What will 2023 bring for consumers and marketers?

I’ve twiddled the tea leaves, delved into the coffee grinds, and polished the crystal ball. Here are my top 3 areas for marketers that will get more attention this year.

1) The king is back – long live customers as king

Due to a myriad of changes around privacy, tracking, and targeting, marketers and their agencies will shift their marketing budget out of acquisition and awareness media, and into customer management activity.

The pendulum will swing away from media wastage, and back towards customer retention, loyalty, and life-time value outcomes. 

This will mean greater resources, and focus on understanding which customers are most valuable, which ones should be retained and nurtured, and which ones may churn.

Accepting churn from lower value customers, and providing higher value customers with more relevant service in order to prevent them churning or switching. 

All underpinned by customer experiences that truly treat the customer as king.

Systems are starting to integrate, so 2023 will be the time to reap the rewards of the past few years of digital transformation.

2) Influencers influence sales outcomes rather than vanity metrics

With the rapid rise of influencers – and now more rigor around transparency –  influencers will finally start to play a more pivotal role in the marketing armoury. 

Whilst always at risk of being a transient channel, real influencers that align to a brand and brand story, and that treat the opportunities with a longer-term mindset will survive.

Consumers will start to experience seamless opportunities to read, view, engage and buy, all in one interaction. 

Forget the TOFU, MOFU, BOFU funnel migration, influencers will reach quality consumers with $$s in mind rather than clicks and tricks.

3) Smart technology = smarter marketing 

Artificial intelligence, smarter digital experiences, and intelligent engines have been around long enough now to become mainstream. 

2023 will be the year where they become valuable rather than interesting. 

We’ll continue to hear about new AI models, use cases, and applications such as ChatGPT, MagicWrite in Canva Docs, Jasper Art, Stable Diffusion, and many other innovations.

However, the bottom line with all of these will be quality and valuable engagement. Testing which opportunities are delivering quality outcomes, rather than majoring in the minors, or simply being new tricks for the general public. 

Most consumers are wiser to the technology world now, and it will be the most interested and valuable consumers that marketers will want to engage. 

Marketers have the opportunity to use direct techniques that identify valuable prospects, entice quality acquisition, and deliver richer experiences to the right customers. 

If you’re not allocating a quality filter over your marketing activity, then you’re wasting valuable budget. 

My prediction is that smart marketers will optimise their martech, adtech and AI tools in a smart way to deliver real value to the bottom line. 

2023 is all about customer satisfaction and happiness which will deliver $$s at a time when the global economy continues to splutter.

 

Feature image by: Yanapi Senaud (unsplash)