Top Internet Marketing Trends in 2023
Saurabh Singla, CO-founder at ZEX PR WIRE told what influences the brand promotion strategy today and what solutions for digital advertising and marketing it is helpful to try in the new year.
Not so long ago, brands were happy to use popular platforms for the promotion. But did they manage to maintain interest after everything that happened in the digital advertising market? Let’s try to figure it out – and imagine what promotion, sales, and marketing will be like in 2023.
Trend 1. Banned social networks
One of the critical events in the world of media in 2022 is the blocking of Instagram*, which until recently was not much less popular than VKontakte and had every chance of becoming the most inclusive social network in Russia. But this was not destined to happen – by the end of the year, the number of users who visit the social network daily decreased by about five times – coverage fell from 33-35% of the population to 7%.
Does this mean that in 2023 it’s time to forget about Instagram? Not really. The main thing is to determine whether your target audience continues to visit the social network. And master some new mechanics to help compensate for the lost target.
Of course, if you are a micro business (for example, baking cakes at home or making souvenir ceramics), then you should not cling to Instagram. You can continue to maintain an account, but at the same time it will be useful for you to master VKontakte or tell about yourself in house chats and other local communities. Also, manufacturers of consumer goods should not be limited to prohibited resources.
But if you work with the premium segment and create something unique, you should not give up the usual communication.
The premium segment is quite conservative and hardly changes media consumption habits – perhaps, it is here that the outflow of audience from banned social networks is minimal, and the benefit from further work with the site, on the contrary, is remarkably high.
Trend 2. Personal brand development
The next trend, which is expected to develop in 2023, is the growing importance of the personal brand of the founders and its impact on promotion and sales.
It seems that the role of the personal brand is nothing new in the media world. But today we can observe some transformation of the very essence of self-presentation.
We can say that the associations that a person evokes (that is, the values \u200b\u200bthat she creates for the audience) temporarily fade into the background – and the frequency of mentions and the percentage of citation become much more important.
This is due to a decline in demand and increased competition between brands – an entrepreneur needs to show not only the features of their product and work on it but also the fact that it is still in demand on the market. The more often the user encounters mentions of the brand and its creators, the better for sales.
Trend 3. Moving away from niche stories to large coverage
Since autumn, we can observe a gradual increase in advertising activity, which has replaced a long stagnation. Perhaps the suspension was due to the hopes of unblocking popular social networks and the return of an effective target. But since that didn’t happen, brands have turned to other ways to reach their target audience. In particular, they began to buy advertising integrations from bloggers and accesses to Telegram more often.
The potential of Telegram, by the way, can be a separate topic of conversation: the daily reach of the messenger from March to October 2022 increased from 20% to 38% of the population, and the prices for advertising placements in popular channels caught up with the price lists of federal media.
Interestingly, the news is released not only in channels that are close to the brand in terms of topics, but also in those that attract the number of views or seem to the brand to be “close in spirit” and potentially interesting to the target audience. Interior designers looking for premium clients, for example, like to post on investment or luxury real estate channels.
And this is a good trend – it helps to reach the right users in conditions where this is not always possible with the help of targeting.
I would recommend that business speakers go beyond publications and integrations on niche resources and look at new areas. For example, to business or marketing topics. The main thing is that all the stories told by the brand remain interesting to the target audience.
What is the result?
- The main events of 2022 in the media field are associated with the migration of the audience between familiar sites. Finding where your customer has gone can be tricky, but you definitely shouldn’t blindly follow the majority. Despite the fact that the audience of Instagram has decreased by about 5 times, almost the entire composition of premium customers use this social network in the same way as before.
- Demand is falling, competition between brands is growing: in these conditions, as never before, developed personal brands are in place. At the same time, it is important to work not only on the creation of values and the message (quality), but also on the frequency of mentions (quantity). When markets stagnate, frequent mentions of the brand, its founders or ambassadors create confidence among buyers that such a brand is still in demand.
- Brands prefer inclusive stories to niche ones. Targeted advertising is going through hard times – to find their customers, brands are increasingly collaborating with famous bloggers and coming out with native content in popular communities. Moreover, the topic of a blog or channel can be related to business in a non-obvious way – like interior design and investments, connected according to the principle of the income level of the target audience.
