The Five Key Marketing Trends Data is Shaping in 2023

As data transforms every industry, we explore the shifting dynamics of the marketing industry and technology while exploring how data will be affected. Marketing continues to change on two fronts: consumer attention is harder to obtain as their behaviors shift, and leadership is asking Chief Marketing Officers to show their forward-looking investment returns with greater detail and surety.

Five 2023 Marketing Trends

We see five key trends in the marketing domain that will shift how organizations generate, consume, and govern data.

1. Continued Growth of Video

All categories of consumers and influencers will continue to produce short, to-the-point videos and share them as a method of communicating their stories. Marketing teams will continue to focus on leveraging this medium for product demonstration and placement, measuring the impact influencers have on sales and brand awareness.

2. Continued Podcast Excitement

While we do not expect the fundamentals to change and podcasting to suddenly turn profitable, we expect continued growth in the number and diversity of podcasts available. Podcasting will continue to have a few large players that account for most listeners, downloads, and marketing spend. A long tail of more niche content will continue to provide lower-cost alternatives for marketing teams to target small but highly loyal buyer pools.

3. Gamification

Engagement will continue to be a primary measure of what platforms, apps and content marketing teams spend money on to target buyers. Gamification will continue to create opportunities for consumers to get hooked into an ecosystem of other competitors and feel the rush of winning prizes or points. The continued growth of mobile gamification will allow in-app advertising, placement opportunities, and revenue sharing for in-app purchases. We will likely see more jurisdictions apply greater limitations on businesses on the age they can target consumers with these approaches.

4. Growing Regulatory Risk

Consumers will continue to share growing volumes of data, and companies will continue to collect new and richer data about consumer behavior—all creating added risk for organizations against how they store and process private data. Leadership expects Chief Marketing Officers to be close partners with Chief Privacy Officers and be experts in what usage is allowed on the data they collect, purchase and use for targeting and personalization.

5. Well-Informed Consumers

Consumers continue to become more educated about their rights to data ownership. Consumer Advocacy groups will continue to educate consumers on their rights which will, in turn, be exercised against companies that are not fully transparent about the data they collect and how they use it.

Opportunities for Marketing Teams

All of these dynamics will generate more data about consumers, enabling organizations with new opportunities to personalize experiences and monetize their data assets. Marketing organizations will have more data than ever to personalize their campaigns, customer experiences, and financial modeling to predict ROI for specific campaigns.

All of these trends are positive for our marketing teams. MarTech stacks will continue to see investment, enabling marketing teams to automate more, add new capabilities and simplify the usability of the toolset. This investment will come with strings attached. Namely, marketing teams can better predict and report on the ROI of their investments.

Marketing teams should continue to be on the lookout for new vendors and tools. This industry is moving quickly, and new upstarts can often provide advanced capabilities. Teams should reserve the capacity to allow regular POCs that assess new technology for introduction in the MarTech ecosystem.

Conclusion

This speed of change will require alignment between traditional IT organizations, digital transformation teams, and marketing and compliance teams. They must collectively understand the art of what’s possible and what capabilities vendors bring and balance those with the organization’s risk tolerance and customer privacy obligations. This alignment will enable the rapid adoption of new MarTech capabilities for enhancing a marketing team’s ability to assess the market, present content, and measure the impact of campaign spend.