2023 Digital Marketing Trends
Zack Greenfield • February 20, 2023
Hey guys, on this video, since it's the beginning of the year, I can't help myself but do a couple of 2023 sort of outlook. I wouldn't call 'em predictions because I hate to sit here and claim that I have a crystal ball. But let's talk about a couple of trends here, like voice search. Obviously the AI thing is really popping right now. And, data privacy. And then, I don't know, we got other stuff here. I got some notes. Virtual reality, more important, I think more fun, augmented reality. But anyways, let's dive into it. Stick with me. I'm gonna give you a couple of kind of what I'm seeing, what's working and things like that from behind the scenes.
All right, so it's 2023. Lots of new stuff. I think it's kind of funny how the headlines have shifted, right? Like it was all like crypto and blah, blah, blah. During the pandemic, are we sitting at home like trying to make money? And then things have kind of shifted to like AI Now, headlines wise, and you know, we're medium sized digital advertising agency. We're kind in the middle of all those things. We've got a lot of local businesses, uh, that, you know, are all over the country that are always trying to grow. And you know, our job is to figure out like what is of all this stuff that's, you know, coming down the pipe, like how much is usable, how much is important, how much do we have to pay attention to? And how much is relevant for, you know, folks like us who just want to grow our businesses?
So, couple of thoughts. Um, clearly, you know, the basic still block and tackle stuff that I'm always talking about on this channel is still not gonna go away, right? There's no magic pill for not having well out, well thought out Messaging, copywriting and being on as many channels as you can within your budget so that you're where your customers need to be. And you know, obviously that's weighted. Sometimes you're gonna be maybe more on social media depending on your demographic versus perhaps YouTube or more in paid advertising versus YouTube at all, right? So everybody has a little bit of slam, but you really wanna be in as many channels as you can so that you're sort of got the omnipresent vibe. That stuff's not gonna go away. I think voice search's incredibly important. That's becoming more and more accepted and uh, it's really just kind of popping both people using it on their phones now, of course.
And then you got all the Alexa and Google Home stuff that's running in people's houses. We certainly use that here. Love it. Uh, so, you know, being, making sure that all of your SEL work is rock solid is still not gonna go away. And it, and now it's, it, it bridges into voice and other technologies. And then we've got this AI thing, right? So the, we've had Jarvis in this business for a long time to help with writing and spinning articles and doing AI stuff. So this like language learning model, you know, a writing AI thing, it's not incredibly new, but it did hit and kind of wig everybody's eyes up to, wow, this could be a really, um, powerful productivity tool. Now how much of that translates to marketing is a little complex, right? Because you can get some ideas from there, but is it really gonna be perfect for your business and not like, kind of generic?
Probably not, right? Because as a business owner, you are bound to tell your own your own story as it is unique, you know, to what you offer, right? So the problem that you solve. And so you, the thing that I'm noticing as I've been continuing to play with AI and it keeps developing and we've been tool, you know, messing around with that now for probably close to like four and a half, almost five years behind the scenes. Um, and I can say that it's definitely getting a heck of a lot better. There's no question about it. Uh, can you, can you do everything with it? No d does it, you know, do everything perfectly. No. Does it hit that? I guess I would say like that fine sort of artistry that a human brings into any situation when it comes to word crafting and getting messaging right and really a deep understanding of say your business is really gonna only come from you or somebody that's working closely with you.
So there's some, there's some big gaps there. Does it help get started with a lot of stuff? Hell yeah. Does it help proofread and clean things up? Absolutely can do that. It does seem to be limited on like long body text, uh, some other stuff that the system kind of struggles with, but you know, we'll see how that plays out. It's definitely gonna be a big topic we'll be touching back with for 2023. So if nothing else, if you're not playing with it, you know, mess around a little bit and see, you know, what you can get it to do for your business and uh, maybe helping with get stuff started that you've been wanting to get started, like emails and things like that, right? And then, you know, other stuff is what's the comp, what's the consumer behavioral shift like? Well, without a question, everybody's kind of out of the house this year for sure.
We're gonna go into a normal spring for the first time in a long time. So all that like spring cycle of, you know, getting things going, the energy and business seems to be really high right now. People are kind of back on track. There's no real serious downers here in the us. There's a lot of stuff going on in Europe that's pretty negative, but we're, we're kind of on the fringe of that here. It seems like behavior is much better. Uh, consumers seem to be outspending the, you know, the economy. There's all these mixed numbers of course in the headlines, but on boots on the ground, my understanding is things are going fairly well for most businesses. Uh, certainly comparison I think year over year for some businesses. Pandemic numbers are kind of a throwaway cuz I got some projects where there's just huge changes between that time and this time.
Um, but that was sort of an anomaly, right? So, uh, some businesses like cleaning companies did crazy good during the pandemic. Are they gonna do that good this year? Probably not cuz people aren't having to disinfect the hell outta everything. So there's some examples where there's gonna be some year over year revenue changes. I don't think they're showstopper like anyone's gonna get crushed now. Um, like luck of the, you know, sort of unluck of the draw. Like it wasn't a pandemic, but it's gonna be back to regular block and tackle, earn your keep and drive and market your business, uh, to grow. There is not gonna be any handouts in 2023. It doesn't look like nobody's gonna get, you know, sort of the magic wand. Your business, you know, suddenly is gonna be getting a huge amount of just, uh, win in your favor. It's much more of a normal business environment.
So for those of us out there that wanna grow, we're gonna have to do, get back to the basics of marketing, focus and get crank in, make sure our campaigns are running and be out there, uh, cutting through the noise and making sure the spotlight's on our business. So hopefully you got your planning done at the end of the last year and your focus right now in q1, can't wait to see you on the channel. Go ahead and subscribe. We'll see you on the next one and we're gonna just keep digging in, unpacking all these exciting things this year. So we'll see you.
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