2022 was certainly a year to remember. The Lionesses brought it home, we had more Prime Ministers than hot dinners, Apple was the first company to reach $3 trillion and sadly Her Majesty, the Queen passed away after a historical 70-year reign.

As we move into 2023, we expect to see even more change, especially in the marketing world. Here’s our take on the marketing trends for 2023.

Authenticity and marketing data

Jaime Gee, Managing Director

As we saw in 2022, there will be a stronger focus on authenticity and moving away from pushy sales messaging to brands connecting with customers via meaningful content. The Jammers have touched upon this in all of their predictions below, and providing useful and relevant information to audiences will drive customer loyalty and be a key tool for relationship building, particularly for B2B brands.

Authentic, relevant and useful content can drive meaningful conversations and demonstrate a brand’s commitment to its industry and its understanding of its customers’ pain points, and more importantly, how to solve them. Rich content, such as white papers, thought leadership pieces, blogs and vlogs, news announcements etc will provide learning and insight, helping build authentic and meaningful relationships between brands and customers.

Anna Savage, Associate Director

Authenticity will continue to be important throughout 2023. Following a period where many think they have been served with ‘fake news’, consumers are now looking for brands to provide the proof with the pudding. They no longer want to hear marketing speak, but want to see brands live by authentic values and ethics.

Brands need to be prepared to address this through their branding, messaging and content marketing to ensure they meet the needs of their customers.

PR has had a notoriously difficult time proving its worth but with the analytics and reporting technology available now, businesses are once again beginning to see the real value it can offer.

Businesses should be looking for agencies who can present back on basic KPIs like brand awareness and sentiment, engagement and quality web traffic, as well as delving deeper into tailored metrics that really matter to each specific business and demonstrate how activity is helping to meet objectives. This will help them to understand that PR is an important part of the marketing mix.

Emotive social media content

Liam Moran, Midweight Creative

I think in 2023 content across social media will focus largely on evoking an emotion/reaction from the audience. Recently we’ve seen brands become a lot more transparent and authentic with their audiences and more platforms are adapting and adding features to promote authenticity like BeReal. Similarly, other popular platforms like TikTok encourage fast-paced video content, which promotes quick reactions and relatable content triggers an instant emotion.

AI in design and marketing

Dave Gee, Creative Director

My prediction is the increase of artificial intelligence in design and marketing – it’s becoming really useful and not just a nice-to-have gimmick. I think it is brilliant. 

But there is a big grey area around IP. Some face AI apps have come underfire as they are using ‘any kind’ of image source to generate the result. It will be interesting to see how this develops through the year. 

Dan, Senior Creative

I think the debate will go on about AI in all areas of the creative industry from marketing to copy to design. 

From a design perspective, one belief is it’ll be a great tool to speed up processes and help with the development of ideas, plus give more traditional artists a new way of working in the digital age. 

The other side of the coin is being cautious about how much we let AI into our space, can it really ’think’ like a human? Will clients become accustomed to and believe there’s no value in the human side of a client/agency relationship? 

Another side of caution comes from whether AI is actually stealing work as its reference points for mimicking styles that haven’t been consented to by artists. The role of social media and users sharing art and data for free has shaped the algorithm to a point where creatives may no longer be  needed. It’s an interesting topic, no one really has the answers to at the minute.

Intent built into content

Amy Shirtcliffe, Digital Specialist

It’s all about intent. Google updates have constantly shifted more and more in this direction for years for SEO, and it’s no surprise other channels are following suit. Marketers can no longer rely on fairly basic audience builds – they need to gain some real insights on the ‘why’ to make sure their targeting and messaging truly align with the intent of the people they’re speaking to.

Low-fi social media video

Alex Davies, Junior Account Executive

I can see short, low-fi authentic video content continue to perform this year. This is what is grabbing and keeping the audience’s attention, less branding and being more relatable are what social media users want to see. This has increased with the likes of reels and TikTok. However, I do predict that we will see continuous changes in platform algorithms, and I think it will become more challenging to predict how content will perform.

Looking for an agency to execute your marketing strategy in 2023? Get in touch and let’s talk!