2022 was a turbulent year in digital marketing – from a bumpy data landscape to not-so-gentle platform nudges toward machine learning to an economy that threw budgets into flux, marketers were dealing with a lot of change.
Our experts take a close look at marketing strategies and where they’re headed as we flip our calendars to 2023. There’s a common theme: optimizing to business outcomes instead of more surface-level metrics.
Be sure to check out our 2023 predictions on Digital Marketing Platforms, too!
Simply put, internal marketing functions will be held more accountable for pipeline and revenue for the business. For agencies, this means we need to be thoroughly integrated into our clients’ CRM systems in order to track (and optimize to) the ultimate value resulting from each campaign.
To stand out, B2B companies will need to continue to look for opportunities to differentiate their creative, which boils down to deep understanding of their customers and what they value most.
I expect that marketers will put more of a focus on understanding metrics deeper than just ranking. In other words, how do your marketing channels impact the entire marketing portfolio? Besides just traffic to a blog, how were people interacting, what was the next page they went to on the site, and what other signals did they give you with their engagement? SEOs will need to recognize, and gear their efforts around, desired behaviors and actions that signal quality and intent.
Over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of people pushing money into ABM and quickly realizing it’s harder than they think and moving budgets back to performance marketing. In 2023, I don’t anticipate marketers moving en masse to ABM, but I do expect some fundamental tenets of ABM to pick up steam, namely better messaging and creative alignment with clearly defined customer segments (which is where performance marketing is headed).
A secondary prediction (which might be more of a hope) is that B2B companies make a bigger push to optimize to offline data and focus on down-funnel actions.
I predict that marketing organizations are going to start to look at performance in a more holistic/big-picture way instead of holding each individual channel to strict KPIs. This means that teams will evaluate paid efforts based on how much value/revenue/LTV they drive rather than focusing on initial cost per lead, CPA, etc.
While creative is a critical piece of performance marketing now, it is going to continue to become more important and draw more marketing resources as targeting options and capabilities become more restricted and limited.
Our predictions series will continue with a look at 2023 developments in martech! Stay tuned.