Tag: ai

2023 Digital Marketing Predictions

At this point, doing a 2023 prediction now seems to be cheating. I admit that predictions are hard and it probably took me longer than I should to assemble my views. While better late than never, hopefully this will spark conversation and hold us accountable for our predictions. 

AI-Powered Digital Marketing

Let’s start with an easy and obvious one – something I have already wrote about previously. Whether we like it or not, the rise of AI in Digital Marketing is upon us. 

2023 is probably the first year we see the start of real competition to Google’s Search dominance in the form of Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. However, this hype about AI has already transcended Search marketing, and many Ad Tech businesses are eager to incorporate AI into their products. 

With AI providing efficiency, what this means for Digital Marketers is the need to go beyond building deep technical expertise and instead focus on soft skills like problem solving, strategic thinking and creativity.

Focus on Enhancing Customer Lifetime Value

From a macro economic standpoint, 2023 is set to continue the tailwinds of a turbulent 2022. Rising interest rates, inflation and a potential recession.

With such a gray backdrop, more companies will probably prefer to be conservative with their digital marketing budgets. As such, to obtain growth in revenue, companies will need to extract higher value per user. 

Companies should therefore focus on product and monetisation to enhance their customers’ LTV. Improving LTV will also reduce the opportunity cost caused by the rising interest rates.

Apple to Extend its Digital Advertising Dominance

Since Apple released iOS 14.5, the importance of Apple Search Ads to Digital Marketers has grown drastically. This has clearly revealed Apple’s ambition in the digital advertising space.

Apple’s strengths lies predominantly in its ecosystem. With full visibility of its audiences within the iOS ecosystem, Apple is in the best position to provide personalised ads and measure its effectiveness. 

All Apple needs now, is to build its own ad exchange and demand-side platform.

Privacy Forces Transition to Probablistic Tracking

Towards the end of 2023, Google is expected to finally release its Privacy Sandbox initiative where it will reduce cross-site and cross-app tracking. This is almost equivalent to Apple’s iOS 14.5.

So, Digital Marketers should prepare for a world without deterministic tracking such as device IDs or cookies. The broad solution to this is probabilistic tracking and it is likely that advertising platforms will resort to using this. 

Tiktok to Finally Overtake Meta and Google

Let’s face it. Attention spans are dropping globally. (If you made it to this point, kudos to you!) We have been saying it for years that video as a medium is the next big thing. Specifically in 2023, short-form videos will takeover the world. To combat Tiktok, Meta and Google have both released their own versions in the form of Reels and Shorts respectively. 

It is probably still a stretch that Tiktok may actually overtake the two behemoths in 2023. But with as the fastest-growing platform dominated by youths, it is clear that the future, for now, lies in Tiktok’s hands.

In all, 2023 will definitely be another interesting year for digital marketers.

What other futures do you see yourself in 2023?

Digital Marketers: 7 Skills to Have in 2023

Recently with a little more time on my hands, I was curious to find out what companies/recruiters are looking for in Digital Marketers. But going through the many job descriptions on LinkedIn, it seemed to be a mammoth of a task, an especially menial one.

So, I decided instead to use some simple text analytics to mine out the keywords used in these job descriptions. First, using “digital marketing” as a keyword on LinkedIn, I took 30 job descriptions as the raw data. After that, I used a text mining package on R to analyse it for keyword frequency and associations.

Here’s what I found out.

Taking together the keyword frequencies and associations, provided me with a list of skills I believe would be important for Digital Marketers to have now.

1. Teamwork and Team Management

While Digital Marketing may oftentimes be thought of as an individual contributor, this is hardly the case. To run an effective digital marketing campaign, multiple cross-functional teams need to work hand-in-hand.

I will say the critical teams here would be the Performance Marketing, Creative, Data and Product Teams. Effective digital campaigns require these four teams to work together to produce data-driven potent ads that are successful in driving users to convert in the product conversion funnel.

As such, a Digital Marketer in 2023 needs to be able to work well with cross-functional teams, and/or be able to manage such teams.

2. Media Campaigns

Needless to say as digital marketers, we need to have the right technical skills to run media campaigns. However, I will go a step further here to highlight two points – the breadth of media campaigns and hands-on experience.

As we move towards a world powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Digital Marketers need to be more than single ad platform specialists. Being able to understand and manage multiple campaigns across different ad platforms will be vital.

In addition, with a looming recession, companies may be forced to tighten their resources and thus more Digital Marketers will be expected to have hands-on experience in managing the campaigns.

3. Drive Customer Growth

A huge part of what Digital Marketers do is to drive user acquisition. However, it is important to note that growing the customer base does not stop at the top of the funnel. It goes way deeper than that.

Digital Marketers need to be able to bring in quality users who will end up as valuable customers. This means focusing on bringing in relevant users, and working closely with Data and Product teams to retain customers.

4. Business Strategy

With increased help from AI, Digital Marketers need to move beyond technical expertise and towards other skill sets such as strategic thinking, creativity and problem-solving. 

At the end of the day, digital marketing needs to help the company achieve its business goals. The more strategic Digital Marketers are, the better position they will be in to formulate strategies and tactics to bring success to their company.

At this point, an astute reader might be saying “Hey Mervyn, there are only 4 skills here. What happened to the other 3?”. To that, my answer is that the remaining three are from a book I have read recently – Think Again by Adam Grant. 

5. Think Like a Scientist

To level up as Digital Marketers, we need to develop the habit of thinking again. Instead of simply forming opinions based on experience, come up with hypotheses, test them with data and arrive at your conclusions. 

When building up our skill set to be more strategic, we Digital Marketers should approach business strategies as experiments.

6. Abandon Best Practices

More often than not, we Digital Marketers resort or fall back to what we think are ‘best practices’. However, in doing so, we are preventing ourselves from further improving our current routines. 

What we need to do is to focus not just on results but also on the process. A bad process with a good outcome is luck, and a good process with a bad outcome might be a smart experiment. We need to adopt process accountability and continually pursue better practices.

7. Make Time to Think Again

Last but not least, we need to make time to think again. The world of Digital Marketing and Technology is ever-changing, and thus it is imperative that we set aside time for us to rethink and learn. 

Take the time to assess how much you are learning, or how much closer are you moving towards your goals. All this will help you decide on your next steps, your next experiment or your next campaign. 

Ultimately, we are rapidly moving towards a world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. Digital Marketers of today need to evolve as well to ensure that we stay relevant and continue to contribute substantially to our companies.

Are you up for the change?