Digital marketers, particularly SMEs do not have unlimited marketing budgets compared to large organizations whose strategies cover the gamut of marketing channels. The marketing world moves at the speed of light, and trends come in and go out. However, there are some trends that will survive the test of time, at least for the next few years. It is these trends that small and medium businesses need to keep abreast of. These are the 4 digital marketing trends in 2023 that every business, irrespective of size, must set in motion for their organizations.

Voice-enabled search is increasing, is your website ready for it?

Humans have always preferred to communicate through speech. It is just that technology was not yet so advanced to support this preference. In 2023, it is a completely different landscape. Speech recognition technology is more advanced than a few years back. In fact, Google’s speech recognition accuracy for queries in English has an outstanding 95% accuracy. It won’t be long before this will be true for voice in almost all other language searches.

Google’s speech recognition accuracy for queries in English has an outstanding 95% accuracy.

Interesting voice search statistics:

• In 2022, 40.2% of searches in the USA were voice searches. Globally it is at 27%.
• 52% of users do voice searches when driving
• Google’s speech recognition technology has a 95% accuracy rate for search queries in English.
• Voice AI and Machine Learning have improved so much in accuracy that it is predicted that 75% of voice search results will influence the top 3 positions even for desktop

The statistics above should be put in the perspective that Google voice search was first introduced by Google in 2011. In the early years, adoption was low and the technology was nascent. But with the growing ownership of smartphones and a generation of users who have been born in the technological era, voice searches might soon overtake typing out queries. 

Businesses and SEO specialists must recognize that online search is altering is going through a transition and Google voice search is here to stay.  While voice search is complicated, businesses are only leveraging the existing technology developed by the Google voice search team. Marketers only need to focus their attention on how their SEO strategies need to evolve. 

Currently, most SEO relies heavily on keywords used in typed searches. If businesses optimize their website for voice search as well, they will generate more traffic. Voice search is more focused on long-tail keywords or phrases, the way you normally speak.

For instance, the headline of our blog is crafted using a question that someone would dictate as a search query to their voice assistant on their phone. Such blogs are found to rank much higher.

Not every business is focusing on voice searches yet and the early movers will get the advantage.

2. B2B Marketing trends are going to focus more on easy-to-create videos

B2B marketing is more focused on creating LinkedIn reach because that is where most businesses are Over 76 million Indians are on LinkedIn. It is the leading professional network.

 What we are seeing on LinkedIn is that the channel started increasing the organic reach of video content in 2022. Video is the most popular content on all other social media channels like Facebook and Instagram and of course YouTube and TikTok (not available in India). LinkedIn has been a little late to the party but it caught on with he video marketing wave in 2022.

63% of marketers plan to increase their video content on the channel.  This is because video marketing gets 5X times more engagement than any other content. The channel is also becoming bullish on live video, with the statistics showing it gets 24X more engagement.

Businesses should consider explainer videos, testimonial videos (both client and employee), product demos, and even curated content.

The attention span of audiences on social media is notoriously fast-paced. Marketers are aware of this and will create more short-form videos.

Small businesses need no longer say that they do not have the budget to make short-form videos. Apart from the fact that everyone is using their mobile phones to make explainer and testimonial videos, there are also tools like Canva that help you edit or provide templates to make a new video. Of course, you can also work with digital marketing experts like the team at iTech to get your video marketing strategy on point.

3. B2C businesses will use Social Media also as a customer support tool

We saw this trend among businesses and customers in 2022 and it is expected that social media as a customer support tool will gain even more momentum in 2023.

Hubspot data indicates that 25% of marketers used direct messages (DM) as another channel to offer customer support. They say that a further 15% of businesses plan to try it for the first time this year in 2023.  We already know that WhatsApp as a customer interface is a recent marketing trend very popular.in India with over 15 million businesses in India using it. The iTech team develops mobile-friendly websites and has helped customers to integrate WhatsApp chatbot buttons into their websites.

Facebook and Instagram are also expanding their chat and DM capabilities for businesses. This supports the insight got from HubSpot’s Consumer Trends which says that 20% of Gen Z and 25% of Millenials have contacted a brand for customer service through their social media page. This data covers just a 3 month period.

4. Blogging will remain a popular way to reach target audiences for brands

Blogging has been around for a long time and remains one of the popular marketing strategies. If you haven’t got blogs on your site, then it is time you do. At iTech, we have seen the success of our blogs in reaching our expertise to a greater audience. Research shows that online audiences read blogs multiple times a week and make a purchase/service from the brand after reading an article or blog on their site.

Blogs don’t only offer a higher conversion but also increase your website’s search discoverability. In fact, if you are optimizing your blog correctly, you can expect to get 50-60% of your search traffic to the blogs section of your website.

These are my top 4 picks for recent marketing trends to watch out for in 2023 for small to medium size businesses who want to spend their marketing budget judiciously. While there are other trends, to name one of them – openAI launched GPT-4 which uses artificial intelligence to generate automatically text-based content. However,  the deep learning model is still in the learning phase and is still being trained on data models using information gathered before 2021. It will probably figure in 2024 marketing trends.

Karen Jain

Karen brings her decades-long experience in content and digital marketing to helping global brands to showcase their expertise. When she isn’t writing or caught up in being a digital marketing evangelist, you will find her passionately involved in animal rescues.