MARKETING REPORT 2023
MARKETING REPORT 2023
The Social Juice presents the Curated Marketing Report 2023, featuring insights from 138 reports and input from over 200 industry professionals. Elevate your strategy in 2023.
Introduction the social juice x ahrefs
This Marketing Report is a compilation of over 200 marketing statistics from market research conducted by Harvard, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, Hubspot, and many others. It took more than 200 hours to research and write this report for marketers. In addition to the statistics, I also conducted surveys to find out what consumers and marketers are looking forward to this year. I made sure that this report is extremely valuable to marketers. With this report, I also wanted to preview what freemium reports can be to help marketers because most free reports in the market are lead magnets and aren’t helpful to marketers. That’s why I curated this report with the incentive of providing insights into marketing channels that still work in 2023 and will continue to thrive.
Writing this report was going to take a significant amount of time and effort, so I reached out to about sponsoring the report. They were more than happy to do so. I personally discovered Ahrefs through their posts on Reddit in r/BigSEO. Here's one of my favorite reads for you to read and learn. And now with their latest tool, Ahrefs Webmaster's tool is a free-to-use part of Ahrefs. With the ability to identify and fix on-page SEO issues, track your organic keyword rankings, and monitor backlinks, Webmaster's tool is the one-stop shop for all your SEO needs. One of my favorite features is the alerts about your website whenever it ranks on new keywords. Best feeling ever!
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Marketing in 2023: The Emphasis on Personalized Engagement
Read on for an overview & In-depth analysis of Current State of Marketing & Consumer Behaviour Trends in 2023
Influencer Marketing
2023
Content Marketing
2023
Social Media Trends
2023
SEO Trends
2023
Consumer Trends
2023
Advertising Trends
2023
Email Marketing
2023
Video Marketing
2023
Marketing Software Trends
Coming Soon
Audio Marketing
Coming Soon
Marketing Skills
Coming Soon
A word from Jaskaran
With this, you have reached the end of this report. I hope you enjoyed reading it. But I have one more gift for you – this report will be updated every month with new statistics added to different parts of the report. The reason for this is to make sure that you come back to this report every month and gain more knowledge about not only marketing in 2023 but also marketing in the following months of 2023. The updates will continue until September to help you elevate your strategies throughout the beginning of 2023.
Once again, I would like to thank our sponsor, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, for helping me finish writing this report. In 2023, with our report and Ahrefs tool, you will reach new heights with your marketing channels.
This report was curated, written, and researched by Jaskaran and beautifully designed by Hardik. We will see you next year with the 2024 report, or you can subscribe below to receive our weekly newsletter.
© 2023 Jaskaran Saini. All rights reserved.
Influencer Marketing
Expected market size by end of 2023: $17.4+ Billion
Current Size: $16.4 Billion
Average amount spent on an Influencer: $257
Online Purchases Influenced: 40% (collabstr)
Creators aren’t Influencers: Only 14% of creators are Influencers having a high impact on their audiences. (Adobe)
Brands that included links to the website achieved 11.4% higher ROI with Influencer Campaigns. (Harvard)
Among new businesses to influencer marketing, the most asked question to Influencers and Agencies: “How does this convert to ROI?” (Oglivy)
Influencer Marketing Campaigns announcing new products can have a bad effect on ROI with an average decrease of 30.5%. (Harvard)
Emerging Trends: Shift to Micro-Influencers, Both Tiktok and Instagram micro-Influencers have more engagement than Top 5 Influencers of Platform in relevant niches.
Content Marketing
Expected Market Size by End of 2023: $88.17+ Billion
Current Size: $76.09 Billion
83% of Companies are increasing their content production budget in 2023. (NP Digital)
Video Content was the leading format used by Content Marketers to reach new audiences. (Hubspot)
2 out of every 3 people globally expect Branded Content to show empathy towards them or their beliefs. (istock)
Only 50% of Content Marketers focus on better content distribution to compete with competitors.
83% of them focus mostly on producing better content than competitors. (MarketingProfs)
The most Reliable metrics to measure content performance among marketers are conversions (70%), quality of leads (60%), and website engagement (57%). (CMI)
Emerging Trends: Shift to Short Form Content, Decrease in Paid Content Distribution, Leveraging AI & Automation.
Social Media Trends
Instagram’s Own Vision: Adam Mosseri CEO shared that IG will work on making the platform more personal with features like IG notes & Upcoming Group features. Also mentioned they are working on fixing IG reels and Photos engagement. (CEO)
Updates to Instagram’s Creator Marketplace will help Brands & creators send payments within the app. (Post)
Instagram reels are heavily influenced by trending sounds and will continue to act like that. You can use these two free resources to find sounds: justcollab & reels tips.
The number of Hashtags doesn’t matter in your Post. As the study by Social Insider suggests there is less than a 1% engagement difference with the usage of more vs fewer hashtags. It’s something to leave behind in 2022.
Instagram creator's preferred format is Carousels & Reels. In our own survey of marketers & creators, Carousels are preferred due to elements of storytelling that they can expand on the topics + carousels are previewed 2 times in your feed by the algorithm.
Predicted Trends by Instagram: Climate Friendly Beauty Products, DIY clothing, and Digital Avatars representing Various Niches.
PPC Trends: Instagram advertisers have shown curiosity regarding the new Advantage + Ad format to market on Instagram alongside Facebook. But Instagram Story Ads are still one of the most preferred Ad Format.
At last our own Instagram Prediction from 1.5 years of tracking. Instagram isn’t changing a lot but the KPIs used for the platform will be changed. Likes will not hold the value as the key metrics, the focus will move to story views and comment engagement to track your progress and the average value of IG influencers.
Our Instagram survey: 16% of Marketers will try to shift to New platforms, and 45% are going to stick with IG in 2023. 5% will only use IG for Advertising & 32% will utilize IG but not as the main social channel.
LinkedIn launched “Focused Inbox” to protect users from the constant cold outreach on the platform. One of the first predictions about LinkedIn is using LinkedIn outreach as a growth strategy still works but the quality of automated outreach needs to be better.
As we tracked in Q3 2022, LinkedIn updated it’s search algorithm to provide users with better content. With that update, LinkedIn wanted to push keyword-reach content to the audience that’s more relevant to the users. The use of keyword-rich content in 2023 will be seen.
LinkedIn Post formats like Document Posts, Polls & Carousels lead are the most engaged formats while Posts with links in them get the least amount of engagement. (Report)
33-% of thought leaders on LinkedIn believe that the overall quality of their content is excellent while only 29% C-Suite executives believe that for their content. (Edelman)
44% of posts that generated an emotional response had a better Click through rate. (LinkedIn)
LinkedIn’s various representatives shared through their blogs and events their thoughts about content repurposing. One of the keys mentions where repurposing their LinkedIn Live & webinar content as posts.
LinkedIn Newsletters were one of the key formats utilized by B2B organizations to generate brand awareness and spread their messaging to their target audience in 2022 and the trend will continue this year.
The Hiring rate in the US, India, Australia and the UK has decreased since 2021 which has caused high activity on LinkedIn as a platform. The number of daily active users is increasing for the platform. (Talent)
The last trend I have tracked is LinkedIn focusing on bringing creators to the platform to attract the next generation of Gen-Z users to the platform. This year, there were multiple events and times the platform invited creators through their programs and updates to creator mode. That’s also the reason the platform is one of the most organic platforms right now after Tiktok.
Snapchat & AR Trends
Snapchat’s AR report shows that two-third of AR shoppers tend to make easier decisions with help of AR. (Report)
Snapchat’s Sophisticated Lenses help to derive more brand awareness and influence purchase intent while Simple lenses are less influencing for a few niches. (AR)
Snapchat’s audience is mostly Gen-Z & Millennials and the platform has 75% of those audiences. (Report)
Snapchat Users are loyal to the platform. 51% of daily Snapchatters age 16+ do not use TikTok every day, 41% do not use Facebook every day and 67% do not use Twitter every day. (Snap)
Facebook
Facebook’s Guide on How to get your content seen focused on telling businesses to focus more on your content’s shareability to grow your account. That’s the main growth driver, not the algorithm. (Report)
Facebook announced they condemn Watchbait, and Clickbait to make people watch the content from start to end. But the opposite is being practiced, most of the content going viral in various niches is the one keeping users hooked till the end of the video. (Meta)
Facebook isn’t attracting Gen-Z audiences while 7% of Gen-Z users on FB are planning to quit the platform this year. (Forrester)
Facebook users are using the platform as a new source more than users of any other platform. But Tiktok is catching up with the social media giant slowly and is predicted to take over this year. (Pew)
Facebook Ad Targeting options in the EU are predicted to suffer in 2023 due to new EU laws and regulations. (CNET)
You might see Facebook’s change to make the platform experience better with tests like sending fewer notifications and Quiet mode on IG. The platform is moving toward real-time user demands.
Twitter
Twitter Ad spending is dropped more than 70% since Elon musk’s takeover. This year it will be harder to gain the trust of advertisers back for twitter. (Reuters)
As Elon Musk says, Twitter will be more honest about the advertising data to gain the trust of advertisers again. Recently Elon musk has previewed platform insights in various presentations.
The platform is going through a lot of transitions but Elon promised various creators on the platform to have better monetization & content formats on twitter. He will try to attract creators as much as possible.
50% of consumers in a survey said Brands did great by boycotting Twitter after the Elon musk takeover. (DIW)
Reddit
Reddit is also running the visual content marathon between every social media platform. The platform is supposedly working on making the platform more visual & focused on video content. A recent update regarding this was bringing image comments to selected subreddits.
Reddit is making adjustments to its Ad platform as often many advertisers complain about bot traffic and it’s changing. Last year, Reddit launched more than 23 updates to its platform and recently launched the “Reddit for business” official website for Advertisers to learn about Reddit Ads.
Reddit is also constantly rehiring Silicon Valley employees from Meta, Pinterest & Youtube. These hirings tell us Reddit is still growing steadily and is a place to market your business & especially validate ideas.
Reddit has the most dominant US demographics with 50% of desktop traffic in 2022 from the US. (Post)
Pinterest
Overall Pinterest will continue to thrive this year for selective niches. There are a few changes coming to Idea Pins to make creators utilize the new feature. Pinterest also shut down the Creator funds program in Q4 2022. The program will be launching again this year for selective creators.
- Pinterest Trend Predictions 2023:
In Finance, Pinterest predicts upto 135% increase in content related to financial challenges like Budget & savings.
In Parenting, Increase of Gender Flag content up-to +285%.
In Travel, up-to 105% increase in Train related travel.
In Beauty, Clean Scalp & Hair colour related trends to increase more than 70% on platform.
In Entertainment, Trends around House music to grow about 185%.
In Fashion, Romcom, Sci-fi, & long sleeve content trends are predicted to increase.
Growing & Falling Platforms
Twitter’s rival Mastodon is attracting new audiences but suffering to keep users engaged. (Guardian)
Discord is joining the conversations as the growth continues and they have also acquired “Gas - A teenage Social Networking App” to attract more Gen-Z users to the platform.
BeReal is going nowhere because of its platform messaging- Transparency. Gen-Z their target audience loves Transparency and with that platform won’t die. But they have to find new ways to keep users engaged. Currently, Brands are using BeReal for Ad creatives.
As The Social Juice tracked Clubhouse last year. There were more than 20 updates made to the platform to make the UX better but the platform will not make a comeback this year. As per our analysis & hearing the CEO’s vision they are focusing on community building which might work but be hard to bring the platform to the mainstream again.
Seo Trends
Growing SEO Practices among Marketers (most time spent on): Technical SEO (15%) SEO strategy Planning (13.5%) Keyword Research (13.5%) On-page SEO (12.9%) (SEJ)
88% of SEO Marketers will continue to increase their budget for SEO in 2023. (Hubspot)
Backlinks help Google To find more pages. But they don’t promise Higher rankings on Google Search. (John Mueller)
Biggest Changes in SEO 2023 predicted by SEOs: Machine Learning (18.7%), Google Updates (18%), Third party cookie depreciation (13.9%), Google zero-click pages (12.9%) (Rock Content)
SEO Predictions From The Social Juice
The Findings below are generated from my research and tracking of Google’s Search Updates in 2022. While writing In The Social Juice, I was tracking most updates related to SEO. These are my personal Insights!
Google will prefer more Interactive content in the search with Blogs with in-built polls, queries, and web elements that promote the human element.
There will be Google Search Updates related to Content Guidelines to prevent AI content from spamming search. Reading and using Google’s Article Structure Data needs to be considered with every post.
Focus on making your website mobile-friendly first and build a better UX. Google 2020 has pushed Mobile-first Indexing but from recent talks. It’s said to be coming in Mid 2023.
Changes to Google Search Console, Google will add new changes regarding content indexing through GSC. There will be more thoughts on what to index and what to not. And these changes might help SEOs.
Google can’t stop AI content but it will work on stopping generic content. AI can generate quality content too with good prompts. This year, google will work on promoting helpful content and which can include AI generated Helpful content
Consumer Trends
95% of buyers in any given category aren’t actively looking to purchase. They need to be informed about their needs. (LinkedIn)
Every Year, Consumers are becoming more dependent on Buy Now Pay later. 48% of Gen-Z planned to use BNPL last holiday season, followed by 47% of millennials. With rescission fear and low budgets, the dependence will increase in 2023 too. (RD)
Consumers found 48% of landing page destinations either not similar to the Ad or could use improvements. According to Meta & Brand Building’s report, Consumers like seamless continuity.
Consumers in food&beverages, Mom&kids, FinServ, Grocery & Beauty Niches are the most active consumers on Internet with on average reach out of 2-3 times per week to businesses through chat or social media. (Facebook)
34% of consumers say brands and retailers make sustainability information too difficult to find. That’s why businesses are focusing on making sustainable information easy to access for consumers. (Product)
32% of Consumers say if a celebrity is behind a brand or backs a business. They will trust the brand more. (Report)
75% of consumers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in the values. (Battery)
39% of Gen X use Facebook for Purchase inspiration, 31% of millennials also use Facebook. For Gen Z Facebook is not even in Top 3, with 26% of Gen-Zs using Youtube & 24% using Tiktok. (Emplifi)
70% of Netflix users are ready to pay full price in case password sharing ends this year. (Report)
Consumers from age 25 to 44 said they loved the posts that reminded them of their past. (Mintel)
Users are spending lesser and lesser time reading your emails. The average time dropped from 13.4 to 9 seconds. (Litmus)
61% of consumers want the ability to share their streaming profiles across platforms to get better personalised content. (Accenture)
Why Consumers are abandoning purchases: 37% limited payment options, other 37% due to poor navigation and layout. With 33% leaving due to slow speed. (Storyblok)
Gen-Z wants brands to share memes to connect better while baby boomers don’t want to engage with humour activities in Brand Engagement. (Gwi)
89% of consumers agree high-quality product imagery is important. (nfinite)
46% of consumers are hit with misinformation searching for new purchases and that’s a big problem. Due to that 69% of respondents in the report prefer brands actively fighting against misinformation. (DV)
Advertising Trends
Expected Ad Spending Size by End of 2023: $740.9 Billion
Current Size: $713.6 Billion
Traditional TV spending went flat in 2022 and is expected to decline in 2023 -1.9% while Connected TV will continue to increase in Ad Spending. (Dentsu)
Overall Advertising spending in 2023 is predicted to grow but slower than expected with growth in CTV &
retail media (Every Source)
US consumers don’t like when video ads automatically have sound on. Facebook’s own 70+ Ad campaign Research recommends making videos optimized for mute. (Teads)
Google Ads will have fewer user data in 2023 and third-party cookies will be removed from Chrome with the launch of
Privacy Sandbox in Q3 2023. Cookies will remain, complete removal is expected in 2024. (Google)
Emerging Trends: High Usage of First-party Data in Advertising, Shifts from Google to Bing & Amazon Ads, and Growth In Social Advertising.
Trends Tracked By The Social Juice
Usage of UGC & IGC content continues to grow among advertisers to market their business on Tiktok and Meta Platforms.
Growth in Retail Advertising, Walmart and Amazon in 2022 had one of the best revenue growth and brought new updates to their Ad Platforms. Like Better Local Ad Targeting & Influencer Database to attract more Advertisers.
Growth in Advertising Channels with Brand Awareness as the end goal. The channels of advertising: Podcasts & Newsletter where most brands invested to get more awareness, will continue to grow this year.
Data restrictions for Meta & Google in the EU will cause the average CPM to go up as both platforms will have a hard
time acquiring data. EU Digital Market Acts will limit the usage of data for both platforms.
Tiktok will continue to be the cheapest Advertising platform in 2023. As the report from Financial Times shows advertising on Tiktok is 50-60% cheaper compared to all other social media platforms.
Reddit, Pinterest & Tumblr will be the platforms making changes to their Advertising platforms to attract more advertisers.
Email Marketing
Expected Market Size by End of 2032: $59.8 Billion
Current Size: $12.4 Billion
Email Personalization helps consumers to connect with the brand more. Elements like First Name & Brand Emojis are on the look-out in 2023 (segment)
Email Marketer’s most common objective with email campaigns was Awareness in 2022. In 2023, the focus has been shifted to customer retention. (Mailmodo)
The involvement of AI in email marketing in 2023 will rapidly increase. Most Brands are already utilizing it to create better Email campaigns & Automate fast responses. (Sendgrid)
26.7% of marketers sent Image only emails. Image-only emails aren’t good because they can cause spam issues with your email deliverability (Mailmodo)
Emerging Trends: Integration of Referral marketing in Emails, Usage of Email Newsletter to Deliver content among Brands, Optimising Your Email for Dark Mode on Mobiles. Most importantly usage of AMP emails to Increase in 2023
Video Marketing
96% of Video marketers believe the optimal length for a marketing video is under 10 minutes (HubSpot)
48% of marketers believe the integration of Video Content into their websites and blogs helped them with better
search rankings. (Mcuser)
Video marketers continue to invest in webinars to generate more brand awareness and leads. With the biggest goal of educating their customers, most organizations are investing in Webinars. (Twenty)
60% of Marketers use Views & In-platform metrics as KPIs while 44% of marketers use direct traffic from Video content as the key indicator. (Vidico)
Don’t compromise Video Marketing for the budget. Quality Videos require high budgets, 91% of marketers spend up to $50,000 on Video Campaigns. (Hubspot)
Short Form Content is the king of the video market but it’s important to use Storytelling and Brand Characters like Social Media Managers or Influencers representing your business.
Video Insights from The Social Juice
Social Media Managers replacing Influencers as Brand faces for B2B & B2C businesses. In Video content, you will find SMMs being the faces of their brands in 2023.
Repurposing of Long Form Content like Webinars and Live events to create B2B content for Tiktok & Youtube.
Shift to Broad Content, The reason why brands will shift to broad content is simple. The audiences spend time-consuming short-form content on IG, Tiktok, and Youtube shorts are there to find new interests. That’s why the broadness of content is recommended.
Usage or Storytelling in Video Marketing shouldn’t be neglected. The Frameworks being used by Video Marketers are: AIDA, SPE, and Uncertainty Bias to hook the viewers.
Usage of Trends and Clickbait hooks continues to grow, TikTok’s #Tiktokmademebuyit was one of the best examples of developing hooks that people relate to works well.
One last growing trend in video marketing, we tracked was the usage of AI-generated videos to welcome visitors to the website through tools like Loom & Synthesia AI. The involvement will continue to grow.