Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2023 (Web Accessibility, Metaverse, and More)

We’re ending the first quarter of the year and everyone — including marketers — is trying to put their best foot forward. What better way to cut through the noise than by jumping on explosive trends in their early stages?

I’ve curated a list of marketing trends that are still struggling with mass adoption but already gaining traction and yielding results. Here are my top 5 marketing trends for 2023.

Top Marketing Trends for 2023

Web Accessibility
Gamification
Communities and User Generated Content
Change in the Way We Track
Metaverse

Web Accessibility

Brands are increasingly adopting the practice of web accessibility. Apple is currently leading the pack on mobile accessibility, with companies like Microsoft, Fiverr, Netflix all ensuring their web content is accessible to people with disabilities.

Web accessibility is the inclusive practice of making web content accessible to people with disabilities. Although web accessibility is primarily for the inclusion of people with disabilities, it achieves more than that. An accessible website has better image alts, well-ordered page structure, and contextual HTML; elements that improve the SEO status of websites.

Whether you’re making your website accessible to abide by the law, or because it’s the right thing to do; the fact remains that the benefits are well worth the investment. You are sure to boost your brand image as well as increase revenue when your website is accessible to everyone.

Gamification

This refers to the infusion of gaming elements into a website’s user experience. As a business strategy, it consists of using the elements that make games engaging, addictive, and fun to increase customer loyalty, brand awareness, and engagement. With gamification, you can tap into the emotions of your audience and demonstrate the best activities that they can perform to achieve a goal. Gamification modes could feature animated gifs, popups, forms, and a host of other elements. Such animations containing flashing images could trigger a fit in someone with photosensitive epilepsy. Equally AI’s Accessibility Assistant can control such sudden flashes and popups, ensuring your website poses no risk to people with accessibility needs.

Communities and User Generated Content

The cryptoverse rules in this regard. It’s common to find crypto companies with their own communities of loyalists constantly spreading the word and raving about their experience with the products. Such communities thrive on user-generated content and B2B companies are fast integrating such models on Slack, Discord, etc.

With so much word-of-mouth advertising happening on dark social, it’s a no-brainer to adopt this model. Not only will you have access to unique customer insights, but you’ll also be able to subtly influence trends and curate your agendas.

Change in the Way We Track

We are nearing the end of the era of cookies. Google announced that it would end cookie tracking in early 2022. What are the implications of this?

You will have to make some major changes to the way you track and categorize users across the web. A big part of the data that digital marketers play with on Google analytics comes from cookies. So, how do you maintain a high standard of tracking without cookies?

Here are a few suggestions:

First-party data collection: When users interact with your website, you can offer them survey forms to fill or use the gamification model to make information sharing fun and less obvious. Other channels of first-party data are mobile apps, social media, SMS, email, customer service interactions, CRM systems, and point of purchase.

Zero-party data collection: Zero-party data is a nuanced form of first-party data with the difference being that the customer in this case proactively provides information regarding their preferences. Coined by Forrester Research, zero-party data is defined as “data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, which can include preference center data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize her.”

Slack communities are a great way of gathering zero-party data and leveraging dark social to your advantage. Killing two marketing birds with one stone.

Boost your CRM: Customer relationship management (CRM) empowers marketers to combine business strategies, software, and processes to help build long-lasting relationships with their customers. With a shift to first-party data collection models, your CRM tools will require adjustment for a more proactive approach.

Metaverse

The Metaverse is a continuous 3D simulation of virtual environments. Despite its name, it’s more of an experience than it is a place.

Powered by the internet and augmented by virtual reality headsets, the Metaverse is a rapidly growing new world. The tech giant Facebook recently changed its name to Meta in a sleek brand repositioning move, Shutterstock has a VR content library — Turbosquid by Shutterstock — and NVIDIA just launched the NVIDIA Omniverse a place where “Creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can connect major design tools, assets, and projects to collaborate and iterate in a shared virtual space”.

With early adoption speeding up, it’s only a matter of time until the rest of the pack jump in. Don’t get left out.