Nearly 80% of marketers say their industry has changed more in the last three years than in the past 50. Consumer attitudes, preferences, and ways they engage with companies are changing rapidly, and brands must quickly shift strategies and tactics in order to keep up.
In 2023, marketers should place a greater emphasis on data-based decision making, agile marketing, and brand building. These top marketing statistics for 2023 will help you prioritize your efforts to stay competitive and relevant.
Digital Advertising
In general, 55% of marketing is digital, continuing to pivot away from traditional tactics. In fact, 72% of overall marketing budgets are put toward digital marketing channels: Digital advertising spend is forecasted to reach $602.25 billion this year. For growth context, in 2021, digital spend was $436 billion and traditional advertising was only $196 billion.
When it comes to earnings, search advertising alone generates more than $202 billion, and roughly 87% of digital advertising revenue will be generated via programmatic advertising (by 2026).
Not only will digital advertising generate leads and revenue for your organization, it also can increase brand awareness by 80%.
However, your ads must be compelling, unique, and targeted, or they will be ineffective. About 70-80% of people completely ignore paid digital ads.
Content
Content can mean a lot of things, from blogs, videos, images and infographics to white papers, eBooks, webinars, social media content and more. Content marketing is still an essential piece of a marketing strategy and can drive significant ROI for brands:
- Content marketing costs more than 60% less than traditional marketing tactics but can generate more than 3x as many leads.
- Nearly 50% of businesses say SEO is their best ROI generator.
Content can also support your overall internet presence. For example, brands that have a blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t. Content on your website can support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and be applied to each of your marketing tactics.
Video
If you want your content marketing and digital advertising strategies to be successful, your brand must produce videos. It’s estimated that this year, more than 80% of the world’s internet traffic will be video. Due to this:
- Video content is 50x more likely to drive organic traffic than plain text.
- Using video on landing pages can increase conversions by more than 85%.
- Product videos can increase sales by more than 140%.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization should not be considered optional when it comes to your marketing strategy. Nearly 70% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and the first five results on first page of Google account for more than 60% of clicks. The SEO industry is actually worth about $50 billion.
49% of marketers say organic search has best ROI, and brands with a blog have 55% more traffic rate than those who don’t. To stay relevant, visible, and get ranked well enough on Google that your page gets clicks, you need good content and a solid SEO strategy.
Additionally, while the primary goal of SEO is to drive traffic, another is to generate leads and sales. Leads generated via SEO have a 15% conversion rate, and 28% of local searches result in a purchase within 24 hours.
However, while important, SEO can be difficult to master. For example, an important part of SEO is ensuring your website and content has relevant keywords throughout, but about 92% of keywords get only 10 or fewer monthly searches. This means you have to be more strategic about keywords you use and content you produce.
Another example is that there are more than 200 factors Google’s algorithm looks at when ranking a website, so there are a lot of parts that need attention and optimization. For many companies, this is a full-time job.
Note that even if you have a great strategy, about 50% of all browser-based searches on Google end with no clicks. That’s why SEO is just one of many parts of an overall marketing strategy.
Social Media
Social media may seem like it’s becoming “outdated,” especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, statistics show having a paid social presence can still drive traffic and sales for your business. Example stats include:
- 70% of marketers claim their social media efforts have resulted in an increase in website traffic.
- Instagram has the second-highest ROI of all social channels for marketers, with 84x more engagement than Twitter and 10x more than Facebook.
- 64% of consumers watching branded videos on social made a purchase after.
One key to a great social media strategy is to generate content specifically for your target audience and only be on the social media platforms they frequent – you don’t have to be everywhere in order to maximize the power of social. For example:
- TikTok’s ad reach is around 885 million people and while the largest portion of viewers are ages 10 to 19, 47.4% of users are under age 30.
- YouTube is second only to Google as the most popular search engine; one billion of hours of video are watched on YouTube each day.
- 15% of users on Facebook use the platform to shop for products, and it has an ad conversion rate of nearly 10%, the highest of all platforms.
- Instagram’s ad revenue is estimated to be nearly $51 billion in 2023.
Note that 91% of businesses use social media for marketing, meaning the advertising space on social is extremely competitive. (For example, 93% of businesses are active on Facebook, and 86% advertise. There are also more than 200 million business accounts on Instagram.)
So, you must take steps to set your brand apart from the others. One way to stand out is by taking advantage of paid video options, since fewer than 5% of businesses use Facebook video ads. With nearly 50% of Facebook users on the platform to watch videos, you can get in front of more eyes with relevant content.
Keep in mind that paid social traffic only makes up 5% of overall website traffic, so you may want to take advantage of other types of ads that drive direct messages, form fills, or conversions.
Email Marketing
Even though sending and receiving emails has been a regular part of life since the 1990s, email marketing is still relevant and should be part of both your acquisition and retention strategies for several reasons such as:
- 46% of customers prefer to be contacted by brands via email.
- Email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent. (That’s a 3600% return.)
- Revenue from email marketing is worth $8.49 billion.
However, it’s estimated that people receive about 120 marketing emails per day and only spend about 10 seconds going through a brand email (on average). Consumers are continuing to get savvier, so email marketing strategies must adjust to avoid going to spam or getting deleted. (For example, nearly 70% of consumers can tell if an email is spam by reading the subject line.)
On the other hand, about 47% of people open an email based on subject line alone, and interestingly, conversion rates increase by 56% if the email has an emoji in the subject line.
Influencer Marketing
In 2022 it seemed influencer marketing was dying as consumers began to show distrust in big brands with mega-influencers. However, it’s still alive in 2023, though strategies are pivoting to keep up with consumer preferences. Brands should focus on micro- and local influencers instead of big names, targeting niche audiences with specific products.
The primary reason brands aren’t giving up on influencer marketing just yet is due to its significant ROI. This tactic has a return of 650% (you get back $6.5 for every $1 invested), meaning it has surpassed print advertising in effectiveness.
Augmented Reality
Brands are still trying to figure out how to get into the augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI) space, but should try to put a larger focus on it in 2023. It’s predicted that this market will reach more than $461 billion by 2030. Today, 61% of shoppers prefer to shop from businesses that have augmented reality offerings.
Brands should also be deciding how to integrate the use of voice search in their tactics. More than 50% of baby boomers use voice assistants as a way to get information on the go. However, the average voice search result is only 29 words in length; stay competitive in market by increasing your content’s organic results with power keywords and other SEO tactics.
Contact Dragonfly Digital Marketing
To learn more about how we can help you develop and deploy a strong digital marketing campaign, contact Dragonfly. Call (443) 564-4634 to get started today.
