Discover the digital marketing trends for 2023
Xpert Digital marketing specialists have already looked ahead to the new year: 2023.
The end of 2022 is approaching and that means that the new year is not that far away from us at all.
Do you want to discover new trends in digital marketing? Here we will discuss the macro trends for the new year.
In 2023, we need to focus on three aspects: people, measurability, and margin. It is important for organizations to focus extremely on this in the coming year.
In today’s market, it is becoming more difficult to find and retain the right people. Competition is increasing, revenues are under pressure, there are high costs, and measuring ROI is becoming increasingly challenging.
Retaining people with Digital Marketing
Just like the previous years – something that has really started since the start of COVID-19 – the so-called ‘Great Resignation’, the large outflow, is underway.
Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, more and more people have left their work sector and have started working in another sector or have started working less.
Others have found a way to live life in a different way. For this reason, the effective capacity of labor is shrinking.
If you look at the media and the technology sector – that’s where marketing, or at least online marketing, comes in, there’s also more outflow than inflow. Namely 55 percent versus 45 percent.
Where does the outflow go?
That remains unclear.
These are some of the results that have emerged from McKinsey’s great attraction (2022) global study.
A possible reason that people are leaving their sector is that they dare to make more demands on employers (think, for example, of working from home or in the office).
It is also the case that employers can no longer expect employees to have certain studies or backgrounds. The employer is forced to look more at what the employees have to offer.
This brings the employee to a place where he functions well and performs work that the employee likes and can do well. A win-win situation for all parties involved.
A lot is changing within the field. People and organizations are increasingly going to work digitally.
This has a lot of influence on who performs the work, but digital developments also have a lot of effect on the work of marketers.
They are the linchpin in the organization when it comes to changing and moving with the latest market developments and customer demand.
They become centipedes and must be at home in all markets. Improving, changing, and continuously experimenting is the daily life of a marketer.
Maintain margin
For many organizations, it is becoming increasingly difficult to become or remain profitable.
The higher purchasing costs are partly due to the events in the Suez Canal, but also due to rising gas prices and inflation.
These aspects ensure that more and more people still keep their hands on the cut. And demand is already declining in some sectors.
The best way to deal with this is to start with an analysis of how you are doing. That’s step one.
In your digital marketing mix, you can then focus on that margin. See if the customer you bring in via channel A or B at the bottom of the line makes you money.
And how much?
Also, look beyond that initial purchase. And that lead that came in last? Has that become a customer?
In addition, it is also a pick your battle situation.
Because so many, and so fast, things are changing, it is almost impossible to make a profitable business case. Therefore, take a very critical look at your marketing mix.
The opportunity to switch from a target group or market to something else as a company can be rewarding for your organization.
It is often the case that companies start cutting marketing budgets. This is not always wise because it can mean a permanently deteriorated economic position in the market.
Improve measurability through Digital Marketing
Well-known programs used by almost every marketer will undergo many changes or updates.
In 2023, we will massively switch to Google Analytics 4 (now the beta version Web+App property).
Google Chrome will stop supporting and supporting third-party cookies in 2024. And this poses a threat to data quality.
Collecting data will therefore be done in a different way. But do you actually need all that data?
A large part does not. Often too much rather than too little data is collected. Or not the right data.
Solutions for this are certainly there, but they also cost time and money. Possibilities are:
- First Party Tracking;
- TraceDock or a CDP
- Server-side Google Tag Manager
Other possibilities and solutions are discussed in more detail in the Data & Automation podcast that will soon be online.
Many changes await us in the new year, but a new year also brings new opportunities.
For marketers, it can be fun. At least, if you have a growth mindset. There is still a lot to be gained and you can outsmart your competitors in many ways.
Keep looking at all the opportunities!
Read More: 3 steps that will help you grow your brand
5 reasons to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing
With more than 750 million members worldwide, LinkedIn has become the number one website for companies.
That alone should convince you to focus on marketing via LinkedIn.
Curious about 5 other reasons to get started with LinkedIn for B2B marketing? Then read on!
On LinkedIn, as a B2B marketer, you can find a new business partner, introduce a company to potential customers and attract new talent to join your company as an employee.
But you can also get valuable benefits from it with the right use of marketing.
Reason 1: Content!
Where social media channels are often used as a pastime, which is different from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is mainly used for professional networking and for development. A time investment!
LinkedIn users are often engaged in self-development and gaining knowledge about their field.
When you use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, you have the advantage of context. Users are open to content that is really relevant to them.
As a company, you can perfectly respond to this with your content!
Example: A LinkedIn user is looking for a time management solution for his/her company or training software for their employees, and look – there you are.
When you advertise on LinkedIn, your ads appear in a news feed filled with industry news, expert advice, and insights and recommendations from colleagues.
An advertisement on LinkedIn will therefore be better received in this context than an advertisement on Facebook.
When a lead generation ad is shown on LinkedIn, it is shown to people who want to improve their industry. When it is shown on Facebook, it is visible to someone between different private photos.
This may be the same person, but think about it: When are you most likely to fill out a form to read a work-related white paper or case study? When you’re in relax mode? Or when you’re in work mode?
Much of the data LinkedIn uses for ad targeting comes directly from its users.
If used in the right way, this data brings your company to the attention of the most valuable target groups.
Reason 2: Business targeting capabilities
For each campaign, you need to carefully consider which target group you want to reach and how you can reach them.
This way you can reach users who are actually looking for your product or service. This way you can respond to their questions and needs.
But what possibilities are there in terms of targeting?
Target at the company level
Often you already have an idea of which or what kind of companies you want to focus on.
Based on a company level, you have several options.
On the one hand, you can choose a specific industry and, for example, companies with a certain number of employees with LinkedIn for B2B marketing.
Do you already know specific company names? Then you can also reach the employees of a specific company by targeting company names.
Depending on your target group, you can already target very specifically with this option.
Target at the job level
Do you not want to focus on specific companies, but on functions?
Then you can target based on job titles.
Because everyone on LinkedIn has entered a job title, you can target very specifically in this way.
In addition, you can also select based on seniority. For example, don’t want to reach interns with your ads? Then you exclude it.
Targeting on a personal level
Don’t know someone’s exact job title? Or do you want to reach beyond industry or function?
Then you can also use targeting based on skills, groups, education level, etc.
For example, when you use multiple IT job titles, you might reach people with those job titles, but not someone in IT with an unclear job title.
One way to address this is to also target skills. This way you also reach people who have IT skill on their LinkedIn profile.
What works best? That’s a matter of testing!
Set up different audiences with the same ads and compare the results.
Reason 3: Use your own data effectively
Do you already know who exactly you want to reach?
Upload a list of emails and LinkedIn will match those emails with user profiles.
When your list successfully matches 300 or more profiles, the end result is a matched audience that you can use in any campaign on LinkedIn.
Do you want to reach people who are similar to your current customers?
Then create a look-a-like audience based on your customer list.
In this way, LinkedIn looks at which profiles match and match your current customers.
This way you reach a completely new target group.
Reason 4: The right tool at the right time
Of course, it has been known for a long time that it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach people organically on social platforms.
Social advertising is one of the ways to reach prospects.
LinkedIn’s advertising platform provides everything a marketer needs to ensure that the ads reach the right people with an effective ad spend.
In addition to the countless targeting options that LinkedIn offers, there are also multiple advertising products available.
Re Objectives
LinkedIn offers different advertising goals so that there is always a suitable objective for your campaign! Below they are listed:
Knowledge
Brand awareness: Tell people about your product, service, or organization.
Consideration
Website visits: Drive traffic to your website or marketing landing pages.
Interactions: Increase engagement with your content, such as likes, comments, shares, landing page clicks, or clicks or tracks from your LinkedIn page.
Video views: Share videos with more people.
Conversion
Lead generation: Find leads on LinkedIn using a lead generation form pre-populated with LinkedIn profile information.
Website conversions: Capture leads on your website or drives leads that are valuable to your business.
Applicants: Tell more people about relevant vacancies at your company or send applicants to your vacancies.
Talent leads: The talent leads objective is only available to companies with an active LinkedIn Recruiter contract. Generate leads from candidates who are interested in career opportunities within your company.
Reason 5: Make use of your employees
As with everything in business, your employees are the most important thing.
Give them the resources they need to thrive.
Employees can be a good source for distributing content on LinkedIn.
With well-optimized profiles, employees can become important assets and spokespersons for your company.
Optimized profiles — both your company’s and employees’ — boost visibility in search results.
Google doesn’t leave LinkedIn out of the page-crawling fun. Google will crawl both employee and company profiles. So use your profiles and update them regularly to highlight what’s important.
Another way to get more out of LinkedIn is through employee reinforcement.
When an employee shares one of your LinkedIn posts, the organic reach will be strengthened.
As with Facebook, organic posts on business pages rarely appear in the average user’s newsfeed.
But once someone shares the post, it will appear in many more feeds. Take advantage of that!
Time to get started and get the most out of your LinkedIn page! Do you want to know more about LinkedIn for B2B marketing or do you need help? Please contact us!
Read More: Create perfect lead magnets that customers can’t ignore
3 steps that will help you grow your brand
Branding takes a lot of time and it is difficult to measure? You often hear this reaction when you drop the term ‘branding’.
Fortunately, this is a thing of the past.
I can already hear you thinking, “How do I get people to recognize my brand? And what does it take to make them part of the buying process?”.
I’ll help you on your way!
By getting started with the principles below, you will grow faster than ever before.
The 3 principles for brand growth:
- The louder the better
- Mix it & fix it
- Stand out of the crowd
The louder the better
The more people who know your brand, the larger your market share is. That’s just the way it works.
According to research, there is a strong link between market share growth and investment.
In other words: SOV (share of voice) = SOM (share of market). That basically means that when you shout louder (spend more money), you end up taking a larger share of the pie.
In other words: you have a larger market share, your share of market.
Just an example. Think of a physical Friday afternoon market. The one man behind his vegetable stall who screams so loudly probably also has most people at his stall.
This is the same effect as online.
How do you know if you are using this tactic optimally?
The most reliable is calculating the excess share of voice where you compare your SUM to your competition.
For this it is important that you have the figures ready. But… it can be a big challenge to get this done yourself.
Looking for an alternative? Look at the share of search (SOS). This is the percentage of a brand’s total search volume relative to its competitors.
Studies show that SOS often equals SOM.
By looking at the search volume of a product category versus your brand name plus product category, you can find out how you stand.
Here’s a quick look:
SOV = Share of voice
SUM = Share of market
SOS = Share of search
But beware! It’s not a matter of ‘just increasing budgets’.
Increase your budgets and only start shouting louder after you have the following two principles in order: mix it and fix itandstand out of the crowd.
Mix it & Fix it
Performance and branding are two different things.
Performance teams focus on short-term results such as conversions, while brand managers think about the whole funnel and creating brand awareness.
You can imagine that this can cause quite a few discussions within a company when you split the two teams.
Why do we settle for impressions in a branding campaign and why is the emphasis on a higher CTR and a lower CPC for performance?
These two approaches reinforce each other when they are combined.
Take a look at your branding campaign with your performance glasses on. And vice versa.
For example, the performance team can learn from storytelling. The branding team in their time again of applying more analysis and data-driven decision making.
Ideally, you no longer want to look at performance or branding.
Instead, you look at brand growth. The growth of your brand.
That’s what you end up doing it for.
Mix your teams and make use of each other’s strengths. Only in this way can you really grow.
Mix it and fix it.
Make sure you have a healthy balance between your long-term and short-term campaigns.
The overall ratio between brand building and sales activity is 60:40. This of course depends on the industry and the maturity of the brand. This is based on official research by Les Binet & Peter Field.
This way you achieve results much faster. You can also determine your next steps more clearly on the basis of data.
Stand out of the crowd
Social media channels are designed to let you scroll.
We see 4,000 ads a day. Bizarre a lot!
Sometimes it feels like we stand out in the crowd, because our ad just scrolled by without being clicked on or even noticed!
Imagine what this means for your business…
How do you make sure you stand out?
It’s super important that you get people to stop scrolling.
You have to find something that sets you apart. You have to dare to jump out of the crowd.
By being creative you have a chance to be seen and remembered. According to Nielsen research, creativity even has a 49% impact on final sales.
What can you do to stand out?
Start working on your brand salience!
Brand salience is a similar metric to brand awareness. The difference is that brand salience is aimed at measuring awareness during the actual purchase decision rather than overall brand visibility.
If you have a high brand of salience, then you have a strong brand presence that consumers recognize and think of when they need a product.
An example: suppose you are in the mood for coffee and are on your way to a customer appointment.
Where would you stop to get a coffee? Which brands are you thinking of at the moment when you want to make a purchase?
Right, those are the brands that have a high brand of salience for you.
Ask yourself, “Which coffee brands do you know?”.
The answer you get to this is brand awareness.
It is therefore very important to map out where your customer may be thinking of you.
This way you can increase your brand salience and make a difference with your brand and if you want to know how to attract more customers to your brand, you may check the article “Create perfect lead magnets that customers can’t ignore.”
If you are looking for a good Digital Marketing Company in Kolkata that can handle your Social Media Marketing or Brand Promotion, then you may check our reviews on Google.
Create perfect lead magnets that customers can’t ignore
You scroll for hours and hours on social media along different pages. Ask yourself: “What really catches my attention?”. When do you stop scrolling and take the time to read something?
While scrolling, you are distracting your brain, overstimulating it, and taking your focus away. As an organization, you want your content to stand out. You want to stimulate the customer and ensure that you come to the attention.
In this blog, we tell you how to create lead magnets that do not pass your customer by.
A good example: how do you tell a detailed story to a good friend during a big and busy concert? Pretty tricky huh? It can also be difficult to make your ads stand out on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Productive Mindset for lead generation
Advertisements on social media are often aimed at getting people off the platform. So basically you use a platform to advertise and then you want the customer to go off that platform and visit your website. Quite a difficult task.
If you want to succeed in that, you have to ensure a productive mindset among users. A productive mindset consists of:
- Focus
- Attention
- Interest
Focus, attention, and interest can be retained by sending the perfect message at the right time and in the right place. What helps you with that are lead magnets.
The secret ingredients for epic lead magnets
When you start using lead magnets, you have to focus on a target group that is problem-aware. After all, they are looking for a solution. The image below shows you where they are located.
A lead magnet ensures that you make this group solution-aware. With your lead magnet, you offer a solution to their problem.
Ingredient #1: the target group that benefits from the lead magnet
Ask yourself: is the target group defined without being too niche?
Below you can see examples of lead magnets that have worked and have not worked. The bottom lead magnets did not achieve the right result because the focus was too much on a niche target group.
| Lead magnet | | Target audience |
| 9 Health Benefits of Beans | Healthy foodies ✅ |
| A legal checklist for starting a business in Rotterdam | Entrepreneurs in Rotterdam ✅ |
| 5 must-haves for reaching retirement age | Parents reaching ❌ retirement age |
| 7 Tax Saving Strategies for Pharmacy Owners | Pharmacy owners ❌ |
Don’t make the target audience too specific. It becomes all the more difficult to get hold of them.
Ingredient #2: The applicability of the content
Ask yourself: Can the reader use this now or is there more work to be done?
We’ve been talking about attention retention. You can only hold a user’s attention for a short time. After all, they want to scroll further quickly to see holiday photos or cool videos.
In this short time frame, you have to make sure that the reader does not have to do too much work to take action. Otherwise, you’ll lose them. Below you can see two examples of lead magnets that have or have not worked. Are you watching?
| Lead magnet | | Kind |
| Spaghetti with scallops | Recipe ✅ |
| 5 easy exercises to learn the English language | Exercises ✅ |
| 7 financial strategies for brokers | Strategies ❌ |
| How to: buying investment properties | Buyers guide ❌ |
Recipes always do well. You read the lead magnet in the afternoon and can get started the same evening. Users can put themselves to work right away.
The same goes for 5 easy exercises to learn English. This lead magnet is successful because an important ‘keyword’ is used. The word ‘easy’ tells the reader that there is not much work behind this lead magnet. Other words you can use are for example: simple, simple, or small.
For example, a word that you should avoid in a lead magnet strategy. That word makes the reader think that there is still a lot of work to be done. At that point, readers drop out.
Ingredient #3: The relevance of the lead magnet
Ask yourself: is the content on time or is it poorly timed?
The title of your lead magnet is important. With this, you finally trigger the reader. A successful lead magnet often contains a year or time in the title. It makes the reader aware that it is or may be relevant at the moment.
Take a look at the examples below:
| Lead magnet | | Timing |
| Why you should buy real estate in East Groningen right now | Good content: right time ✅ |
| Why You Should Consider Building a Modular Home in 2022 | Good content: right time ✅ |
| How to buy a house as a starter | Good content: wrong time ❌ |
| How to sell your dental practice | Good content: niche time ❌ |
Two lead magnets have had no success. Why is that? The timing of both lead magnets was wrong. For many people, it is currently hardly possible to buy a house because of the scarcity of the housing market. Starters continue to rent and cannot yet buy a house. A good example of timing is key.
Ingredient #4: The emotion the lead magnet evokes
Ask yourself: Could this topic work in small talk or is it too focused on productivity and work?
When the latter is the case, you won’t get many downloads. Topics that appeal to the reader are often topics that you also discuss in the bar, for example. It should be a topic that people like to talk about.
| Lead magnet | | Emotion |
| How we can positively influence our daily lives with compassion | Compassionate and caring ✅ |
| 10 lessons to find happiness in life | Happy and fulfilled ✅ |
| Is it cheaper to buy or rent a water heater? | Productive and informative ❌ |
| Three essential checklists for a safe working environment | Practical and work-related ❌ |
When you scroll through your social media feed, you don’t think of a water heater. That is exactly the reason that this lead magnet was not a success. It’s a topic that doesn’t appeal to readers easily.
To respond to the emotions of readers, you can use a number of smart words. Words like positivity, impact, and happiness release dopamine in our brains. We make a connection between these words and our feelings. A successful lead magnet responds to these emotions.
Convert readers to buyers
A successful lead magnet contains the above 4 ingredients. The last step is that users actually read the lead magnet. The infographic below gives you insight into how you can ensure that a lead magnet is read.
It doesn’t stop at sending one e-mail. Many emails end up somewhere between the dozens of emails you receive in a day. Therefore, send users a reminder to open the lead magnet.
Follow the further step-by-step plan to actually turn readers into buyers. Step by step you create the perfect lead magnet and if you need help from any marketing agency then we are always ready with our market-tested lead generation strategies.
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Good luck!
