past few years, going hand in hand with FOMO marketing, and succeeding at increasing eCommerce sales, which is something that cannot be ignored. E-commerce marketers need to prioritize influencer marketing because it is not something any eCommerce business wants to enter 2023 without.
However, influencer marketing trends in 2023 are expected to have some changes.
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The terms “Influencer” and “Content Creator” will no longer be used interchangeably.
The term “Influence” now refers specifically to people who have lots of followers, a well-established popular platform, and who are expensive to work with.
As for the term “Content Creator”, it is now used to describe individuals who have fewer followers than influencers, work on a smaller scale, do not ask you for large fees, and produce high-quality relatable content.
It is important to understand the difference because, in 2023, digital marketing is expected to shift from expensive celebrity endorsements to micro-influencers on social media platforms, such as TikTok.
E-Commerce marketers now realize that we don’t have to pay huge amounts of money or try to reach the influencers with the biggest number of followers to benefit from influencer marketing. Today, even influencers with a small followers list can boost eCommerce sales.
In other words, instead of targeting quantity, you can start targeting quality. You can target less-costly influencers with fewer followers but who have a reputation for credibility, honesty, and transparency. If there is an established trust relationship between the influencer you are working with and their followers, it doesn’t matter how many those followers are.
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Virtual influencers are expected to rise.
Virtual influencers, also called virtual personas or virtual models, are starting to appeal to eCommerce customers. These are characters who are fictional, computer-generated, and used for marketing purposes, especially social media marketing.
You should know that the market size of virtual influencers is now at 4.6 billion dollars and that it is expected to grow by 26% by the year 2025 (Candid, 2022). That is why perhaps you should start using virtual influencers in 2023.
2- Content Marketing
Content marketing is also not something new. It has been a great strategy to increase eCommerce return on investment (ROI) for the past few years. However, it is expected to be leveraged in different and more optimized ways in 2023.
Here are some of the Content marketing trends expected to rise in 2023:
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User-Generated Content
Consumers always feel that user-generated content is transparent and trustworthy. No matter how much your consumers trust your eCommerce business, they will trust the content shared by other customers more. This can be attributed to the psychological social proof concept.
Whenever in doubt, customers seek guidance from other customers who have tried the products or services that they are interested in. Therefore, in 2023, make sure you do whatever you can to encourage your customers to share their written posts, reviews, images, and videos of them using your products or enjoying your services. Also, make sure that all this content is visible and easily accessible to everyone in your target audience.
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Curated Content
Creating original content is not always the way to go. Curated content is expected to shine in 2023. Curated content is content gathered and synthesized from trusted sources or people.
Curated content can show your customers that you are not just interested in selling but also in adding value, driving conversations, and making real connections with them.
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Authentic Content
You need to create authentic and humanized content that your customers can relate to. One way to do this is by always creating relevant customer personas throughout your digital marketing. However, make sure that your customers' personas properly reflect your target audience and are well-aligned with your brand.
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Scrappy Content
Scrappy content is a type of unpolished, raw content that witnessed a huge rise during the pandemic lockdowns. However, with the current economic stagnation and tight marketing budgets, it is expected that scrappy unpolished content is here to stay.
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Multi-format Content
It seems that 2023 will be all about diversifying. You need to use different types of content in your eCommerce digital marketing. The digital marketing world has reached a point where it is not enough to depend on only one or two content formats. You have to leverage every single format available.
Use videos, articles, email newsletters, blog posts, images, webinars, infographics, podcasts, quizzes, white papers, and as many more as you can.
We are well aware that this might sound challenging, but this is one of the trends that are going to help you survive in 2023.
3- Short-Form Videos
Research shows that the average user attention span has declined from 12 seconds, in 2000, to 8 seconds, in 2022 (Devrix, 2022). It is also not likely for the time of attention span to increase in 2023. Therefore, digital marketers have to start planning on how to accommodate their marketing strategies to this very short user-attention span.
Additionally, you should ensure that the format of your videos is optimized for the channel from which users are watching them.
One way to do this is to use shorter-form videos. For example, in one of its most recent updates, Instagram has merged all of its different forms of video posts into one single format: Reels, which have a length of only up to 15 minutes.
Also, Youtube is expanding in what it calls “Youtube Shorts”.
Moreover, today Google is experimenting with a machine-learning tool that can reformat landscape videos into square or vertical formats. This tool is already available for some Google Ads campaigns and will be available for Performance Max campaigns in 2023.
4- Artificial Intelligence
Source: Freepik
For a few years now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been an essential part of digital marketing and it has been succeeding at making marketing smarter every day. In 2023, you should take advantage of all that AI can offer for the marketing of your eCommerce business.
Artificial intelligence is one of the many computer science fields. It specializes in creating intelligent machines that can substitute the intelligence of human beings and do the activities that only humans used to be able to do.
Of course, when you picture digital marketing in 2023 within the framework of this definition, you can only expect great things.
Artificial intelligence is expected to:
- Provide eCommerce with advanced customer data collection and analysis.
- Take marketers to a whole new era of personalization through a better understanding of customers’ psychology.
- Introduce more accurate product searching and product recommendation.
5- Metaverse
Metaverses was one of the most controversial topics in 2022. They received criticism from some people and were met with positive responses from others. The world is still determining whether metaverses will become mainstream soon or not; however, everyone is sure that Metaverses will make a big appearance in the digital marketing field in 2023.
A Metaverse is a network of virtual worlds that offers everyone the chance to have their fictional worlds and interact with others in a real and visceral way.
You should know that Metaverses has already started influencing digital marketing, and the world now has examples to prove that:
- The first Metaverse fashion week was held, in March 2022, in the virtual social world “Decentraland”.
- On the 16th of March, 2022, HSBC became the first financial service provider to make a partnership with a metaverse. This metaverse is called “Sandbox”.
- In May 2021, Gucci opened a garden in Roblox, which is an online gaming platform. In this garden, people could buy digital clothing for their avatars.
6- No-Third Party Cookies
You probably heard about Google changing its cookie strategy, which could dramatically affect eCommerce digital marketing if marketers do not start preparing for alternatives.
Cookies are codes that are added to the web browsers of users. These codes provide digital marketers with insightful data because they track and remember users’ interests, preferences, browsing activities, location settings, buying behavior, items in shopping carts, log-in information, and other important types of data.
Given the fact that, in 2022, Google’s Chrome reached a global market share of almost 66%, making it the leading internet browser in the world (Oberlo, 2022), it is likely that digital marketing is going to be impacted by the change in cookie strategy.
To avoid being negatively impacted by this change, there are a few things that you can do:
- Start depending more on first-party cookies that you can gather from website subscriptions, customer surveys, landing pages… etc.
- Find new ways to gather customer data, such as consumer research tools.
7- Personalization
We can never stress enough the importance of personalization in digital marketing for eCommerce. Although it is not a new trend, it is a trend that is coming with us in the new year.
The competition between eCommerce businesses is rising regarding who can leverage personalization in a better way.
The trick here is that you can take advantage of some of the other mentioned digital marketing trends in this article to help you excel in the personalization trend. For example, you can benefit from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation tools in your personalization strategies.
8- Social Responsibility
As we mentioned in the introduction of this article, our world is currently going through a lot of conflicts and issues, which means that there are many causes that you can support in your digital marketing in 2023.
Today, online customers all around the globe care about what businesses support and stand for. They are also more likely to purchase from you if they know that a portion of the money they’re spending will go to a good cause. In other words, customers like to feel that they are making a difference in the world while spending money.
Harvard Business Review says that 2023 will be a year that tests businesses’ commitment to social responsibility. Therefore, you have to start planning the causes that you want to support in 2023 and plan exactly how you are going to articulate your support.
9- Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing has been gradually replacing multichannel marketing and it is most likely that it will continue to replace it in 2023.
E-commerce Omnichannel is a marketing strategy allowing you to integrate all channels, platforms, and devices available. The aim behind this is to exist wherever your customers are and to provide them with a seamless shopping experience.
One of the digital marketing trends you can use to implement omnichannel marketing and to connect your eCommerce store with your brick-and-mortar stores are Augmented Reality technology (AR), which uses a real-world setting, and Virtual Reality technology (VR), which is completely virtual. In 2021, their market reached 27 billion dollars, which is expected to reach over 28 million dollars by 2028 (Statista, 2022).
Omnichannel also entails consistently expanding your digital marketing to the different social media platforms, especially the ones trending the most, such as TikTok. Research shows that Tiktok generated 4.6 billion dollars in 2021 and that this number is expected to increase in 2023 (Digital Marketing Institute, 2022).
10- Digital Marketing Automation
With all the previously discussed digital marketing trends, there is no room, in 2023, for doing these things manually.
In other words, when we are talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, metaverses, and other mind-blowing technologies, using automation tools is inevitable.
Converted.in offers you one of the best marketing automation tools that will make it so easy for you to start your 2023 while using these digital marketing trends for your eCommerce business. This tool can help you in the following:
- Alleviate the negative effects caused by the change in Google’s cookie strategy by unifying all your customers' data in one place, like a hub.
- Segment your target audience, which is an indispensable step in your digital marketing.
- Deliver your digital marketing strategies to your customers across different channels by building, customizing, and automating personalized ads, SMS, and email marketing campaigns.
What are you waiting for? Book your Demo now and enjoy this marketing automation system that will help you skyrocket your eCommerce store’s sales in 2023.
