Marketing trends come and go, sometimes as swiftly as the evening tide. It’s just not easy to catch the right trend wave. The top social media networks are forging new partnerships to expand their offerings, consumers are buying products through social commerce, and Instagram is pushing Reels first.
Let’s dive into the marketing trends for 2023 to explore how you can practically incorporate some of these big ideas into your marketing strategy this year.
The Top 10 Marketing Trends 2023:
Marketing Trend 1: Social Commerce
Marketing Trend 2: Accessibility
Marketing Trend 3: Short-Form Video
Marketing Trend 4: Value of the Brand
Marketing Trend 5: Future of Demographics
Marketing Trend 6: The Metaverse
Marketing Trend 7: Death of Third Party Cookies
Marketing Trend 8: Social Media Integrations
Marketing Trend 9: Instagram Reels
Marketing Trend 10: Interactive Content
All of these trends are based on our new playbook which contains more information about the trends mentioned in this blog, plus five additional trends! Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 1: Social Commerce
Social buying is already a success in China and India, but it has been slower to catch on in the West, where shoppers are hesitant to trust social buying apps and features.
But despite some pessimism over pace, social commerce is here to stay, with sales projected to hit $1.2 trillion (accounting for 16.7% of all e-commerce sales) by 2025.
A wave of new integrations and updates may very well accelerate adoption internationally in 2023, presenting a new world of opportunities for marketers.
Twitter Shops launched in March 2022. Weeks later, TikTok and Snapchat inched closer to full in-app shopping with announcements of their respective WooCommerce and eBay integrations.
By the end of summer, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Meta had all announced integrations, updates, or test features of their own aimed at making the customer journey from browsing social to check out that much faster.
Notably, YouTube introduced shoppable Shorts in June, and Meta rolled out in-chat purchases and payments for Instagram.
Still, unexpected setbacks, such as the shutdown of Facebook live shopping in October, show that marketers will need to stay agile when it comes to investing in new channels.
Tip: Build trust by getting creative with new platform features while emphasizing the legitimacy, value, and quality of in-app shopping. Want to know more about the social commerce marketing trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 2: Accessibility
Accessibility will continue to be a hot topic in 2023 as the progress made has revealed how much further there is to go.
About three in every 20 people worldwide live with disabilities, yet excluding them from marketing plans has long been the norm. From ads devoid of visibly disabled people to unusable websites and apps, the industry has a history of overlooking the largest minority group in the world. Those standards are slowly changing as more companies are implementing higher accessibility standards as part of their wider DEI efforts.
Thanks in part to subtitle-embracing Gen-Z, closed captions are a regular sight across Instagram Reels and TikToks, which both began offering auto-captioning features in 2021. In 2022, Instagram rolled out auto-generated captions for in-feed videos, while TikTok introduced the option to toggle auto-captions on and off.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn began offering real-time captioning for the platform’s Audio Events. To help the marketers behind the scenes, Google expanded its inclusive marketing resource All In to cover disability inclusivity and accessibility. And on the PR front, artists Beyoncé and Lizzo demonstrated how to approach missteps when they apologized and removed a slur targeting disabled people from their songs.
When it comes to disability representation in content, 2023 will come with even more casual inclusion of disabled people in advertising that doesn’t center on disability.
Want to know more about the accessibility trend? Download the marketing trends 2022 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 3: Short-Form Video
Short-form video might be a three-word phrase that marketers are sick of hearing, (right up there with “content is king”), but that’s just too bad. The short video trend is here to stay.
The definition of short-form video has been changing rapidly over the past few years as new platforms and video lengths emerged.
Video length
When TikTok burst onto the scene in 2020, it was somewhat dismissed as just a new version of Vine, which was popular and novel for its 6-second video format. TikTok was much the same, offering a max length of 15 seconds.
Though TikTok started in the same way, it did what Vine could not by achieving mainstream adoption — and it has continued to evolve. One of the platform’s biggest shifts came in 2022, with the announcement that creators would have the ability to produce 10-minute TikToks — the average length of a YouTube video.
On Instagram, Reels can be up to 90 seconds, and Stories can be viewed in 60-second chunks. Similarly, YouTube Shorts can be up to a minute long.
YouTube Shorts
Although YouTube Shorts were released globally in 2021, it’s taken a bit of time for them to really come into their own. Being a video-first platform already, and one with a fairly long legacy, YouTube faces a unique challenge in introducing its own short form component. It needs to balance things carefully to avoid angering its user base, as Instagram did. So the rather slow burn of Shorts becoming more prominent on the platform is understandable.
Midway through 2022, YouTube made it easier to create a Short directly from a longer form video uploaded to your channel, so creators who maybe felt they didn’t have the time or mental energy to invest in yet another video format can now simply parse their longer content into shorter clips — getting in front of new audiences and finding more subscribers just like that.
Pinterest has also slowly been integrating more video capabilities, introducing a unique live shopping forum showcasing all kinds of different creators and influencers. Since then, the company has made improvements here and there, including partnering with institutions like the Louvre museum for unique behind-the-scenes video content — a great way to showcase how other creators could use Pinterest for video.
Marketing teams should be incorporating more video into their content and social media strategies for 2023, experimenting with different video lengths and several of the new features. Next year, we expect to see even more social commerce features — paid ads, and purchase capabilities — to be coming to short-form in response to a growing need to provide a seamless buying experience, minimizing in-app interruption.
Want to know more about the short-form video marketing trend? Read quick tips for social video content and download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 4: Value of the Brand
In 2023, brands that cast too wide of a marketing net are bound to get lost and forgotten. Investing in the value of your brand identity now will only make content creation as you wade into new ad and platform features that much easier looking forward.
Tip: Create a strong brand story.
As organic reach has declined further on some social platforms, brand exposure is just one battle in the war for consumer dollars. Winning attention is one thing, but it’s the brands that consumers know, trust, and love that earn those valuable clicks. Brand awareness is a marketing team’s best tool for overcoming the limited exposure an algorithmic-based social platform may provide.
Online content visibility and discoverability are especially large obstacles for small brands contending with top-of-mind commerce giants like Amazon. And businesses of any size can find themselves in a constant game of catch-up with platform updates, such as Instagram’s test of getting rid of Recent hashtags.
At the same time, the rise of consumers using TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms as search engines makes the playing field a bit more level for brands with strong identities. In 2023, a large part of strong brand identities will rest on in-depth, real-time knowledge of target audiences in niche, online communities.
Across industries, marketers and brands that get the clicks in 2023 will do so via in-depth consumer and audience intelligence that puts them in authentic conversation with their consumers. Additionally, creative interactive content, short- form video, holistic brand experiences across platforms, and responsive customer service and engagement will continue to be critical brand differentiators.
Want to know more about the brand value marketing trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 5: Future of Demographics
As more marketers embrace advanced segmentation techniques, we can finally say goodbye to basic demographics and hello to better relationships with our audiences.
Marketers have relied on demographic data to segment their audiences for a long time, grouping people together based on things like their age, gender, geography, education, and income levels. While this has enabled them to make broad assumptions about different groups of people, it’s always been something of a blunt instrument.
With the huge amount of consumer data available these days, it’s now possible to segment audiences in far more sophisticated ways. By analyzing social media data, we can now understand how people form “digital tribes” based on their shared attitudes, behaviors, interests, and influences.
This gives marketers a much more useful picture of an audience segment than simply assuming that people will have something in common because of their age or where they live.
The benefits of this more powerful approach to segmentation are huge. As well as being able to target campaigns and content more effectively, businesses can gain an all-round deeper understanding of their customers, which can inform strategic decision-making far beyond the marketing department.
Want to know more about the future of demographics trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 6: The Metaverse
Marketers are always keen to jump on hot new tech trends, especially during the early stages of the hype cycle, and the metaverse is no different. Marketing Week reported that 90% of marketers plan to invest in the metaverse within the next five years.
But what exactly is the metaverse?
The concept of a metaverse has existed in science fiction for a while (notably in works such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and, later, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One) and is generally taken to mean a virtual alternative reality where people can spend time away from the real world. Think of it as the Internet, but rather than simply being a web of connected pages, it’s a 3D world you can explore, either via a VR headset or simply through a screen, the same way you would interact with a video game world.
The problem is that right now, there are several companies (Microsoft is another big player) that are talking a lot about their vision for the metaverse, and claim to be building the technologies to realize that vision, as well as any number of journalists and industry analysts sharing their predictions, but there’s very little in the way of concrete product.
The metaverse, ironically, is still very much a virtual concept. And that concept remains somewhat nebulous. To some, the metaverse really is as simple as one big virtual world where we can all come together to work, socialize, play, and shop in an immersive environment; all we need is to strap on a VR headset. If that’s the case, it’s hard to see how it’s likely to succeed where Second Life failed.
If you’re struggling to see where this is all going, you’re not the only one. In the final quarter of 2022, the tech and business press saw a flurry of reports taking a highly skeptical stance on the outlook for the metaverse, particularly in the wake of disappointing Q3 results for Meta.
Of course, it’s great to experiment with new marketing concepts, to get ahead of the curve, but at a time when marketing budgets are under close scrutiny, it seems prudent to approach the metaverse with caution.
Want to know more about the Metaverse as a marketing trend 2023? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 7: Death of Third Party Cookies
2023 won’t be the year that cookies disappear for good, but it will be the year that marketers spend time thinking about how to find an alternative to uncover similar audience insights and campaign measurement.
Midway through 2021, Google announced it was doing away with third-party cookies, which allow other sites to access your customers’ data, which they can then use for advertising, selling, or other purposes.
The original target date from Google for officially ending cookies was the end of 2023, however marketers now have a bit more breathing room. As of July 2022, the deadline has been extended to 2024. But regardless, we are now entering the endgame for adjusting strategy.
In anticipation of doing away with third-party cookies, marketers will need to reconsider how to achieve and measure the success of their online advertising campaigns, email marketing, brand awareness, and other key marketing initiatives.
One major shift that will take place here is gathering “first-party” directly from the customer. That is, data the customer provides, or agrees to provide on apps and websites. Some say this method is actually better because it provides more relevant and accurate information that you can use to improve your marketing.
Related to this, many marketers may start using “contextual marketing,” which targets based on content that people view, rather than matching only their data. This definitely seems like a wise move, as demographic data only goes so far, and doesn’t truly represent interests, needs, or the idiosyncrasies of our lives that lead to purchase decisions.
Want to know more about third-party cookies as a marketing trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 8: Social Media Integrations
As we enter 2023, we expect to see more social platforms incorporating new features in partnership with other services
and technologies.
More and more social platforms are looking to other companies, platforms, or creators to innovate. Here are some of the integrations we’ve been keeping an eye on.
Music licensing
In 2022, Meta, YouTube, and Snapchat made interesting updates to facilitate more open music use — a traditionally sticky area when it comes to legality and copyright. Meta introduced a rev-share program wherein licensed music can be added to the content, paying the music artist through ad revenue. YouTube added a music library where creators can legally access a broader range of music (for a small fee) and remain monetized.
Geotargeting
There’s also been some movement in geotargeting features promoting experiences, travel, and events. Snapchat got in on the fun by partnering with Ticketmaster earlier in 2022 to bring its users easy ways to buy tickets to events in-app. On Twitter, businesses can now add a map feature and additional information, such as opening hours.
Attracting new audiences
Another key trend we expect to see on social platforms in 2023 is the focus on widening their user bases through different kinds of partnerships. For example, Snapchat sought to bring a new audience into the fold when they partnered with European football league LaLiga.
Pinterest is also doing some legwork to attract new audiences, partnering with various celebrities, influencers, and institutions to produce video series and live streams.
Want to know more about social media integrations as a marketing trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 9: Instagram Reels
Instagram made a few big changes and updates in 2022, but none were as noticeable or met with as vocal of a response as their decision to replace all versions of video, with the exception of Stories, with Reels.
This update was a long time coming and certainly not surprising. Instagram hasn’t made its strong push to video-first a secret — or its desire to keep up with TikTok.
So what updates has Instagram introduced to try to prevent its users from becoming Tiktok users? Here are a few of the biggest:
• Converting all videos into Reels
• Allowing users to respond to comments with Reels
• Introducing several Reels templates
• Extending the maximum length to 90 seconds
• Releasing remixing and collaborations features
• Developing achievement badges to encourage Reels creation
If your brand still isn’t on the Reels bandwagon, 2023 might be the time to invest in this short-form video format. Reels offer a wealth of opportunities for brands, especially as Instagram continues to improve usability. It has also been well established that today’s consumer values authenticity, and Reels are a great medium for giving your current customers, as well as potential customers, behind-the-scenes glimpses into your brand.
Instagram seems to be very focused on functionality right now, keeping up with TikTok’s updates and new features. But if the company truly wants to differentiate (which, again, is unclear at this point), it is going to need to think outside the box, or at least a bit more adjacent to the box.
We’ll be watching this closely — in particular, it will be interesting to see if Instagram taps into its own creator cohort to advertise; similar to the "TikTok Taught Me” campaign.
Tip: Learn more about Instagram Reels. Want to know more about Reels as a marketing trend? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Marketing Trend 10: Interactive Content
Along with offering marketers an added source of consumer insights, interactive content is a major brand differentiator and critical weapon against the algorithm. Overall, the creative bar to keep consumer interest and engagement will only get higher as 2023 unfolds.
In the era of endless scrolling, marketers need interactive content more than ever to capture consumer attention and engagement. That fact was clear throughout 2022 as top social platforms continued investing in features to help bring entertainment and shopping experiences to users wherever they may be.
TikTok introduced interactive add-ons, Twitter started testing interactive ads, and Spotify rolled out clickable CTAs to accompany podcast ads — all giving marketers more opportunities to attract engagement from each platform’s dedicated user bases.
Meanwhile, marketers and brands have become more innovative about deploying interactive content that makes consumers feel engaged and seen. Some standout examples include Google Search’s look back at its history and, of course, Spotify’s annual, personalized Wrapped campaign.
Notably, interactive content is more closely wedded with social commerce with each passing day. For example, Snap rolled out shoppable AR lenses in 2022, beginning with ones from MAC and Ulta that let users “try on” cosmetics and immediately buy them. 2023 will see even more innovation in how marketers use AR to drive conversions.
Across platforms, brands continued innovating with evergreen favorites like branded filters. One popular example is Fenty Beauty’s contour filter created with influencer Grace M. Choi. Outside of custom branded ones, filters play major parts in Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat trends, offering another avenue for brands to connect and communicate with their audiences.
Want to know more about interactive content as a marketing trend for 2023? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
Conclusion on the Marketing Trends 2023
We should not be intimidated by the 10 marketing trends mentioned above and the necessary adjustments they will require us marketers to make in 2023.
The changes and trends we've seen this year have opened up countless new opportunities and possibilities for brands and marketers. Yes, the digital marketing landscape is changing, but by embracing and adapting to these changes, we can improve not only our digital marketing strategies, but the overall customer experience.
With a healthy combination of these 2023 marketing trends, you can engage directly and specifically with your target audience.
Want to learn more about how you can adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape? Check out our Meltwater suite for marketing professionals or simply for a free consultation with our experts.
Would you like to learn more about additional marketing trends for 2023? Download the marketing trends 2023 guide for free →
