Thoughts, Tools & Tactics: Marketing Soothsaying for 2023
In the past, I’ve been relatively decent about giving you guys some educated guesses on the future of marketing. Not just the following year but how one ripple begets another. So let’s dive in, and I want to hear more from you about your thoughts too!
SKYNET MARKETING —
I think next year is the beginning of a multi-year stretch of artificial intelligence-created content: visuals and copy (which is scary AF, but we're going to have to go through it); and it’s already begun:
If you think the AI character above [feels] weird, you’re not alone. But younger consumers and brands are attracted to the odd because it does a masterful job of breaking through the clutter. For instance, this bot is becoming a fashion name with almost 3m followers (at the time of this post) on INSTA.
DATA HAGGLING —
We will see more product scouting, digital currencies, and payment solutions (crypto 2.0). I'm forecasting that as we get closer to a cookieless future, there will be a 'data bartering' phase with brands and users where an exchange of offerings is given for trackable data. You go on a site and agree to have X# of data points tracked during your engagement; for this, the brand will mark down prices, toss in extras, or perhaps graph rewards/related considerations upon purchase or subscription.
How much will your “Digital Self” be worth? —
Even in light of the crypto’s seemingly public meltdown, are companies seeking to allow you to create your digital “self” into a monetizable entity. DataCoining, and other browsers such as Orion and even Mozilla are seeking to put most, if not all, of your data into your hands to generate value.
Persona + audience ÷ by interest ÷ community —
I once heard it asked, “would you rather have 10,000 unengaged people following your brand or 100 fanatical loyalists?” The answer to this question may not be as cut and dry as you think. Sadly, we are reaching an all-time high where ratings/reviews and follower counts transactionally matter in the minds of the cover-reading populous. Nevertheless, and with a very heavy caveat that your brand/product is niche-oriented or subject to a smaller concentric ring of interests, that small and rabid is better. Need a decoder ring yet?
This means understanding not only your ideal customer but their like-minded audience. Marketing professionals spend a lot of time talking about personas. These personas often outline the perfect candidate for your product or service. However, this is one buyer mindset. This person has an actionable trigger of asking for their desired purchase or consideration of purchase. Therefore, looking at a like-minded audience with varying consumer mindsets about what makes them purchase has become more critical than the individual. So how do you make it work?
BUILD (a lot of) Fearless CONTENT —
SO much MORE variable content creation must be done, then — TEST IT!
⚠️ Brands — no matter how much your agency [claims] to be testing their efforts on your behalf, chances are insanely high they're doing little to none because they're scared if they go back to the (often tragically non-existent budget) well to make more content to optimize you’ll shit-can them. Therefore, you might be sitting on far more success than you’re seeing, but you need to BUILD and TEST and BUILD and TEST! Rinse and repeat! Do you think the best products in the world get there on the first try?
Agencies must begin to craft budgets dynamically — assigning fixed budgets on the front of production with encapsulated micro-budgets that will act as test subjects. All categories of work need to align with what amounts to performance bonuses, allowing your marketing teams to move money, time, and efforts to data-backed directives that work and let progressively-tested underperforming marketing efforts roll up. But this is not a one-and-done marketing world because one persona is one sale and one buyer sentiment.
Content creators at your fingertips —
We will see a growing number of tools within tools for content creation. Watch for royalty-free photo houses like:
Vintage:
Feminine Stock:
Sorry for the exhaustive list, but the point of this site is content you can use, not just me making shit up.
So, back to the point of integrated content options. CANVA, as a tool, is one of the best one-stop-shop for entry-level SMBs to use if they have no budget for a creative team. Why is that? They understood that they would simply be the average solution without simple UI and access to GOOD templates and royalty-free content. Now tools like Squarespace and more are porting in these options to build on the fly and keep your attention where it belongs – on the content, not on the hunt for it. With the onset of AI tools like Dream, and Lensa and copy tools like Copymatic, content creators are more at liberty to craft their visions.
See it? Find it! On a collision course with wearable technologies —
More often than not, we could fixate on new technologies or tactics, and we only see the "shiny thing." This fact has been part of my makeup for most of my career. Example: You see a new social media channel, pick it up, play with it, kick the tires, see if it can be used for clients or self-promotional purposes, and then toss it in your wheelhouse or kicked to the curb. Now more than ever, I look at any of these topics, trends, and/or tactics, and push myself to find any connected threads that will coalesce into something far more disruptive. Take for instance, Google’s “Find That Thing” search:
On the surface, you're probably getting the same feeling that I did "I've seen this kind of thing before." Agreed. But we need to be more tangential, and take a dose of futurism and think — what if. I envision modalities like this integrated into wearable technologies, recreating the world around us into a commerce/informational data explosion. That and GEO-featured APIs and you’ll be an epicenter of connectivity. They better have a way to shut that shit it off as well.
Making Smart Small & Fun (“aka” Bite-Sized) Content —
The K.I.S.S. factor that is so prevalent in user interface and user experience has rapidly been adopted over the course of the past half a dozen years in contact creation and its marketing. So what is the problem? Storytellers, by their very nature, are not succinct. They want to romanticize, emphasize, and mesmerize you to a special place, time, event, etc.
There’s, of course, nothing wrong with this — it’s the gift we receive when watching a captivating movie, reading a powerful book, or the motivation created in the spoken word. The problem? Time and attention. The monetization model for short-form video is undoubtedly one of the fastest trajectories we've seen on the Internet in the past decade—the success of channels such as TikTok, Facebook stories, Instagram, and others. We are seeing the need to embrace and reconstruct our modalities surrounding storytelling into short-form, effective marketing.
With all of these points made, I believe there is a real need for a resurrection of the educational community, especially learning designers, to come to the forefront and work with marketing professionals. Now more than ever, we need to aggregate complex scenarios and process them into easily understandable "bite-sized" realities.