Top 5 marketing trends for 2023 - And how Affinio can help

The marketing landscape is forever changing. Meaning, there will always be new strategies, platforms, tools, and algorithms to pay attention to. Marketers must continuously anticipate and adjust to these changing trends. 

You can’t do it all though — otherwise, you’d blow through your marketing budget pretty quickly, which is why we handpicked our Top Five Marketing Trends to pay attention to in 2023 (and one tool to help you with all of it).

1. Influencer marketing will continue to grow

In 2022, influencer marketing took off, and there's no sign of it stopping in 2023. 

Hubspot predicts that 89 percent of marketers who use influencer marketing will grow or keep their investment in it in the upcoming year. 

And it’s not all about hiring big-name celebrity influencers either — micro-influencers are used by more than 56 percent of companies. 

In 2023, every brand needs to have an influencer marketing strategy. 

Simply put, when you work with an influencer, you get access to an influencer's entire audience. This helps you gain new followers, more site visits, and more products sold.

Influencer marketing has an ROI that is 11X greater than that of traditional digital marketing techniques and 46 percent of consumers say they rely on influencer recommendations before making a purchase. 

Fortunately, finding influencers has become a lot easier, largely due to the tremendous growth of social media. But not just anyone can effectively advertise your product; there has to be the right fit between your product, the influencer, and your audience. Otherwise, you’re wasting money on the wrong influencer and the wrong audience. 

The easiest way to choose micro and macro influencers—while also guaranteeing that they are the right fit for your audience—is by using an audience intelligence tool like Affinio, which was recently acquired by Audiense.

Affinio uses an audience-first approach; it collects everyone following your brand on social and displays the top influencers that they follow, giving you the perfect brand and ambassador synergy. The best part is that each influencer is scored on how relevant and niche they are to your audience — completely removing the guesswork in the vetting process.

Considering the brand, Reformation, below, when you run a report on its audience using Affinio, the report includes an entire section that lists the top influencers for that brand in order of how relevant and unique they are to that audience. That means you can search for both macro and micro-influencers, and you can categorize them by the type of influencer you are looking for (i.e. Celebrity, Author, Athlete, Host, Actress, Blogger, Creative, etc.) 

When it comes to creating your influencer marketing strategy, its success ultimately depends on the influencer you choose, and how well they reflect your brand and resonate with your target audience. Without audience relevance, brand ambassadors can just end up costing you. 

The beauty of an audience intelligence tool means it removes the guessing game and generates the perfect influencer and audience mix that is guaranteed to see results and secure loyal customers.

2. Increased investment in social responsibility content

Hubspot predicts “nearly twice as many marketers who produce social responsibility content (89 percent) aim to raise or maintain their investment in 2023.”

Forty percent of Millennials and 50 percent of Gen Z'ers want businesses to take a position on social issues including climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, gender inequity, and racial justice. 

In light of all of this, businesses have started to change their social media strategy to concentrate more on inclusive activities, promotions, and products, while also emphasizing the causes or missions they support. 

And 68 percent of Gen Z say that the brands they do choose to buy from, end up being the ones that reflect or share their same values and beliefs — they will show more loyalty to brands that don’t just make a great product but contribute to a shared cause. 

So, how do you choose which social cause to support and target the right group with the right social responsibility messaging?

Affinio allows you to view your entire audience and identify which consumer segments are gen z and millennials. From there, easily analyze these clusters of customers and find out what they are most passionate about, and which social causes they support: 

Affinio also allows you to advertise directly to that audience with your socially responsible content, by sending that audience list right to Twitter to be activated. 

3. Sales and marketing team alignment

What if sales and marketing teams could align from one source of truth? 

Teams that have access to the same audience insights that can be used for both sales and marketing tactics are the ones who will come out on top in 2023. 

A sure sign that a marketing and sales team is not on the same page, is when their buyer personas don’t match. Having the most accurate representation of your buyer profile makes it easier for both sides to know exactly who to target and how. 

What’s sad is that a lot of companies still don’t know who their core audience is, or what their ideal customer profile looks like, so both teams suffer. 

Your Ideal Customer Profile or your ICP is a description of the ideal customer your organization strives to acquire. Creating one is a much more detailed process than just identifying your target audience. It aims to dive deep into the emotional and behavioral side of that customer. 

The exercise of creating an ICP helps you understand who, why, and how someone is buying your product. 

These semi-fictional characters are designed to supply you with an overall understanding of how your consumers think and feel about your brand. When you can put yourself in their shoes, you’ll be able to craft better-targeted messaging.

Customer Profiles are made from a mix of market research and real customer data. They act as one source of truth for your whole organization to work back from and become more morcustomer-centereded. 

So you might be wondering - how do you go about building one? We’ve created a helpful guide here. But to summarize, we used Affinio to research our target customer, and used the insights to build a profile like the one you see below: 

*See the reports we used to gain these insights below 

This profile is used by both our sales and marketing teams when building out our inbound and outbound strategies — it’s our one source of truth.

4. Curated content 

Businesses place a lot of emphasis on producing original content, but depending on your budget and the size of your marketing team, you might not be able to produce as much as you’d like to. This is why you should also focus on sharing curated content, through your social channels and email marketing campaigns. 

Curated content still provides value to your customers, as long as it's relevant. Consider sharing industry news, interviews, podcasts, and press releases that have an effect on your target audience - as long as it’s informative and insightful, you are still adding value to your customers. 

Knowing the type of content they are looking for can involve some guesswork, so it’s best to take a data-backed approach. Affinio can highlight the most relevant publishers and media channels for your audience so that you can identify the best sources of curated content. That way you know that what you’re sending will be appreciated:

5. Podcasts and audio advertising

The number of people who listen to podcasts could approach 160 million in 2023,  according to Statista. Podcasts present a fantastic opportunity for marketers because they can communicate with customers around the globe, and highlight the ideas and solutions their product provides. Podcasts can also help establish your brand as an industry thought leader.

Three out of every four weekly podcast listeners claim to have taken action after hearing a podcast ad. When the host incorporates advertisements into the program rather than utilizing prefabricated audio commercials that don't fit in and disturb the content, podcast listeners can get a smooth listening experience. 

You could consider launching your own podcast or inviting the founder of your business to appear as a guest on an existing podcast. If your team does have the bandwidth - understand which podcasts your audience already listens to, to source ideas for the topics and guests you could host: 

If your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to create its own podcast, choose to advertise through existing ones. Affinio can highlight the podcasts you should be buying advertisements on, in order to ensure you are reaching your target audience:

Keeping up with 2023 marketing trends doesn’t have to take up your entire marketing budget, or even require a huge marketing team - but it does require the right tools. 

Affinio acts as your number-one resource for influencer identification, social responsibility direction, sales and marketing alignment, curated content, and podcast marketing. 

If you’re interested in enhancing your marketing strategy in 2023 with rich consumer insights, try Affinio.