3 Marketing Strategies You Can’t Ignore To Drive Your Digital Media Growth in 2023
In light of recent turmoil in tech companies, a possible recession, and lingering inflation, it has never been more critical for companies to reallocate marketing budgets across different platforms. Now to maximize return on investment. In total, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) have lost more than $3 trillion in market value this year alone, according to Bloomberg.
Frequent mass layoffs and highly volatile tech stock prices have made companies question whether they are stable enough to continue advertising. And even so, should channel priorities change?
Some highlights of the digital media shift in 2022:
After Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter – including his abrupt departure as CEO and introducing and removing subscriptions to Twitter Blue – nervous advertisers withdrew their spending. Spending on paid media, concerns about brand safety, misinformation, and minimal content moderation. Tech layoffs are so common that they quickly became trending hashtags, including #TwitterLayoffs and #MetaLayoffs.
Meta’s valuation plummeted last February and caused Wall Street’s worst drop in nearly a year, with Meta stock dropping more than 26%, representing a $230 billion reduction in market value. It’s school, according to the New York Times. The drop comes after Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, which includes pivoting brand growth through performance-focused ads to its futuristic vision of augmented and virtual reality-focused Metaverse.
So how can executives confidently set their 2023 marketing budgets and forecast return on ad spend (ROAS) as the tech companies they’ve advertised — and become Too reliant on increasing brand awareness, new leads, and revenue — seemingly unstable?
Here are some tips for optimizing your 2023 marketing budget and plan:
1. What does the data show? Re-evaluate your analytics
The performance begins and ends with a weekly metric review. Identifying why numbers are up or down is essential to driving sustainable growth. For example, if Twitter is an important channel for your brand engagement strategy, look closely at recent trends. Are your subscribers increasing or decreasing significantly and faster than usual? An unexpected increase could be due to a bot, while a sudden drop could be due to a follower leaving the platform. If you see a significant reduction, that could affect referral traffic from Twitter to your business website, potentially resulting in fewer new visits and fewer new leads.
Tip:
For Twitter, it may be a good idea to pause ads until the platform stabilizes and reallocate that portion of the budget to another channel like TikTok, Instagram, or LinkedIn, depending on where your audience is. And for organic social media, follow comments on your company’s Twitter account. If the trend is more damaging than usual, reconsider the type of content you promote and/or how often you post. For B2B companies, it can be helpful to refocus on other channels, such as LinkedIn.
2. Who are you talking to? Reassess your audience
The way advertisers define and target audiences is changing, including the growing conflict between balancing data security best practices and personalized content delivery. To deliver a truly personalized user journey, marketers need a clear idea of who they are talking to. Challenges? There has been a growing global focus on data privacy, with government regulation coming to the fore (i.e. GDPR in the EU, Google Chrome being able to forgo third-party cookies and change iOS). Apple’s). These changes could make it more difficult for businesses to identify highly segmented audiences, track their behaviour, and evaluate paid vehicle metrics. This can affect the retargeting, measurement, and attribution of digital advertising campaigns. (The source:
Meta & Deloitte Digital, Q3 2022).
Ensure your organization clearly understands what audience data is collected, by whom, what technology tools store it, and how you plan to leverage the information in reporting and marketing communications. In other words, continue to invest in paid media campaigns but prioritize owned media by first-party data collection on your site rather than completely. Entirely rely on third-party data across advertisers’ various platforms.
Tip:
To grow your audience base through owned media, focus on collecting new email addresses on your website (lead generation), then follow up with a lead nurturing strategic campaign feature where your business sends segmented “Welcome” emails with personalized content to new users. By fine-tuning your website’s customer relationship management strategy, should third-party cookies disappear in the future, your business will be prepared as it has developed an online relationship. Communicate with the audience and gather reliable information.
3. What happens after the click? Create a simplified user experience
According to HubSpot, more than 80% of smartphone users access email on their device, but consumers delete it in three seconds if it’s challenging to read on mobile. If subscribers open your email, click through to your content, and visit your website, what message will they see? Do they act or leave immediately? It is essential to use responsive design and prioritize the journey of a mobile site.
