Trend forecasts 2023

Need for flexible expert skills

The unsettled global situation over the past year has created a great deal of uncertainty around the economy. In the autumn of 2022, it became clear that this was affecting companies' decisions on major investments. Most indications are that several of these uncertainties are likely to persist in early 2023. However, there is also a glimmer of hope that the coming year could be one in which these uncertainties diminish and the market stabilises. But it is difficult to predict with certainty at this time.

In the event of a downturn, it is important to be prepared and create a space that allows you to scale up and down quickly if necessary. It's about cost efficiency and building a flexible cost structure that enables rapid decision-making.

Companies will most likely review their employment costs, contracts with consultants and agencies and seek this flexibility in their contracts. This may involve converting fixed costs into variable costs and ensuring that they are not locked into long contracts that they cannot get out of. For IT projects, it may also be using more consultants over a period of time in order to complete them more quickly.

Sweden has great needs for business-oriented IT. Large parts of Swedish industry are lagging behind in the digital transformation and have only recently started to clean up their structure of legacy systems and integrations. A long recession may accelerate the need for digitalisation to make operations more cost-effective, thereby increasing the need for external specialist skills. This could mean greater demand for consultancy and agency services.

Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is about getting your employees to become an ambassador for your company on their own channels and platforms. Simply talking about the company and sharing insights on behalf of the company. More and more companies are waking up to the impact of employees' personal platforms. A sender who is known and trusted in their network reaches more people, and the right people, more effectively. And in a more natural way than through the company's own accounts. Harnessing this power is an opportunity - especially in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

We believe that in 2023, more companies will evaluate the opportunity for employees to contribute to company marketing efforts and create a plan to engage them. An engagement plan typically includes training, tools and resources to motivate and encourage employees to represent the company and spread messages and insights.

New targeting solutions

Google will phase out third-party cookies by the end of the year (2023) due to increasing awareness and demands around privacy. Cookies have been a mainstay of targeted marketing on the web. Cookies enable a tailored experience for the visitor by tracking user behaviour across the web. To remain relevant, brands are testing alternative personalisation solutions to continue to develop personalised and customised content and ads. A growing trend is to create an interactive personalised web experience through the customer answering questions. This gives the customer control over their data and provides more personalised content without the need for cookies. 

Interactive content

Personalisation of content and messages has been a hot trend and a hot topic for marketers for many years. With content already moving towards hyper-personalisation, it will become even more important to have content that customers can interact with.

Interactive content will be an increasingly important tool to keep visitors on your site for a longer period of time while providing you with valuable information about what they are interested in. 

In a September 2022 survey of marketers, more than half of whom were B2C marketers, 52% of respondents reported that the most effective of these tools was interactive emails, followed by interactive videos or livestreaming, polls or quizzes, and interactive infographics. This is part of a clear trend towards increased B2C interactivity: customers are looking for immersive experiences. Current examples include 360° tours of properties available for purchase or short-term rental and virtual tours of holiday destinations. But any sector that offers something customers can actually see and experience should also enable it digitally.

Clips, reels and videos

The use of video in marketing and sales is a trend that we have been highlighting for the past 4 years and in this year's trend watch it is no exception.

It's impossible to ignore the huge influence that TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels have had on the industry in recent years. With TikTok nearly doubling its monthly users by 2022 to almost two billion, it's likely that its influence will only continue to climb in the coming year.

This format, vertical videos ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, is an ideal content for mobile as it is quick and easy to absorb. Longer videos are better suited to YouTube. But if you want your videos to have a chance of taking off, it's not a bad idea to shorten them and make them mobile-optimised. The more short vertical videos you produce and publish, the better chance you have of standing out in the noise and even going viral by having your content shared widely.

Email

A recurring thesis is that email marketing is dead. But once again it can be stated that this is completely wrong. Yes, you read that right, we predict a greater interest in Email marketing in 2023.

Email is already an important part of digital sales and online shopping. Thus, the likelihood is that all your potential customers have an email address. You could theoretically send an email to all these potential customers today. Or, using the data you've collected, you can target a specific demographic with tailored messaging and spend your money more wisely. This is one of email marketing's strengths. That you have a direct channel you can effectively personalize to your and your customers' needs. It's no wonder email marketing remains one of the most popular digital marketing channels when it's both effective and easy to follow up immediately after sending. 

Add Marketing Automation, where everything happens automatically and data-driven, and you get an even better segmented and personalised email delivery. 

AI-generated content

In 2022, we have seen a number of different AI content generators emerge and take on increasing importance. With the release of OpenAI's open and free ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) to the public in November 2022, interest in AI-generated content exploded. ChatGPT is the first AI that can write longer texts such as reasoned essays, poems and help programmers solve coding problems. Before that, AI-generated content has mostly been about images, illustrations and simpler customer service chatbots or asking Siri and Google Assistant simple questions like what weather we should get. Basically, AI is about giving instructions to an application whose algorithms have been trained to do or solve specific tasks. But one should remember that AI does not possess human characteristics and cannot create on its own, but must have basic information. Nor can an AI make philosophical trade-offs between two different things, but makes trade-offs based purely on data - it either is or it isn't. 

While AI applications have operated under the surface in various systems such as decision support and the like, AI-based content generators have taken centre stage as companies try to keep up with the increased demand for original content. Creating original content takes time and it can be difficult to continuously produce high quality content. This is where ChatGPT or Rytr, for example, come in handy, providing instructions to write an initial version of a text that can be refined into high-quality content. On the image side, MidJourney or DALL-E are leading examples. 

In 2023, we expect to see more similar applications on the market and also see copyright laws being challenged as AI-generated content does not necessarily have a human author.

Extra: Metaverse activations

In 2023, more B2C and B2B brands will activate their presence in the metaverse. 

This is because they simply want to be first with their presence in the metaverse and Web3, which is still in its infancy

While much of the hype around the metaverse came during a time of great economic growth, interest is still high, even as the global economy experiences major uncertainties ahead of 2023. Given the large investments that major companies like Meta, Google and many more are making in these emerging technologies, it's unlikely that it's a temporary fad but here to stay. Big brands and tech companies are taking it seriously, and so should you. Simply put, you could say that Web 1 was about making information available to everyone. Web 2 was to be involved in the creation of the information. Web3 is about experiencing and being in the information and using blockchain technology you can seamlessly move between the different worlds of the Metaverse with your information that you own. Much like moving between shops in town with your wallet and ID, you can move between the Apple Store, Amazon etc.

Earlier in 2022, Decentraland hosted the first ever Metaverse Fashion Week, which featured major brands such as Dolce & Gabbana and Elie Saab. Brands including Forever 21 and Estée Lauder opened their virtual stores in Decentraland's fashion district.

We will expect to see more brands opening virtual stores and planning technology-driven activations in 2023.

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We've highlighted these trends for 2023, but all the trends we talked about last year are just as relevant this year.

Here you can have a look at the trends we highlighted last year.